Oakland Magazine - Holiday Gift Guide 2015

Fully Funk-tional

Recycled is cool. Vintage-looking techie is cool. Put them together, and you’ve got something doubly cool: a mini speaker for your smart phone or iPod built into a re-purposed Altoids box ($70). Oakland’s MakBuilt (known for boom-box tricked out vintage suitcases) offers the tin box covers with iconic images—e.g., Oakland’s oak tree, the estuary cranes, jazz musicians—and a wood-grain interior housing for the speaker. We spied them at Convert, 1844 Fourth St., Berkeley, 510-984-0142, but other stores carrying them include Rare Bird and Marion and Rose’s Workshop, both in Oakland; shop online, too, at www.MakBuilt.com.

—Andrea Pflaumer