Made from one piece of full grain veg tanned leather, the Singular Leather wallet ensures that ease of use matches the capacity of the cards, cash, coins and many other things that can be carried efficiently.
(if you want to see all the features and how many cards and cash it can hold, please watch the video)
Today, we’re going to take a look at a wallet made in Portugal by a maker who is passionate about his design and the quality of his wallet. The Singular Wallet took Jorge Ferreira, the owner, a few years to develop.
You can specify the color of leather and elastic when you order. It came to me with two additional elastics, which are really a nice touch. They provide you with an RFID card, which is brilliant. I’ve mentioned this before and if a company wants to provide RFID coverage, don’t add it to the wallet, don’t do it there. Provide a separate card. You don’t want to ruin a wallet with RFID material.
This wallet is one piece of leather and in the middle connection point it has a small piece of leather that’s glued to where the leather meets. On the exterior, we see no appreciable features except for the elastic which helps keep the flap down. And if we open up the flap, we get into our first feature, which is a slot in the front. This is where cards go, and then in the back again, another slot with more space. It captures whatever else you may put in the rear slot so coins in addition to cash can work in that spot.
The company says it can hold up to 12 cards, so a reasonable number would be 4 to 8 cards. When inserting cash, I really like the fact you only have to fold it once. As mentioned, it’s designed and made in Portugal, and made from full grain, veg tan, Portuguese leather, which will develop a beautiful patina over time.
When ordering, you can also request custom stamping of up to 15 characters, which makes it very personable. From a usability perspective, I have expressed concerns about the width of this elastic before in other products, because it has a tendency to bind or to kind of wrap on itself, twist up. But I haven’t seen that with this wallet as I’ve had time to work with it. I wish there was a quick access card slot on the exterior and the reason is because you have to take this elastic off every time you want to get to something, or stick your finger in the side to slide cards out. If I have one card I use most often, I wish I could have it on the exterior somewhere to use quickly. By way of access to cards and cash once open, I like it because you can thumb through the cards you want. You don’t have to dig in, pull them all out, find the card you want, then put the stack back in the wallet. You can just thumb through the cards, find the one you want and pull it out, not a problem. Want access to cash? Can pull it out. There you go. Coins, they come out just fine too.
In taking a look at the little connection piece of leather. Being that it’s done with glue, hopefully there’s no issues of it coming undone over time or loosening up. Sewing that probably would have been a nicer and more secure option, but it wouldn’t have been as clean looking on the front.
It measures 3.5 x 2.3 x 0.3” and it weighs 45 grams. For something so small, there’s a good weight of leather in this. With Jorge Ferreira as the owner and operator of Singular Leather, it’s a one man show where he’s designed the entire concept of the wallet and creates them all to order by hand. As is the case with most leather makers, it started as a hobby for him where he sold his goods at a local market, where he became known and demand increased. And from there, he decided to focus on just one wallet, this single design. His passion for work and this design, shows in the quality and time committed to making them.
Now let’s get into the final score, for quality a , price a 4, features a 3, usability a 3 and perception a 4. That gives us a great score of 4 out of 5.
Clever designs come out of Singular Leather including this minimalist beauty
