Hey Everyone, It’s Romy and I am back with great conversations on the Bonfires of Social Enterprise. Today we have Jamie and Sean Strasberger talking about their business, Because of a Case. And, of course, we have a great song at the end by a Detroit artist for your listening pleasure. Let’s kick it off here with a fun fuel from Natalie Hazen; she always comes up with the best fun fuels!

Hello, I’m Natalie Hazen bringing you this episodes’ Fun Fuel.

Mobile phones have become such a part of everyone’s daily life that if you can’t find your phone, that can be a giant disrupter to your day! Been there!

Phones have become so mainstream and normal, that a recent post on Facebook about an anniversary reminded me how far we have come in our technology with phones. This post was celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the first ever text message.

In 1992, 22 year old British software engineer, Neil Papworth, sent the first ever SMS from a computer to his colleague, Richard Jarvis at Vodafone. That very first text message sent on December 3rd ,1992 simply said, “Merry Christmas.”

Perhaps you remember your first text message and who it was from such as those defining moments in history where you can state your exact location and what you were doing at that moment. That was honestly no me. But now who would of thought that 25 years later it is normal to communicate via text and also send streams of happy faces, smiling little piles of poo and all sorts of characters!

So happy anniversary text message and hats off to wonderful innovators such as Neil Papworth. Now on to our episode.

Well, who knew, texting has been around for longer than I thought! That’s great. Let’s slide on over to another seat where we move our discussion to the designed mobile phone cases that bring funding to causes while they bring joy to the texters! Here is a part of my conversation with Jamie and Sean Strasberger of Because of a Case

Romy: Let's help our listeners understand what your business is and does.

Jamie S: Okay. We're a phone case company, and for every case we sell, we donate a portion to different charities. We have a phone case that we donate a portion to the Sea Turtle Conservancy, and it has sea turtles on it, metallic gold foil. We have all different designs that coordinate with different charities.

Sean S: For sure, so another organization, the Anxiety ... Association ... What?

Jamie S: Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

Sean S: Anxiety and Depression. Do that one. We have a lot of animal causes. We have a lot of human causes. We just cover a lot of different bases, and we donate anywhere from 10% of net profits all the way up to 75% for a couple of our causes.

Romy: Is the case designed for that particular cause? Am I saying that right?

Jamie S: Yeah. Some of them will have a design that we want to use, with a charity in mind. Then we contact the charity after we have the design, and show them what we're thinking. Other charities have helped us design it using their colors or their logo, and we use some of those graphics in mind when we design them for the different charities.

Romy: How do you get the charities to participate? What's been your method of solicitation? I don't feel like that's the right word, that's my geeky finance person coming out.

Jamie S: Yeah.

Sean S: It's been interesting, just because I think before we started the company, we had this idea, "Oh, we're going to help people," and that was the social aspect of it where we really wanted to bring on as many organizations, with as many causes that we were passionate about, and our followers and customer base was passionate about.

We found that there's, for some of these charities, there's a lot of hoops to jump through to get them on board. You have to have a certain amount of minimum sales. There's just, depending on the charity, they're not ... Not every charity's wiling to have you on board. They need to make sure you're a legitimate company. They don't just take anybody on, which I guess I think we found kind of surprising at first, just because like, "Hey, you know, we're willing to help everybody."

Jamie S: At the beginning, we're like, "We want to donate. Can somebody let us donate to your charity." But it is about just approaching them, and especially in the beginning, we approached a lot of charities. Some of them were really open to us, and really excited about