A Few Days with HARDWOOD Wooden Phone Case

Back in the summer, bored out of my mind, I was poking around online and found out you could actually buy a Pixel 6 Pro case on Etsy. I got hooked pretty fast on these wooden cases from a brand called HARDWOOD.

There are plenty of similar ones on eBay, but this grain pattern was just too unique. The price wasn’t bad, so I bought one just to see if it would even arrive.

They shipped it out quickly enough. What I did not expect was that it was coming from Ukraine 🇺🇦, followed by nearly a month of total silence.

Ukraine is still fighting Russia, right? I was half convinced my package’s plane had been shot down. Then after a bit over a month it suddenly showed up in China, and I had it in hand.

The packaging was pretty nice, and the case itself isn’t bad either. Once it was on, it gave exactly the look I wanted. Then after a day of use I noticed something off…

Namely, this case has the same problem as most cheap cases on eBay: it doesn’t wrap tightly around the sides. With the Pixel 6 Pro in this case, the left edge of the shell pops up really easily. Probably a mold issue.

So my read is that this case is basically one of those generic off-the-shelf TPU shells from eBay with a custom wooden back panel glued on. All the usual problems come along with it…

But here’s the funny part: the case came with a wooden phone stand, and that stand is actually excellent. In a way I feel like the stand was the real product in this order, and the case was the freebie.

Kind of a “buy the box, return the pearl” situation.

Later I found a way to fix the loose left side. Two options: one, stick on a thin foam pad yourself so the phone doesn’t slide around and pop out of the clips. The other is to use double-sided tape and just glue the shell edge to the phone, so it can’t slide anymore.

With that done, the case is finally safe to use.