Welcome to Walletopia. Today, we are looking at the Corkor cork wallet. I can’t believe that they can do something like this out of cork, from the bark of the cork oak tree, and make it last.
We are going to be reviewing this Corkor product, and as mentioned from the introduction, it is made out of cork. As we unbox this, we notice we’ve got a nice wallet here, got the wallet in here as well. The thing that’s nice is it’s vegan approved, for those who are looking for a natural alternative to leather. You’ll notice that the box is also made of cardboard, so it’s also recyclable.
Let’s take a closer look at this. This is a dark blue color. Love the blue. It comes in various different colors as well. It’s a standard bifold as you can tell, and it’s got a number of credit card options in here, looks like three on each side, so you have at least six there, plus two options in under each side plus the expected currency slip.
(if you want to see all the features and how many cards and cash it can hold, please watch the video)
What’s interesting about cork is that it’s very light, and the reason for this is up to 90% is air within cork. That’s why cork is very light, but they also say it’s very durable because of that same reason. Now, if we look at the inside, we can see that it’s got nice sewing around the edges. It’s got a stamp of the company logo, both on the inside and outside, but otherwise, it’s a pretty standard wallet. Let’s take a look at its capabilities by way of durability.
In pulling on one the seam of one of the card slots. That came apart too easily. Let’s see how easy this is to pull out on the other side. It’s actually not too easy, it held pretty tight. Going back to the original side, that popped right again very easily. That’s not something that you’d like to see, but it is cork. Cork is not indestructible. It doesn’t have a tremendous amount of stability from that perspective. Harvesters will strip the bark off of what are called cork oak trees, they have to be alive for about 25 years or more in growth before they can strip it, and and then they’ll strip the outer layer of the bark off, and then use that for manufacturing. After 8 to 14 years, they can go back and can do this again.
So, let’s see how many cards we can get in the wallet to look at capacity. It’s a card test here, so let’s take a look. We’ve got one, two, three, four. We’ll obviously get three on each side, so we get six total there. That’s interesting, let’s look at this to see by way of its thickness with just six cards. That’s about .7 inches is what we’re looking at there, so it becomes kind of a standard bifold at this point. Not seeing anything incredibly unique with this, except that it is cork. If you like that as your material, then I think that’s fantastic.
And let’s see. I think we can stuff more cards in here if we want. Let’s try and get two in each of these slots, to see what it does for us. I’m sure it’ll give us a better idea. It’s handling them just fine. There is 10 right there, so lets add more. There are 12 right there. Let’s close this and see what we’ve got. That is kind of getting to be a Costanza-level wallet here. Let’s measure to see the thickness. That is .9 now, so almost an inch thick is what we’re getting at, and that’s without putting anything in the sides, or putting any kind of bills.
Its capacity is big. Let’s be honest, it has a high capacity for what it can do, and that’s what a standard bifold wallet is meant to do. I think it’ll be great. This will be a wallet that I think I’ll take through the long-term carry test.
So, this will be one that I take on a long-term carry, because I’m really interested in durability on this one. And that’s part of the scoring that we’ll go through in my final rating. But we’ll give an initial rating on this. I’ll take it out for a long-term test, and then we’ll see how it performs, and then post that up as a new video to watch. Now, if you’re interested about how we do the rating, there’s a video you can watch. It takes you through the details of how I do my ratings for each wallets. Now, if you’ve got information about this that you’d like to share, we be happy to hear from you.
The rating on the Corkor bifold wallet, mine’s in blue, love the blue. Quality overall, again, it’s really dependent on the materials. In this case, it’s cork. Cork has the ability to be very durable, and generally when they’re creating products out of cork, they will include a cotton fabric that’s sealed to it, and the silicone that’s also part of that seal makes it very stain and water resistant, and durable in that case. It has very low density, so it’s very light. We’ll be taking this through a long-term usability test as well, but we’re going to give this a 4 for quality.
Price, I bought this for $30. It is unique material, so it’s a little different than normal, so we’re going to give that a pricing rating of 4 out of 5. Features, it doesn’t have a lot of unique features to it. It’s a standard billfold. Quick access slots are six, and then there’s two that are on the inside. Of course, there’s a billfold in there for cash and cards or anything else you want, so we’ll give that a score of 2. Usability, just off the cuff, it’s a bit slippery compared to leather, but it’s manageable. It did kind of pull out on that fabric there that was stitching, so you know, that’s kind of questionable for long-term use, but we’ll give it a middle range of 3, and again, we’ll revisit this when we go through the long-term.
The perception, for me is I thought the packaging was nice. It fit with the theme of being an alternate, sustainable product. Everything was recyclable to it. I thought the perception was good. It was packaged well, had great insights into their mission, what they try to accomplish, and the quality of the product, so we’re going to give that a 3 for an overall score of 3.4 out of 5. If you go down into the details of the notes, you’ll notice that there is a link to all of the ratings. You can compare them as you go forward.
This wallet has been discontinued. Below is a close replacement.
Cork is used in all kinds of thing like flooring, but as a wallet? Would it be durable enough? With the Moral Origin cork wallet, the Minima proves it has what it takes to not only work as a great slim wallet, but thrive!
