SHELLEY — A local company donates one day of sales each month to a family in need.
Jenna and Nick Emery own phone-case company Walli Cases, and for the past year, they’ve been working to give back to the community, while making a name for their business.
The business has been around since late 2020, but started as an idea much earlier.
The idea came to fruition because Jenna often misplaced her debit card.
But Jenna was already a fan of her current phone case, one that had a loop on the back making it easier to hold the phone.
She wanted to keep those features, so the two of them came up with an idea for a 3-in-1 phone case, that functions as a wallet, a phone strap or “loop”, and a stand. That’s how Walli Cases was born.
The business didn’t immediately take off. A year and a half later, Jenna’s mom was diagnosed with cancer, prompting the couple to put the phone-case business on the back burner in order to be able to take care of her.
Before she passed, Jenna’s mom discovered that her daughter and son-in-law had pushed the business idea away to focus on caring for her. She then encouraged them to jump back into the phone-case world.
“She was like, “You should really go for it!” Because we had kind of put it on the back burner to take care of my mom. So she kind of just pushed me to go for it again, and we’ve taken off and done really well,” says Jenna.
Tragedy struck again almost exactly one year ago, when Jenna’s best friend, Kim Olson, lost her husband, Ryan Olson in a car accident.
Olson was less than a minute from work on May 17, 2021 when a woman in another vehicle reportedly experienced a diabetic health issue and slammed into Olson’s vehicle. The collision sent him into a canal and he died instantly.
After the accident, the Emery’s decided that they were going to donate an entire day’s sales from Walli Cases to the Olson family to support them after the tragedy.
“That was the first big (donation) that we ever did,” Jenna says.
After that, the Emery’s founded the non-profit, Walli Gives Back Foundation, to pay it forward and focus on giving back every month to families in need in the community.
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Published in East Idaho News on May 11, 2022