One material at a time.
KIRA started with a complaint: every case on the shelf was pretending to be something it wasn't — plastic printed to look like carbon, leather bonded to foam. We wanted objects that were only what they were.
Why aramid
Aramid is what replaces metal where weight matters — aircraft panels, racing shells, body armour. As a phone case it does two useful things at once: at 0.9 mm it is stiff enough to hold its shape, and it has a texture you can grip without ribs or rubber.
The catch is that real weave costs more than a moulded shell, and it cannot be printed convincingly. So most of the category doesn't use it. We do, and we tool every device generation separately rather than stretching one shell across five models.
Leather, cork and anodised aluminium arrived the same way: chosen because the material could carry the design on its own, not because it photographed well.
A two-person workshop in Singapore, cutting aramid sheets by hand for one phone model.
First magnetic power bank. The ring alignment problem took eleven prototypes to solve.
Moved production to a single facility in Johor so we could hold tolerances ourselves.
Six products, sold direct across Southeast Asia, shipped from one warehouse.
“If a material needs a story to justify itself, it's the wrong material.”— Founders, KIRA