Back in August, I backed the Slim wallet on Kickstarter. The Slim is a tiny wallet made out of an elastic material, and is only designed to hold a few of your most commonly used cards, rather than any cash or other items people tend to keep in their wallets.
The project was a resounding success, managing to get over $200K from backers when their goal was only $10K.
Since then, they've been releasing updates about the R&D/manufacturing process, with a few delays along the way, and about a month ago they began actually shipping the wallets out from their factory in Chicago. I just received mine last night, and wanted to share my thoughts from the first 24 hours.
I love how minimal the packaging is.
Coming from a large wallet I bought from Wal-Mart years ago, I'm now having to narrow down to my most essential cards. I've managed to distill my main collection down to five items: two debit cards, my driver's license, a loyalty card that I use a lot, and my GoGo Stand (which comes in handy more than you'd think).
Rarely-used items being left behind — stuff I can grab from home as needed — include my voter ID, some medical/dental insurance stuff, several business cards I've collected, and a ton of other loyalty cards that will now live in my wife's purse, since we're usually eating at those restaurants together anyway. I was able to comfortably cut out a surprising number of things.
View from above.
The Kickstarter promo video claims that the Slim is capable of holding up to ten cards, and that's true, but that's a very snug fit and I quickly found that anything more than five items made it difficult to retrieve any specific cards when I needed to, instead forcing me to pull everything out at once. Not ideal.
The Slim definitely lives up to its name. I can't get over how thin and light it feels in my pocket. I'm still getting used to checking the inside of my pocket to make sure it's there, rather than patting the outside of my jeans as I used to.
A few small points:
- I like that the Slim's minimalist design has forced me to rethink what's truly important to have on me at all times.
- The elastic feels like it will hold up well, but only time will tell for sure.
- I don't often carry cash, but if you're the type who does, this might not be the wallet for you.
If you're interested in one for yourself, you'll have to wait a while as they complete their first batch from the Kickstarter campaign, but you can sign up to be notified when that happens. I definitely recommend it.
