Maison de Sabré: brothers bootstrapped a phone-case brand to cover $60k-a-year dental fees

Maison de Sabré designs and sells premium personalised leather phone cases and accessories online, shipping worldwide.

That a self-funded premium phone case — visible daily, carried everywhere — could cover one brother's tuition and grow into a global luxury accessories brand.

Self-funded from the brothers' life savings and early revenue; no outside investment.

Omar was working as a dentist in Wellington, New Zealand; Zane was studying dentistry at Griffith University in Queensland, where as a NZ citizen he could get no government assistance and faced $60,000 a year in fees. When their father's leukaemia diagnosis ended the family's ability to pay, the brothers put their savings into a side hustle to cover the tuition.

Fully self-funded: pay one semester's fees, put the rest into the business. Omar kept his dental practice, flying to the Gold Coast every other week, while the brothers ran two countries on Google Docs and Skype. The first product launched in July 2018 and did $1.7 million in year-one revenue; the company claims 500% year-on-year growth and a team grown from three to about 25.

The tuition bill created a non-negotiable revenue target, so the brothers chose a daily-use premium product with visible demand over an unproven idea.

They self-funded throughout — fees for one semester, everything else into the business — which forced early profitability instead of growth on raised capital.

A full year went into market research and product development before the July 2018 launch, de-risking the single product they could afford to make.

Both brothers kept working — Omar's dental practice funded the runway — so the venture never bet more than its savings and time.

A hard constraint can be the wedge: a business that must cover a tuition bill from day one earns its discipline early, and bootstrapping forced profitability before scale.

As of the October 2026 Economic Times profile, Maison de Sabré sells in more than 131 countries with a team of about 25 and remains self-funded; the company positions itself as a contemporary-luxury accessories house that began with a single phone case. No external funding, revenue updates beyond the two-year $10 million figure, or expansion specifics are given in the coverage.