Grips. Let's talk about 'em.
If you've spent any amount of time on this subreddit, you've likely seen at least one post about a Grip case that has fallen apart. Most of you have seen several. We know this because we've seen every single one. We’d like to see less of them. Ideally, none.
Over the past 18 months, we’ve been on an odyssey to fix the underlying problem. What follows is a chronicle of that journey.
Our objectives in writing this post are three-fold. There will be a tl;dr version at the end of this post, summarizing each of the three:

1. Offer an in-depth technical explanation as to why Grip cases fall apart.
2. Outline the improvements we've made to the Grip case to mitigate and eventually solve the issue.
3. Provide some much-needed context as to how widespread the issue truly is, and what our next steps are for affected Grip SKUs.

Since you're still here, you must be in it for the long haul. Assuming an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, this is going to take you nearly 24 minutes to get through. We'll try to make it the most informative 24 minutes of your life. Let's get started.
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PART ONE

Why Do Grips Fall Apart?
Most phone cases are made out of a single material. The material itself varies from case to case, though the most common is Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU). The Grip case, as a point of comparison, is made of two different materials: an elastomer and a polycarbonate.
The word elastomer is a combination of the words elastic and polymer. That's because it describes polymers that have elastic properties - like the one that forms the outer rim of your Grip case. The elastomer that we use is responsible for two critical properties of the Grip case: impact protection and grip.
If you fell off of a rooftop, would you rather land on a hard plastic surface, or a rubber surface? If you value your life at all, you'd choose the rubber - its elastic properties would absorb much more force from the impact. Guess what rubber is? First one to answer "an elastomer" wins a prize!
Next, imagine you’re a pervert, gently running your finger across every surface of a No. 2 Pencil. Which part of the pencil do you think would provide the most resistance to the tracing of your finger? If you guessed "the eraser," congratulations: you possess a basic understanding of coefficients of friction. Erasers are made of rubber. Rubber has a high coefficient of friction because of its elastic properties.
The Grip case's elastomer isn't rubber - it's our own specially-formulated compound. It's still a useful comparison, as all elastomers share similar properties - provided they have the same degree of Shore Hardness.
One person reading this is asking: “Shore Hardness?” The next section is their fault.
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A Beginner's Guide to Material Science
The Shore Hardness scale gauges the hardness of various elastomers. It can be measured with a device called a durometer. You probably don't have one.

• Low Shore Hardness = softer, more malleable, less dense, more rubber-like.
• High Shore Hardness = harder, less malleable, more dense, more plastic-like.

If you fell out of a building and landed on a rubber surface with a high Shore Hardness, injury or death would be much more likely.
If you used an eraser with a high Shore Hardness, you'd find it wouldn't actually do much erasing.
Now, what if you made a phone case out of an elastomer with a high Shore Hardness? It wouldn't offer much grip or impact protection.
The Grip's outer rim is made from an elastomer with a low Shore Hardness. As a result, the material is grippy and impact-resistant, but much more malleable and thus more likely to deform. That's why we bond the elastomer to a polycarbonate skeleton.
Polycarbonates don't require as much explanation as elastomers: they're a category of plastic. On your Grip case, the back plate is made of polycarbonate. The elastomer rim is bonded to the polycarbonate plate on all sides of the Grip, providing structural rigidity to the elastomer, fighting to keep it from deforming. At least, that's the idea. As we've all seen, it hasn't worked out that way.
Bonding two distinct materials together is much more complicated than gluing them together. Instead, we rely on a thermal bonding process. Basically, that means we heat both of our polymers to a degree which would turn you from “rare” to “well done” in moments. This heat melts the polymers, which we then inject at a pressure which would turn you from “solid” to “paste” even faster.
Once injected, these two materials get fused together along the seams. To further reinforce the bonds, we use a series of interlocking "teeth" to provide a greater surface area on which the bonding process can occur. Consider these teeth the mechanical bond, which exists to strengthen the thermal bond.
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Pictured: Bonding mechanic between the elastomer and polycarbonate.
With that out of the way: why do Grips fall apart?
The elastomer rim around the edge of the Grip case is naturally inclined to deform and stretch. The bonding mechanisms we described above are designed to keep that from happening, but it often isn’t strong enough. As soon as the bond fails at any point, it's only a matter of time until a total structural failure occurs.
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PART TWO

How Are We Stopping Grips From Falling Apart?
Philosophically, there are two approaches to take:

1. We can investigate why, exactly, the bond between the elastomer and the polycarbonate is failing.
2. We can tweak and iterate the thermal and mechanical bond - strengthening it to the point where it's statistically improbable that your case will fall apart.

We tried the first approach - it's the road to madness. The number of variables is irrationally large. What's the temperature like where you live? The altitude? The humidity? Do you bring your phone into environments that deviate from the ambient temperature of your location? Does your school or workplace have extremely dry air? Do you bring your phone into a sauna? What sort of soap do you wash your hands with? Do you have oily hands? What sort of food do you cook? Do you smoke? How hard do you press on the buttons? What's your angle of approach when you actuate a button? How big are your hands? How often do you take your phone out of the case? Do you remove it from the top, the bottom, the sides?
We could follow all of these roads, find out exactly which factors are causing the bond to fail, then implement preventative measures to keep it from happening - but that would take a decade. We don't have that long. Much like you, we want this fixed yesterday.
So, from the moment we received our first complaint about a Grip deforming around the buttons, we've been making structural, thermal, and mechanical improvements to the design and production process of the Grip case - some visible, some not. Every new phone release has brought a new iteration on the core Grip design, with each one reducing the failure rate, incrementally. We'll bring the receipts in the next chapter. For now, let's highlight the most noteworthy improvements.
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The Most Noteworthy Improvements
The first signs of trouble were the buttons. Months before we'd received our first report of a Grip case de-bonding, we saw the first examples of buttons that had bent out of shape.
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Pictured: Button deformation.
Why the buttons? Because you press down on them. The force from button actuation puts strain on the elastomer, causing displacement of the material in the surrounding area. Through a combination of time, repeated button actuations and the above-mentioned force, the case would permanently deform around the buttons. This concept is called the "compression set" of the elastomer - Google it.
The solution to this problem was two-fold:

1. First, we increased the compression set of the elastomer. Essentially, we made it as dense as we could, without compromising on the elastic properties of the material.
2. Second, we added relief slits surrounding the buttons - they're plainly visible on any newer Grip case model. These relief slits are an escape route for the force generated by button actuation. They also had the positive effect of making button actuation significantly more satisfying (read: clicky).

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Pictured: Relief slits to improve button tactility and durability.
Another early issue, pre-dating the first reports of total de-bonding, was a deformation of the elastomer along the bottom of the case - where the charging port and speakers are.
Since we've covered the basics on how the interlock between the elastomer and the polycarbonate creates a bond, this is how the interlocking teeth along the top edge of the polycarbonate skeleton of the Grip used to look.
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Pictured: First-gen interlocking teeth on the top of the Grip.
...and here's the bottom of that very same Grip case.
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Pictured: First-gen interlocking teeth on the bottom of the Grip.
Notice anything? Around the charging port, there is absolutely nothing keeping the elastomer in place. No teeth, no structural reinforcements... it's no coincidence that an overwhelming majority of early Grip deformations happened along the bottom.
Since then, we’ve added a reinforced polycarbonate structure around the bottom of the Grip case. You'll see what that looks like in a bit.
So, why didn't the launch portfolio of Grip cases have mechanical interlocks or a polycarbonate support structure along the bottom?
The answer may or may not be complicated, depending on how much you know about plastic injection molding. We'll assume the worst and explain the concept of "undercut" to you with a ridiculous metaphor.
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The Ridiculous Metaphor
Imagine you had a tube full of melted cheese. Next, imagine you emptied that entire tube into your mouth. Rather than swallowing the cheese, you decide to let it sit in your mouth and harden. Why are you doing this? We don't know. Let's just say you want a brick of cheese that's perfectly molded to the contours of your mouth - a very normal thing to want.
So, your mouth is completely filled with cheese. It hardens. You reach into your mouth to remove the brick of cheese. As you're removing it, you encounter a problem: your teeth are in the way. This wasn't a problem when you were putting the cheese into your mouth, but that was because the cheese was melted and could flow around your teeth. Now that the cheese has hardened, this is no longer the case.
In the world of plastic injection molding, this is an undercut. Our concern was that, by molding a structurally rigid piece of polycarbonate around the charging port and speaker holes, we'd find ourselves unable to remove the Grip Case from the mold once hardened. Imagine spending $30,000 on industrial tooling only to get a $30 phone case stuck inside of it.
Once we saw Grip cases deforming along the bottom cutouts, we knew we'd need to find a way to remove the cheese from your mouth without breaking your teeth. To make a long story short: we did it. The cheese is out of your mouth, and you get to keep your teeth. Congratulations! Now, keep reading.
On newer models of the Grip case, the result is a polycarbonate bridge extending around the bottom cutouts, adding both structural reinforcement and interlock mechanisms to promote mechanical bond, much like the ones which line the perimeter of the rest of the Grip case.
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Pictured: Newest-gen structural reinforcement on the bottom of the Grip.
On the subject of structural reinforcements, this design revision was around the time we flanked the buttons with some fins, working in tandem with the heightened compression set and button relief slits, detailed above, to further guarantee that button actuation would have no impact on the overall durability of the Grip case.
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Pictured: Lack of button fins on the first-gen Grip.
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Pictured: Button fins on the newest-gen Grip.
As an aside: Unrelated to the de-bonding issues, we've also made a number of smaller improvements to the Grip case with each new iteration. For instance, we chamfered the front lip of the case to make edge-swiping more pleasant and reduce dust accumulation along the rim. Those raised parallelogram shapes along the sides of your Grip case that create its distinctive handfeel? We made those way bigger for a better in-hand experience. In short: product development is a complex and multifaceted process. Each new iteration of the Grip case is better than the one that came before, and that applies to more than just failure rates.
Speaking of failure rates: all of these improvements were in place by the time we launched iPhone 11-series Grip cases. The failure rate for these cases decreased exponentially... but didn't disappear entirely.
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The Even More Ridiculous Metaphor
With these improvements, we achieved our desired outcome: the case was no longer deforming around the buttons or the charging port. Instead, the structure of the case began to fail literally anywhere else around the perimeter of the phone.
Think of it this way… you’re a roof carpenter. The greatest roof carpenter of all time. Like the son of God, but if he was a carpenter. Unfortunately, you’ve been paired with the Donald Trump of wall-builders.
You're tasked with building a house. You spend all of your time and energy perfecting your roofcraft. You've designed a roof that's so durable, it may as well have been made of Nokia 3310s. Nothing's getting through that bad boy.
The wall guy? Instead of building that wall he said Mexico would pay for, he's been tweeting about the miraculous medicinal properties of bleach while a plague kills hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The point here is that you can build the greatest roof of all time, but the walls need to be strong enough to match.
To strengthen the Grip case's metaphorical walls, we needed to re-design the inside of the Grip case from scratch. More specifically, the mechanical interlock between the springy elastomer and rigid polycarbonate skeleton. We took every tooth at the bonding point between the two materials and made them as large as we possibly could. Then, we added more teeth.
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Pictured: Polycarbonate teeth on the newest-gen Grip.
To jog your memory: this is how the teeth used to look...
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Pictured: Polycarbonate teeth on the first-gen Grip.
If time proves that these changes aren’t enough, our engineers still have a number of ideas on how to improve the bond between the elastomer and polycarbonate. Will we ever need to implement those ideas? Again - that’s a question only time can answer. Each change might be the silver bullet that puts this problem to bed for good... but there's only one way to find out: it involves real-world testing and, with each iteration, months of careful observation.
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PART THREE

So, Where Are We Now?
Have the improvements we've made to the Grip case been successful? You bet.
For the sake of comparison: we began shipping iPhone 11 series Grips on September 30th, 2019. Within six months of that date, we had received 52 reports of structural failures - a big improvement over the early days, but still not good enough.
Fast forward two months. We began shipping Note 10 Plus Grip cases on November 21st, 2019. In the first six months of availability, we received exactly eight reports of Note 10 Plus Grips falling apart. Again, a major improvement over the iPhone series in the same stretch of time. If we'd launched the first Grip cases with a failure rate that low, we wouldn't be writing this post right now and you’d have nothing to read while pretending to do work.
How about the Galaxy S20 series, which began shipping on February 10th, 2020? They're the most recent and improved set of SKUs we’ve made to date, leveraging everything we've learned and making further improvements over the Note 10 Plus. No reports so far. Same goes for the iPhone SE and OnePlus 8 series - these SKUs share all the improvements we've made to the underlying design of the Grip case thus far.
Does that mean these numbers will hold forever? Who knows. That's the thing: every improvement we make, we need to wait several months to see how effective it's been. No amount of internal testing can replace the real-world data of shipping cases to hundreds of thousands of users across nearly 200 countries.
We could always just throw in the towel, make the entire case out of rigid plastic, and call it a solved issue... but that would be the easy way out. The Grip case and its unique design properties can't reach their full potential unless we make incremental improvements - then wait and see how they pan out in the real world.
All of which is to say: it's far too early to say the newest set of improvements have officially solved the problem. While the failure rate is still zero, we need to keep watching. We've made a ton of progress, but we're not going to rest until we've killed this issue for good - without sacrificing the unique properties that make the Grip case stand out in a sea of derivative hard plastic and TPU phone cases.
That's probably enough to inspire confidence in someone who's on the fence about buying an S20 Ultra Grip, an iPhone SE Grip, or any Grip we release in the future. But what if you're one of the people who bought an older Grip model?
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"I'm One Of The People Who Bought An Older Grip Model!"
We won't sugarcoat it. The failure rates for older Grip models is way higher than we deem acceptable. Why has it taken us this long to publicly address the issue, then?
Easy: it's not as widespread as you might think. Some humans reading this might be looking at their iPhone X Grip, purchased in 2019 and still intact, wondering what all the fuss is about. That's an important consideration: most people who have functioning, still-bonded Grip cases aren't posting on /dbrand about how unbroken it is. The people who've had issues around total product failure are in the minority.
We're not using the word "minority" as a get-out-of-jail-free card here. It's still a way larger number than we'd ever be comfortable with. We simply don't want our transparency and candor in writing this to be misinterpreted as an admission that every single Grip case we've made for older devices is going to fall apart. Statistically speaking, this is an issue for a minority of Grip owners.
Our philosophy at first was that, while it was unfortunate and frustrating that Grip cases were falling apart, dramatic PR action wasn't necessary. Instead, we resolved to:

1. Quietly and diligently work in the background to improve the underlying design of the Grip case.
2. Ship free replacements to anyone whose Grip case had failed.

To date, we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on shipping fees alone for replacement Grips. As you can imagine, that number gets a lot higher once you add in the cost of actually making the thing. We've been fine with writing these costs off as sort of an R&D expense, since every example of a deformed or de-bonded Grip provides invaluable data on how to improve the product.
Where our strategy backfired was in the narrative that began to take root as Grip cases continued to fall apart. Look at it this way: the failure rate of older Grip case SKUs is anywhere between 1% and 20%, depending on how early we released the SKU. Since the improvements we've already made to the underlying design were rolled out incrementally with each new phone release, that number has been on a steady downward trend.
For the purpose of this thought experiment, we'll go with the earliest, shittiest Grip cases - putting us at a long-term failure rate of 20%.
So, 20% of customers for this device have a Grip case fall apart at some point in the product's lifespan. Every single one of those people writes in to our Customer Experience team about the issue. They all receive a replacement, free of charge.
Since this replacement is identical to the first Grip case they'd received, it also has a 20% failure rate. We're now dealing with percentages of percentages. Stop panicking, we'll do the math for you: that means 4% of these hypothetical Grip owners will have a second Grip case fail on them in the long run.
Four percent is a lot better than twenty… but it's also a lot of people who've been burned twice. These people are going to be extra vocal about how shitty the Grip case is. To be fair, they've got every right.
So, we've got four groups of customers for this SKU:

• Group A: Has had two or more Grip cases fail (4%).
• Group B: Has had exactly one Grip case fail (16%).
• Group C: Bought a Grip which has not failed (80%).
• Group D: Has not purchased a Grip case (NA%).

Group A is livid about the repeated issues they've had - rightfully so.
Group B, having been burned before, reads about Group A's experience. They take it to mean their replacement will inevitably fail on them as well, and they'll one day get the dubious honor of joining Group A.
Group C, despite not having had any issues yet, reads the experiences of Groups A and B. Then, a significant portion of this group begins to operate under the assumption that it's only a matter of time before their Grip falls apart as well.
Group D reads all of the above and decides they don't have enough confidence in the Grip case to ever purchase one.
A narrative begins to form that this hypothetical failure rate is close to 100%. Worse yet: people with newer phones, unaware that each new iteration of the Grip case has a dramatically reduced failure rate over the last, start to assume their case also has a 100% failure rate. That's where our original strategy - the one where we quietly improved the product in the background while offering replacements for defective units - backfired on us.
This narrative only exists because we've continued to leverage existing stock with too high a failure rate, which, in hindsight, was like pouring gasoline on a gender reveal forest fire of disappointment and regret. This brings us to our next chapter.
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Mass Destruction
At this point, you're probably aware that a number of Grip SKUs for older phones have been listed as "Sold Out" on our website, and haven't been restocked since.
We stopped production on these cases because we knew they'd have all the same issues as the original production runs. See, it's not as simple as pushing a "make the Grip not fall apart" button at the factory - we'd need to redesign the case from scratch, implementing all of the design improvements we've made up to this point, then re-tool our existing machinery to produce this new version. We'll have more to say about re-tooling a bit later - for now, focus on the fact that some Grips have been listed as "Sold Out".
If someone's Grip case falls apart while listed as "Sold Out", we don't have any replacements to send them. Instead, dbrand's Customer Experience team has been issuing refunds wherever possible, and store credit otherwise. Just in case you're wondering what we mean by "where possible": PayPal doesn't allow refunds on transactions that are more than six months old. Store credit, on the other hand, can be offered indefinitely.
What we've come to realize is that we're never going to be able to escape this downward spiral until we rip the band-aid off and stop stocking these old, flawed SKUs.
Today, we're ripping the bandaid off. As you're reading this, we're disposing of all of our old stock. All of the flawed Grip SKUs are now listed as "Sold Out".
Head over to our Grip listing and take a look at what's available. Everything that you can currently buy is up to spec with the improvements we've made over the past year - meeting or exceeding the standard of quality set by the Galaxy S20 series, the iPhone SE, and the OnePlus 8 series. In some cases - take, for instance, the iPhone 11 series - this means we've already re-tooled our production lines to meet that quality benchmark.
If a Grip case is listed on "Backorder", it means we've begun the process of re-tooling the SKU to match the improved quality standard you've spent the last five hours reading about.
However, if a Grip case is now listed as "Sold Out", that means no more reshipments.
If you own a sold out Grip case that hasn't fallen apart yet: that's great! Don't assume that your Grip is doomed to fail just because we devoted 5661 words to explaining why it might fall apart. You've still got better odds than you would at a casino.
As always, if you run into any issues with your case, sold out or not, shoot an email to one of our Robots. They'll still take care of you - it just won't be with a replacement case… for now.
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Mass Production
Remember when we said we'd talk more about re-tooling a bit later? That's right now.
So, why are so many Grip models not being fixed? Why haven't we re-tooled these old SKUs with all of the quality improvements made to the case's build quality? It's a little complicated.
Taking the improvements we've made to the most recent suite of Grip models and retroactively applying those changes to older SKUs isn't a simple task - it would require us to throw out our existing production tools and create new ones, from scratch. Suffice it to say that doing so is a wildly expensive endeavor.
To recoup that cost, we'd need to produce more Grips than we're likely to ever sell for aging, irrelevant hardware. Let's use the Pixel 3 as an example.
If we replaced every single de-bonded Pixel 3 Grip, that would account for about 3% of the MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) on a re-tooled Pixel 3 Grip case. Now we're sitting on 97% of that MOQ as overstock. Pixel 3 owners have had their phone for nearly two years now. If they want a phone case, they already have one. They're not looking for new Pixel 3 cases, they're getting ready to buy a new phone. Simply put, it’s no longer a viable market.
Now, say the Pixel 3 was a significantly more popular phone - enough that we'd be shipping out, say, 50% of the MOQ as replacements on day one. Now, that's a lot more tempting to us - we'd still lose boatloads of money, but at least it would go towards some consumer goodwill.
To figure out how much money we'd lose on re-tooling, we gave our bean-counting Robots a giant jar of beans and told them to get to work. They emerged three days later. When asked how many beans were in the jar, they gave us a blank stare. When asked if it was possible to re-tool any of our production lines for old Grip SKUs without losing obscene amounts of money, they said:
"Absolutely not."
Still, we're no strangers to throwing away obscene amounts of money to make the internet happy. Remember Amazon gift cards? Those were the days. The only question that remains is "How much money are we willing to set on fire?"
We can't tell you yet. Why? Because we're currently running a detailed cost-benefit analysis on the subject of re-tooling old production lines, on a SKU-by-SKU basis. That's business talk for "the bean-counting Robots have been given more beans to count."
The objective is to determine the viability of producing new-and-improved Grip stock for older phones: how many units would be tied up in replacements for that model, how many we could reasonably expect to sell to new customers, and how much overstock would be left from the MOQ.
From there, we can determine what the financial impact of re-tooling would be and make the final decision on how much cash we're dumping into the ocean somewhere off the coast of the Seychelles. We'll have our results by early next week.
These re-tooled models, if produced, would feature every improvement we’ve made thus far to the Grip case line, plus a few that have yet to be released. Remember how the S20s, the iPhone SE and the OnePlus 8s haven't had any reported failures yet? Picture that, but for the phone you've got.
If we go ahead with re-tooling production lines for your phone, a few things will happen:

1. The Grip case for your phone will go from "Sold Out" to "Backorder".
2. Our Customer Experience Robots will shift their communication strategy from "we no longer support your phone," to "we'll get you a replacement once we've got improved units in stock."

None of these things will happen until we've run the simulations on which phones are getting restocked. Why are we posting this today, then? We could have waited a week and had concrete answers to offer about the future of our out-of-stock Grip cases. Well…
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Take Our Survey
This is it: your chance to have some say in how much money we set on fire as a goodwill exercise for this whole R&D clusterfuck.
Those simulations we're running? They'll be great for telling us how much money we're going to lose on each Grip SKU, but it won't tell us anything about how much money our customers want us to lose on each Grip SKU.
To that end, we've prepared a survey for people who have purchased a Grip case. We'll be taking your feedback into consideration during our decision-making process.
We have only one request: don't be a jackass. Answer the questions honestly.
Click here to take the survey.
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In Closing...
We're sharing a special moment right now. We're all seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.
For us, that light is "we're almost done with a year-long R&D effort to stop the Grip case from falling apart."
For you, the light is "the end of a 5661-word marathon of a Reddit post."
We just want to take a minute to recognize that we couldn't have gotten this far without your collective support. At any point in the past year, we might have pulled the plug on the Grip project entirely if we'd reached a critical mass of negative sentiment from our customers. Instead, we've got an army of devotees who have no problem paying us for the privilege of being our guinea pigs.
Product development isn't a one-and-done process. It's easy to forget, but our skins weren't always to the world-class, record-setting, Michael-Jordan-in-his-prime standard you expect from us today. If you happen to have an iPhone 4 skin lying around, apply it and let us know how it goes. You'll immediately appreciate how many process improvements we've made. We weren’t born as the greatest skin manufacturer in history. We got there through a process of methodical improvement. Each jump in quality was driven by a bottomless well of user feedback, sourced from millions upon millions of customers. That, and the competition was comically inept.
It's the same story for the Grip case. Your continued support has enabled us to make huge strides in developing a product that's on the cusp of blowing everyone else out of the water. We're going to keep working until it gets there.
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TL;DR VERSION

Please note that by reading this tl;dr, you’re missing out on several outlandish metaphors, including classics such as:

• Plastic injection molding melted cheese into your face hole.
• What if Jesus and Donald Trump built a house?
• How to turn yourself from “rare to well done” and “solid to paste”.
• Pencil Perverts.

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WHY DOES THE GRIP FALL APART?

• The Grip case is made from two materials: a polycarbonate skeleton and an elastomer frame.
• The elastomer frame provides the majority of the case's impact protection and grip, but is prone to deformation.
• We prevent deformation by bonding the material to a polycarbonate skeleton (i.e. the rigid back plate on the Grip case).
• The bond between the two materials was not as strong as we'd originally anticipated, causing the elastomer to de-bond from the polycarbonate skeleton and the case to sometimes fall apart.

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WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO FIX IT?

• Through a series of design revisions, we've made countless improvements to promote a stronger bond between the two materials.
• These changes have incrementally reduced the failure rate of Grip cases. Our most recent SKUs are yielding extremely promising results.
• Each time we improve the Grip case, we need to play a months-long waiting game to observe the real-world effects.

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HOW ABOUT THE GRIPS YOU'VE ALREADY SOLD?

• Since we're using you as guinea pigs for the purposes of product development, we've been uncharacteristically generous with our warranty policy.
• However, that warranty policy only lasts as long as we have stock. Once we're out of Grips, we're out of replacements.
• We've finally reached the point where we need to rip off the bandaid and dispose of all of our Grip stock produced during 2019.
• If your Grip for any of these older phones falls apart, you can no longer get a replacement.
• You should still write in to our Customer Experience team if it happens to you - we'll work something out.
• On the bright side, our Grip SKUs from 2020 onwards have dramatically reduced, if not outright eliminated, the failure rate of previous models. We have no reported cases to date.
• It's not economically viable to re-tool production lines to apply our improved industrial designs to any of the Grip cases that are currently marked as "Sold Out".
• We're probably going to do it anyways.
• We're running the simulations right now to determine which older devices will be re-tooled.
• Take our survey to help determine which devices we'll be re-tooling.

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1: MATCHED BETTING:
I have said this before but putting it simply Matched Betting is the number one when it comes to the easiest way to make money at home. If you are not making extra money online by using Matched Betting then you are missing out on some serious extra cash.
Matched betting is the action of placing a for and against bet on a football team or other sport and using this to gain the bookmaker bonuses. It is 100% legal and is netting some people up to £1500 Per month. When looking around for how to make money online this comes top of most google searches.
There is a mom I know on one of the Matched betting forums who is earning approx. £1200 per month from the comfort of her own home while her children nap.
It’s crazy and sometimes I feel people ignore this as they just think it is normal betting or it is not entirely legal but trust me it is.
If you are interested in learning a bit more then check out my guide on Matched Betting, it goes a bit more into how it works. This is my main way of how to make money at home and it has worked really well for me. I even taught a friend how to do it and he now makes around £400 extra per month in his spare time.
Or if you want to start making extra money online straight away then simply click on the banner below to get free access to Profit accumulator a site which has helped 300,000 customers by showing them how to make money online from Matched Betting.
Profit Accumulator literally walks you through each matched bet with full text and video guides to and will have you making extra money online in an hour or so. Check them out.
2: VIRTUAL ASSISTANT
So if you do a search on how to make money online I’m pretty sure that Virtual assistant will be close to the top of the search options.
There is a very good reason for that. We are now living in an ever-increasing digital age and this is getting more and more common especially with the pandemic as companies are working out that it saves them money having their staff work from home.
This also means lots of businesses will need digital assistants or Virtual assistants to assist them with their day to day business needs.
So how do I start making extra money online from being a virtual assistant and what will I need to do?
A virtual assistant could do any number of tasks online such as answering and replying to emails. Creating Facebook adverts, Decluttering emails, Setting up meetings and or organizing an online diary.
There are plenty of virtual assistants who specialize in certain areas and I know of a couple of VA’s that specialize in making Pinterest pins for a blog and scheduling them out.
Assuming you have a laptop or pc and a good internet connection as well as some personal skills such as good literacy, typing skills and organizational skills then you should have the basics to get started.
Rebecca Lake over at Bosssinglemama.com has a great guide to getting started as a virtual assistant as she has great first-hand experience in this field. Go check it out.
3: SELL GOODS ON EBAY
Let me add before I get started that I hate eBay, Don't get me wrong I have made money with eBay and from time to time it is a good way of earning some quick cash but out of all the ways of how to make money online, this is one of my least favorites.
The reason is simply that there are lots of stupid people out there who bid for no reason or argue the item didn't arrive or is not as described and this can be annoying as well as very time-consuming.
Don’t let this put you off though as it may have just been my experience but it’s not for me. However, if you are looking to get started with ways to make money at home then this is a good a place as any.
The best place to start making extra money online with eBay is to have a clear out around the house and get together all the stuff you are probably thinking of just throwing out.
Have a search around the site and see what other people have listed these types of items for. Once you have sold your stuff you can then reinvest that money by buying some packing products off the site and then look for stuff to buy and resell.
Look around at car boot sales and thrift stores to get your bargains and then relist at a profit on eBay, Don’t forget to add the cost of your eBay fees and Paypal fees into the equation. When I first started looking at how to make money online eBay was one of the first places I came to.
4: CASINO OFFERS
Hold on, I’m not suggesting you go down to your local casino. That is not a great way to make money, In fact, your more often than not lose all of your money.
This is a cheeky way of gaining profit from the online casino bonuses offered to new customers. It works in a very similar way to Matched betting in that new bonuses are offered out to new customers and with a bit of background knowledge and trickery, you can obtain most of the profit from those bonuses without losing any money.
It might sound too good to be true but it is from the brainchild of the guys over at Profit accumulator.
Quite a lot of money earned within a day or two.
Simply sign up with Bonus Accumulator, and they will walk you through your first couple of casino offers and then you will get access to their site which includes guides for all online casino offers as well as a very good forum for members.
Sign up below and see how easy it is to make a good consistent profit. When I was learning how to make money online I didn’t have something as easy and accessible as Bonus accumulator. Hit the link below to learn more.
5: PINTEREST VA
As with being a virtual assistant as I mentioned above, you could also specialize in one certain area if you are looking at how to make money online.
Pinterest is essentially a search engine and requires not only great titles and descriptions but also very good graphics and visuals that stand out from the crowd when your potential customers are scrolling through it on their phone.
This is where the problem lies for most bloggers or business owners, we are not overly creative and have probably not used graphics sites such as Canvas before.
Luckily I have used Canvas and have now got pretty good at it, however, in the beginning, a Pinterest VA would have been very handy. A Pinterest VA can not only create pretty pins linking back to your site or blog but also they can schedule them out for you saving you more time to concentrate on other areas.
My advice when trying to start out is to join some blogging groups on Facebook and create a profile. Then just put yourself out there. As a new VA, you could always offer out your services very cheaply just to get some experience behind you.
Kristin from Believe In A Budget has a great post here on how she became a Pinterest VA and how to make money online from learning how to do it yourself.
6: OFFER SITES
OHMYDOSH:
Making extra money online and more specifically making around £500 per month is no easy feat. Offers sites are great at making you £20 here and £30 there but to do £500 per month you will need to combine 2 or 3 of these sites and hit them hard. It is possible though. You can certainly make £250 per month easily.
When looking back at what I did when I was working out how to make money online as I found offers sites and the first one I came across was OhMyDosh.
Offers sites are basically cashback sites that reward you with cash into the account when you sign up for certain things or do simple surveys etc. It is super easy and you can very quickly in one afternoon make a cheeky £50 or so with very minimal effort on your part.
OhMyDosh is one of the easiest offers sites to navigate in my humble opinion. This makes all the difference as well when you are new to the site so I stuck with OhMyDosh for quite a while.
You can sign up here for OhMyDosh if You use my special link you will also get a £1 sign up bonus for free. A nice little start to your profit without having to lift a finger.
Pin This For Future Reference:
SWAGBUCKS:
Swagbucks is a very similar website to OhMyDosh accept it is a little more well known. You simply complete offers and surveys in exchange for Swagbucks which when you hit a certain amount of you can exchange for gift cards etc.
It can get incredibly addictive as Swagbucks have a few daily targets for you to hit and achievements along the way. It becomes your goal to hit those achievements every day.
If you sign up using my Swagbucks Link you will receive 300 Swagbucks for free. What a great way to start towards earning your first gift card.
Swagbucks also have a chrome app button which you can install on your computer which can help you earn more each day giving you greater chances of earning some fantastic gift cards for yourself or your loved ones.
INBOX POUNDS:
Inbox Pounds is the last site you should try in the offers sites. When It comes to making extra money online then combining the 3 offers sites I have mentioned is the best way to maximise your income. Some of the offers will be the same but just skip those and move onto the next one.
Inbox pounds also has a different variant called inbox dollars for our friends across the pond.
The easy stuff is a section that I like on Inbox pounds whereby you can go on and answer easy questions or a simple survey for between 50pence to £1.50. You will be surprised how quickly these all add up.
Dont miss out on making extra money online and earning some really quick cash, sign up using my referral code and start earning now.
7: BLOGGING
Blogging is one of the top answers when searching for how to make money online. Although blogging is not a quick way to make money and it is certainly not the easiest it is one of the more rewarding ways to make money at home.
If you are starting a blog just to make money you need to know that for most people it can be more than a year before they start seeing income and for others maybe less.
It really does depend on how much effort you put into your blog. Take my blog for example. I work really long hours in my main job and a lot of the time I dont work on my blog until the weekend and then I am tired so just dont put too many hours in. It took me around a year before I started earning money.
Other people may put in 4 or 5 hours a day every day and they will progress faster. With blogging though and when it comes to making extra money online with your blog, you need a bit of patience.
If you have a passion for something then it is usually quite easy to turn this passion into a blog. It always helps if whatever you are writing about is something you really enjoy.
If this is something that sounds good to you then I have written a few blogging guides to get you started here. Starting out blogging can be a bit of a minefield so I’m hoping these guides help.
You can start your very own blog from as little as £5.99 per month.
Siteground is who I use to host this blog and I have found them really great to work with. see their link below.
Seeing as starting a blog is so cheap then there is nothing to stop you making extra money online from your new blog.
8: BECOME A PROOFREADER
If you are always looking at how to make money online and keep seeing the same old stuff then try learning about how to get paid to become a proofreader. This is one of those great ways to make money at home by simply using your computer.
Here in the UK I occasionally read a newspaper called the daily mail. I read it via an online app and every single page I read has grammatical errors and misspellings and it drives me mad (Frantically goes back through this post to look for misspellings!!)
They clearly dont have anyone proofread their posts before they go onto the app and it makes me not read it as much. Im sure this is that same for other people.
This can lead to you losing business so paying someone to Proofread emails, documents and other such media can be valuable and companies will pay you to to do this.
Getting started Proofreading is a little harder but I would suggest setting up some profiles on sites such as People Per Hour Fiverr.com or Upwork. You can then offer up your services cheaply which will help if you have no experience.
A lot of proofreading jobs will need you to have a degree unfortunately however there are lots of free courses online to help you get a good feel for Proofreading and can give you some background knowledge.
If you love reading and spot mistakes easily then proofreading can be a great way of making extra money online. Read this beginners guide here and see how you feel about it.
9: TEACH ENGLISH ONLINE
It sounds like you need to go off and get some kind of degree but trust me you don’t. You already have the gift of being able to speak perfect English and if you are looking at how to make money online then that is the skill you can use to do exactly that.
I found out about this when my wife and I were hosting foreign students at our home. We got chatting to them and one group, in particular, said that a lot of the older students already speak good English but were struggling with conversational type language and how to sound more natural which must be an incredibly hard thing to do.
They said that a lot of the students pay up to £20 per hour just to chat to you online and for you to give guidance on how they can sound more natural with their day to day chat. It sounded like a great idea of how to make money online so I got more information from them.
Lots of companies are looking for people just like you to teach their students English and to reward you well for doing just that.
It can all be done from the comfort of your own home with skype or in a zoom type meeting. Make sure to provide yourself with a quiet room and make sure there are going to be no distractions such as mobile phones going off or family members popping their heads in.
So where do you go to find out more information and start making extra money online? Well, Education First is the biggest company and one im sure you will have heard of.
You can build your own schedule although it does have to fit in somewhat with the hours the student is available. You can also teach the same student each time so you can build up a rapport and have a little fun with it.
Click the link above and learn how to make extra money online by teaching students.
10: PUBLISH AN EBOOK
With that handy website Amazon, you can write your own E-book and publish it on their site. The great thing is you dont even need to write it yourself if you dont want to as you can pay people to write it and also get people to design a cover for your E-book as well.
The best way to prepare is to do a search on what keywords are doing well on searches within amazon and then base your E-book around those. As long as you are helping people learn something or solving a problem then you should see sales quite easily.
It might help if you put your E-book up for free for a few weeks to gain some interest and some good reviews before applying a price.
This E-book right here is the perfect example. How to write an E-book and sell it on Amazon step by step guide.
Just remember you do not have to be an expert in something just a little more knowledgeable than your average Joe.
11: FREELANCE WORK
In the current economic climate, we all find ourselves in, it makes sense to look for ways of how to make money online. Freelancing with skills you already have in your day job or skills you have in your hobbies can translate quite well when it comes to making extra money online.
You can create a profile on sites such as Fiverr and Upwork and list the skills you have. You may be able to use a program like Canva really well to create Pinterest graphics or Wedding invites.
There are people on Fiverr who get paid to play video games with lonely people which is a bit weird but shows that if you don’t think you possess a skill then you are probably wrong.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON MAKING MONEY ONLINE IN 2021
This global pandemic has taught me one thing and that is the importance of making extra money online and having a passive income is paramount.
How to make money online is now a more searched for term on Google now then it was at the beginning of the year.
Everyone’s jobs have been and still are at risk and to have a second or third source of income is like a safety net in case the worst happens.
Make sure you pick and try one of the making extra money online tips from above and see how you get on. I would love to hear some progress feedback in the comments.