Photo: Ryan Kim
Wanna see something weird? Search for "wallet" on Kickstarter. You'll end up with pages of projects — many of them highly funded. For a site that's largely associated with hopeful tech products, these wallets (106 projects) are right up there with iPhone stands (115 projects).
After a bit of research, we can divide kickstarted wallet projects into three basic genres. 1. Small leather or fabric wallets. 2. iPhone case/wallet combinations. 3. Minimalist wallets.
The third group fascinates us. Minimalist wallets are designed to be as compact as possible, fitting into a front pant pocket unobtrusively, with room for some cards and cash. That's a pretty simple design brief. Correspondingly, minimalist wallets are all almost identical.
To make one, you take two stiff surfaces the size of a credit card and use an elastic of some kind to hold them together. The wallets are almost always milled from some science-fictional material like carbon fiber or titanium. When it comes to making a minimalist wallet, the main questions seem to be: Should it block or allow RFID (either answer can be listed as a feature) and should it open bottles?
Kickstarter's minimalist wallet designers are almost always dudes, and most of them look like dudes who like clubbing (this makes sense: These are the dudes most likely to need a slimmer wallet).
Almost every pitch leads with the designer complaining that they couldn't find anything like this out there, despite the ample evidence on Kickstarter that there are things like this out there. It doesn't matter. Over and over the projects get funded. Here's a taste. The The Ainste raised $86,748 on Jan. 23. The Aluminum Plate Wallet System raised $45,241 on Feb. 4. The Omega titanium wallet raised £103,899 on Feb. 23. Just days later, the Ridge wallet raised $266,622 on March 5.
This trend has been going on for a while. The Slim raised $203,488 in September last year alongside the Keylet, which raised $113,484 that same month. The HuMn wallet raised $295,402 in April and then with the HuMn mini, another $81,294 in November.
There are plenty more to come. With nine days to go, the Wallet Works by Danny Wilk looks to be well on its way to meeting the goal. The Multi, which incorporates a multitool into the plate, has tripled its goal with 27 days to go. The Crabby just launched. Maybe it'll do well too.
What's going on here? How can essentially the same product get launched on Kickstarter again and again and keep doing well?
First, minimalist wallets are relatively easy products to design and test. As barriers to entry for manufacturing small runs of a product fall, the barrier to cutting a plate and then attaching an elastic must be lowest of all. This makes it easier for new designers to take a risk on the product. Many of the minimalist wallet projects launch with initial funding goals of just a few thousand dollars.
Second, these wallets are genuinely useful and appealing. If you are a person who wears pants and carries cards and cash, the idea of a small, unobtrusive wallet will be immediately attractive. Even if you carry your wallet in a bag, a smaller wallet has appeal. There are hundreds of millions if not billions of people who might have a use for a small wallet. It takes only a tiny fraction of those to stumble on any particular minimalist wallet Kickstarter for it to become a success.
It's interesting to note that though the basics of the wallets are the same, none of these products are ripoffs of each other. Each one is the result of a particular designer or design team revisiting the same problem and coming to similar but not identical solutions.
This is the world of mass customization. It's a world where hundreds if not thousands of designers can create objects, and economically produce and sell them. A world where the same problem can be solved over and over in slightly different ways (for good or ill).
In industrial design, it is traditional that a designer should create a lamp or a chair. It's so common that there are manifestos asking designers to stop. Even Bruce Sterling has designed a lamp.
Perhaps in the era of Kickstarter, the chair and the lamp will be replaced by the wallet.
