2 years ago I did find a piece of light leather. It was approximately 11cm x 1m. At that point I did think that I’ll build a wallet out of it. So I bought it.

Fast forward 2 years latter - I still didn’t do anything with it. So time did come. At that time my wallet was 2-3cm tall - so I had to carry it in my front pocket. Also it had a lot of compartments that I barely used. I did think of following properties for the new wallet:

• Light
• Slim
• Easy to access money
• Sits well in pocket

I did build 3 paper prototypes before starting building the actual wallet. From all these iterations I did discover:

• Classic bi-fold wallets have best access for money
• Mainly I was using only 2 cards so I needed pockets only for 2 cards
• Coins in UK have great value so I'll need a coin pocket
• A wallet will feel much slimmer if coins pocket will be outside of wallet

Having all this in mind the work was started. It took 2 months to finish it because I wasn’t working on it every day and you could do only 1-2 pieces a day as the glue had to stick for 24 hours under pressure. I think I spent around 40-50 hours working on it. Sometimes it was relaxing, other times it was boring, but it was going forward.

At some point I had an ordered TODO list for the wallet to be able to track the progress and not make mistakes.

I’m using it now for 2 months and it is definitely lighter than my previous wallet. I do have 3 cards: one bank debit card and 2 for accessing the office. Because most payments are contact-less there are only some back-up money which I almost never touch. Also I do keep home token and key in coins section. So when I get out of home I have to be sure that I got only my wallet (instead of checking for wallet, key, tokens and access cards).

However there are some things that could be better. This wallet is more of an universal wallet. But if you want to go really minimal you have to make one specific for your use-case. Because currently I’m in London where most of the payments are contact-less and the only thing I have to take out of wallet is my home key I did compile a new list of requirements for my next wallet:

• Make it of the size of a credit card
• Fit the credit card and access cards together
• Add door access tokens over other cards
• Make home key slidable so that I don't have to take it out
• Add a section for back-up money

It may be hard to imagine this wallet but basically it should be a 3D printed wireframe that is not much bigger than a credit card. Its height should be of around 4-5 credit cards as everything is stacked nicely.

Looking forward to build this wallet.

p.s. Here is a nice article explaining different wallets shapes.