You’ve waited. We’ve waited. We’ve defined the proverbs. We’ve lived the sayings. We’ve piled up the virtue and built several Romes. But, hey, good news! The waiting time is over and we can all breathe a little easier as iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have arrived. They’ve been introduced and we’ve been wowed. They’re gorgeous and they’re for sale today, at Apple!

Here at Grovemade, we’ve cracked open our piggy bank just for this momentous occasion! Not only do we want them for the incredible design and top notch communication applications but also because we want to swaddle them in hand-oiled Walnut and Maple and premium grade, vegetable-tanned leather iPhone 6 cases.

The new iPhone 6 demands (really, it told us this in no uncertain terms) that it wants to be clothed in only the best cases available. Happily for the iPhone and for you, we happen to produce some of the very finest cases and bumpers designed especially for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Featuring classic craftsmanship, cutting edge design and custom quality construction, our new line of cases are works of iPhone protecting art. Did we mention that we’re taking orders now and greasing the gears of our people-powered production machine?

Thinking of all these new things has moved us to reflective mode - just how did we get to our most current cases. Like, what went into the design, the construction, the everything? Unlike Isaac Newton, an apple didn’t fall on all of our heads at the same time, triggering a spontaneous and synchronized eureka for team Grovemade, specs and all. Nope, if we peeled back the tape, we’d see that nearly five years of continuous thought, revision and prototyping went into our new products!

When we learned that a new iPhone was coming down the pike, we definitely knew that we wanted to change the design of our cases fundamentally. But doing so proved to be difficult. It wasn’t until we were finetuning our current iPad case that we realized we could do the same thing with our next iPhone case. Quoth our very own Barrett: “We can do this for iPhone!” That’s why you’ll find that our famed slider frame has been replaced with a soon to be famous single, seamless frame.

This design amplifies the natural flexibility of the wood and lets you put in and remove your phone without putting extra stress on the wood. We’ve also used our additive design principles to increase the core strength of the frame, using precision corner joints to ensure that we get the most out of the wood and that you get a durable and strong case or bumper.

We also wanted to make the overall case thinner. Way back when, we started with a single piece of wood and carved down. Very reductive, very time-consuming and very not the way we like doing things. Happily, we’ve learned a ton since ‘09, and now offer a self-adhering back plate composed of a single piece of wood that’s all of 0.070 inches thick.

And, after many, many prototypes and rejections, yeses, nos and maybes, we arrived at what the elegant cases you see now. They didn’t happen overnight but thanks to our ethos of teamwork and our willingness to learn from previous processes, they came to be naturally. That’s the Grovemade way!

Written by Edmund Sandoval. Edmund is a member of Team Grovemade, a writer, a medium to deep thinker and the founder and sole member of the Amateur Flâneur Society.