Welcome to Walletopia. We’re looking at the Ridge cash strap band wallet. A carry test was performed as well as a 2nd LOOK since the original review of this wallet.
This is a very rigid white box, very Apple-esque in how they’ve constructed it. If you look at this carefully you can see that we’ve got a metal wallet, this is aluminum, that is really nice and obviously we’ve got a little screwdriver provided along with it and we know what that’s for. The reason why, is because there are little screws that are attached to this. So each one of these grommets you see around the outside, these are actually screws that screw in one plate to the other on the front and the back.
you can see that on the inside there is a band to hold the cards from passing through and another band that stretches the outside circumference where you can put your cash. I like the quality of the packaging, I like the fact that you would have a tool to be able to tighten this up, but I hope it doesn’t come too loose too often. I figure you could put some Loctight on this to prevent that from happening.
(if you want to see all the features and how many cards and cash it can hold, please watch the video )
Let’s take a look at this a little closer, it has a thumb capability here, if we push it from this angle any cards on the inside come out from the opposite side where the inside band sits. This is a very common practice with band wallets, to get to things effectively in band wallets like this, where there are loose pieces of metal on both sides, you push the whole stack of cards up and then you pinch the bottom so the cards flare, so you can get access to cards in the middle of the pack.
We load card in from the top, so let’s get our typical stack of cards, see what we got going on here. So I’m going to put in a few of these at time, so there is 2, let’s get 2 more, they say this should hold roughly up to 12 cards is what they say so we’ll see. Six in there now, let’s see how many more we can do. Pull this open, here’s 10 in there now. With 10, that’s not too bad, let’s take a look see what we got by way of size with this many cards inserted, we’re not going to count the strap itself. With 10 cards in there it’s .6 inches. That’s not really bad actually. All things considered.
If we look at this closely it’s really just barely over half an inch, it’s got those nice pieces of aluminum on either side. If you push up from the bottom, push into this right there and it gets most of these out and then what you do is you grab the bottom and you squeeze (pinch) and it starts to flare them out. You pinch it and then it provides access to these middle cards at which point you’ve got access to all of them and you just push them all back in when you’re done.
Now granted, this is really stacked and they say idealistically no more than 12, so we’re really overloading this. So let’s take out 2 of them, let’s go back to what we had here by way of what would be a normal size which would be more like 8 or 10 cards. Otherwise you’re going to get out of minimalist wallet idea.
Not bad. I like this wallet, I like the durability of the metal that’s used, don’t know how that would hold up by way of scratching. I know this company also make carbon fiber, as well as titanium band wallets in the same kind of design. They also have a version that has a money clip on the outside instead of the strap. So if you’re a fan of money clips you could get one instead of this strap.
It has a lifetime guarantee on it. If, it has possible failure points, obviously these screws would be it, and the internal strap wearing out, they’re obviously providing this little screwdriver for a reason, but overall I like the size, I like the feel of it, they heft of it.
They’ve tried to address the most common one’s like access, which with floating pieces allows you to pinch the bottom to gain access to all the cards quickly. Ridge was launched on Kickstarter like most wallets are these days, there are more wallets launched on Kickstarter than any other product type. It’s pretty amazing. So, the measurements on this is, 5.5 inches by 1.8 inches and it’s about five ounces. This is not a bad wallet at all. My perceptions on this good, I love the box. I mean I just love this, I like Apple products anyway but the presentation, the fact that they give you this nice little screwdriver, they’ve got a lifetime warrantee on this. The perception on this is great, I really like this.
So with that being said, let’s get into the ratings. The quality is great. I really like the quality of this, I’m going to give a 5 out of five.
Usability, 3, it suffers from some things that other products do but it’s right in the middle and it handles that just fine. I’m going to give the perception of it a 4. It actually is a great little product, that gives us a final score of 3.5 out of 5.
The Ridge wallet is an excellent band wallet. It’s materials and presentation provide a great experience.
