CaseLabs

» see caselabs-store.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On the afternoon of Friday 10 August 2018 the front page of caselabs-store.com stopped selling cases and began apologizing. "We are very sad to announce that CaseLabs and its parent company will be closing permanently. We have been forced into bankruptcy and liquidation." Four paragraphs down it had given up sounding like a company statement at all: "We understand that there will likely be a great deal of understandable anger over this and we sincerely apologize. We looked at every option we had."

The parent was California Fabrication Company, a sheet metal business at 7901 Alabama Avenue in Canoga Park, in the San Fernando Valley, trading since 1971. Three generations of one family ran it. Robert Keating started the shop and had been a chief weld engineer on rocket work in the 1960s. His son Jim was president and designed every CaseLabs case and accessory himself. Jim's brother Brian ran the shop floor, and Jim's son Kevin handled the sales side until 2016. CaseLabs itself began in January 2011 as a brand on an overclocking forum, with a web store that September, built because the family had looked at the enthusiast case market and thought a metal shop could do better.

They could, for a specific customer. A CaseLabs case was flat-packed aluminum on a universal mounting grid, so radiators and pumps went wherever you decided rather than where a designer in Taipei had decided; doors came off entirely instead of swinging aside; you could bolt a pedestal underneath and double the radiator capacity again. For anyone running a serious water loop these were the only cases on sale that did not need cutting. Prices ran from $199.95 for a small Bullet to $799.95 for a MAGNUM STH10, sold direct and never through shops, which is roughly the point where a hobby stops being affordable from Ankara once you have added transatlantic freight on a crate of sheet metal.

The tariff line in the farewell has been quoted ever since, usually wrongly. The statement said tariffs had raised prices by almost 80 percent, and the figure was real but it described what the company paid per pound of raw aluminum, not what anything cost in a shop. Jim Keating gave the numbers to Tom's Hardware: high $1.50s per pound in the last quarter of 2017, mid $2.80s by August 2018. The Section 232 aluminum tariff was 10 percent and took effect on 23 March 2018, and Keating dated his own cost increases to January, which is before it existed. He also undercut his own statement on the record: "Most of the information I have around the tariffs have been provided by our material distributors, so I can't confirm the accuracy of it, but believe it to be true."

~ the case file ~

~ the arithmetic ~

The sentence that follows the tariffs in their own statement is the one that reads like the actual cause. "The default of a large account added greatly to the problem. It hit us at the worst possible time." They never named the account. By then the company was down from 22 employees to 16, case orders had already been suspended in late July while they fought a backlog, and a rescue deal with a European manufacturer had fallen through; Keating said the plan would have shrunk the Canoga Park plant to custom work for law enforcement and government. Parts orders shipped after the announcement and the case backlog did not. The store itself served pages into late September and was answering with errors by 9 October. The Chapter 7 petition, under the parent's name, was not filed until 7 March 2019, seven months after the goodbye, and the case did not close until 22 October 2024.

~ the swedish afterlife ~

In October 2021 a Swedish enthusiast named Emil Rytterstedt bought the CaseLabs brand and its intellectual property out of the wreckage. The site at caselabs.se says the cases are made in Europe now and that the new owners work with former employees and American enthusiasts to keep the look of the originals. It also says, as it has said since January 2023, that the next step is to manufacture parts and open a webshop, and that there is no official date yet.

The brand is not dead. It has simply never sold anything. The homepage is substantively identical across captures three and a half years apart, the site's own feed last published in November 2022, and in 2026 the contact page still carries the web template's factory settings, phone number 123-456-7890 and a testimonial from an imaginary client. Meanwhile caselabs-store.com resolves to a domain-parking service, one American retailer still keeps a CaseLabs page up for the last of the spare parts, and a used Mercury S8 that cost $439.95 new gets asked four figures.

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