Metal Fabricator Makes iPhone Covers

Bier Designs, a metal fabrication shop in a nondescript industrial park in Fresno, California started making aluminum iPhone covers six months ago just to keep their employees and machines busy.

Now, the business is taking off. The Fresno Bee has more:

But the covers have become much more than that, attracting hundreds of orders a month. The increasing demand has forced Bier to buy another milling machine just to keep up.

Bier’s unexpected success is just one example of a growing cottage industry for accessories for the wildly popular smart phones. Now he and others are cashing in on a market that has yet to hit its peak, experts say.

Worldwide sales of aftermarket cell phone accessories were estimated at about $26 billion in 2009 — about what buyers will spend on mobile phones this year in the U.S. Accessory sales are expected to nearly double to $50 billion by 2015.

“Everyone starts off with the idea of making something and selling a million of them,” said Bier. His industrial-chic, multicolored cases for Apple’s iPhone 4 are a sensation for his website, www.e13ctron.com.

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