This is the selfie stick of the future – and it’s already been ripped off in China

Image credit: Stikbox.

Yekutiel Sherman was walking around Jerusalem one day when he spotted a shop selling smartphone cases and selfie sticks.

“Why carry two things, when you can carry one?” he thought to himself. A few months of prototyping later, Stikbox was born – a phone case that includes an expandable selfie stick.

Built initially for the iPhone and Samsung S6 – but with more designs in the pipeline – the Stikbox is one of those fun “I can’t believe nobody thought of this sooner” ideas. It’s simple, has obvious use cases, and even the naysayers would have to admit it’s no more ridiculous than carrying around a selfie stick.

Image credit: Stikbox Kickstarter.

Yekutiel and his team put together a Kickstarter campaign in December, and within a month had raised more than US$50,000.

But while the Stikbox folks were busy this winter and spring at CES in Las Vegas and CES Asia in Shanghai, the world’s knock-factories were already hard at work.

The China challenge

The Stikbox case. Image credit: Stikbox.

“In China, we were copied immediately,” says Yekutiel. “You can find Stikbox on many websites, [but] none of them are ours.

With the money raised from their successful Kickstarter campaign, the Stikbox team is aiming to start shipping cases this fall, when the gadget will also become available to the general public for US$50.

But some very, very similar devices are already for sale on Chinese ecommerce sites, some of which even include Stikbox’s branding and packaging (as well as plenty others that are shoddy wrecks).

Ever the optimist, Yekutiel says, “short term, this is good for us, as it gets the name and concept out there.”

Fakers gonna fake