Articulate Wallets: Another great product design accelerated by Kickstarter

I came across a Kickstarter project that caught my interest. The Articulate Wallet is a sleekly designed new leather wallet that adds a new twist to the traditional wallet.

Articulate Wallet

You can visit their Articulate Wallet Kickstarter project and see more of their story, but the key is their effort to combine the best of the wallet and money clip:

We took all the great features of wallets and money clips and put them into one affordable, stylish,and sleek leather design.

There are two unique approaches that I really like in their design:

1. Elastic bands instead of leather pockets
2. Special slide out pocket for most-used credit/debit card.

Fewer Pockets

The simple single-fold design minimizes the amount of leather and material in the wallet itself. Also, the simple ‘X’ bands of elastic hold a small stack of cards on each side to allow you to carry multiple cards in minimal space. They would still be fairly easy to access. I just hope that they have done a good job choosing elastic that will hold up to the wear and retain it’s elasticity for a few years. This improvement applies to the very most common use case for the wallet – sitting in the pocket. Suddenly, your wallet is smaller in the pocket, less noticable, less uncomfortable. It also improves the closely related use cases of removing the wallet from a pocket and returning it there.

Perfect Pocket

Besides the wide cash pocket, there is only one other pocket in the Articulate wallet. It’s on the outside of the wallet and it’s designed to give you quick access to your most used credit or debit card. Once you place a card in the wallet, you can slide it part way out the side of the wallet by accessing it from a slot in the pocket. Simply extend the card, swipe it for payment and slide it back securely in the pocket. If this works as promised, it’s a game changer for wallet design. I would love not having to open my wallet to swipe my credit card several times a day. It totally streamlines one of the most common use cases for a wallet – accessing the primary credit card.

An Experience Designed Product

I always enjoy seeing an example where someone has been inventive in improving a common object in a way that genuinely considers common use cases for the product. In this case, they have minimized the wallet toward a couple of really important use cases, pocket storage and credit card access. Some other use cases may be less-realized (no family photos, no fanning of cards for quick recognition, no ‘secret’ pockets, etc.), but for those that care only about the key functions, this will be a welcome trade-off.

I also have to give props to Kickstarter for giving these 2 college guys a chance to see their product idea through to reality. They have been able to take the project from design stage and meet the minimum order quantity with their supplier by leveraging the crowd-funding power of a Kickstarter project. Kudos, guys!

Anyone else interested in the Articulate Wallet? What do you think?

All images from Articulate Wallet Kickstarter project

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