Zack Nelson, the man behind the popular YouTube channel JerryRigEverything, has published a scathing video where he publicly calls out Casetify. He along with Dbrand is accusing the Hong Kong-based smartphone case company of ripping off Dbrand’s Teardown lineup of skins.
Teardown is basically a series of skins you can put on your devices to make it look as though its been taken apart. Dbrand had worked together with Zack to create these vinyl skins that very closely replicates the actual internal layouts of the devices they’re meant for such as the iPhone, Pixel, MacBook and so on. It makes sense that they would work together—Dbrand makes cool looking skins and cases, and Zack himself makes plenty of transparent mods of smartphones that he has torn down on the channel.
Casetify though had apparently copied these Teardown designs and passed them off as their own designs. They had launched their own line of cases recently called Inside Out, which as the name probably implies offers a similar ‘torn down’ look showing off the supposed internals of the device. That being said, it soon became clear that these weren’t mimicking the exact internal layouts of the device, with Casetify reusing images of electronic internals across different phone models—even Dbrand mocked them about it earlier this year.
iNsiDe PaRtS pic.twitter.com/f6VXfDreyv
— dbrand (@dbrand) March 12, 2023
However, it wasn’t until Dbrand noticed even more similarities between its own Teardown lineup and Casetify’s Inside Out cases that things got more heated. For starters, Dbrand loves adding in little easter eggs into their skins, and the Teardown lineup was no different. Seeing as they had worked together with Zack, they included Zack’s famous catchphrase ‘glass is glass, and glass breaks’ into one of its Teardown skins. Unfortunately for Casetify, they seemed to have also included that easter egg into their own case design.
That’s also far from the only easter egg from Dbrand that Casetify had inadvertently plagiarised. Dbrand also highlighted Castify using their “11 11 11” easter egg, a reference to their date of founding, as well as the string “R0807”, a reference to the Dbrand support Twitter handle and a joke about how Dbrand’s being run by robots. Casetify even copied the ‘all seeing eye’ symbol that Dbrand uses, seen previously in the Dbrand Pyramid PC built by fellow tech YouTuber Linus Tech Tips.
Exhibit C: The string “R0807”.
— dbrand (@dbrand) November 23, 2023
This is a reference to our Twitter handle, @robot. This string does not appear on the ZIF connector of any smartphone, yet somehow appears on @Casetify’s products. (4/6) pic.twitter.com/Bvgss91Zip
In total, Dbrand claims that Casetify had copied 117 different designs. The company is now suing Casetify with a lawsuit in the Canadian court, and is asking for the latter to pay up around eight figures in damages. Casetify for their part has yet to respond to the statements at time of writing.
For more about the whole Dbrand and JerryRigEverything vs Casetify issue, you can check out Zack’s video on it below:
