Calm in the time of chaos: How this zillennial made landlines look cool again, making $120,000 sales in 3 days

Amid a world full of chaos that jumps on to the bandwagon of trying out every new technology that peeps from the corner, Cat Goetze for years has been on a journey to create her own nest free from the latest devices.

Two years back, Goetze realised that she wanted to pull back from smartphones and rely on something more low-tech, she told CNBC Make It in an interview.

That is when she had the idea of switching back to a landline device, but there was a twist coming.

“I was kind of just sitting around [thinking] it’d be so cute if we still had landline phones and you could twirl the cord and talk with your friends,” she told the news outlet.

What she did not realise at the time that getting a landline for her home would mean that she would need to get a completely new number, and also pay for a phone line. That is when Goetze, in her 20s, decided to build her own version of a landline that she thrifted.

“I literally just hijacked a landline phone and made it Bluetooth compatible,” she told CNBC Make It in the interview.

The cute, pink landline quickly captured attention and eventually became the most talked-about feature of her apartment.

From home to business

In July 2025, two years after building the customised landline, Goetze unveiled the device to her online audience to check if they thought it was a good idea.

Within hours, she her post was flooded with hundreds of people commenting that they needed one for themselves.

Then she had the idea of opening an online shop promoting her product for pre-orders, thinking that maybe 15-20 customers would place orders and she would make the devices at home by herself.

What Goetze did not expect was the tsunami of orders for her project, Physical Phones. In just a span of three days, people placed orders for $120,000 worth of the phones, according to documents cited and reviewed by CNBC Make It.

Physical Phones currently has five styles of phones that range from $90 to $110.

The business has sold over 3,000 units of the system till the end of October, making $280,000 in sales in just a matter of three months.

“It literally felt like we had captured lightning in a bottle,” Goetze, who has partnered with an electronics manufacturer to produce the phones, has said in the interview.

How does Physical Phones work?

According to CNBC Make It, the first batches of Physical Phones will be shipped in December.

These devices connect to both Android and iPhone devices via Bluetooth. When someone calls you on your mobile number, the landline device will ring — even when it is a video call from platforms like WhatsApp, FaceTime, Instagram and Snapchat.

To make an outgoing calls, users need to put in the phone number or can just simply press (*) button to activate their smartphone’s voice assistant and asking it to call a contact’s name.