More than two years ago our friend Wes Cox sent us some early prototypes of an ultralight wallet design he was developing in his mission to make a better billfold.
Included in the package was a hand drawn illustration showing a stick-figure motorcyclist with lightning bolts of pain emanating out of…well, out of his butt.
The problem was the stick figure man’s wallet. It was a standard leather wallet that, Cox contends, is needlessly thick.
Taken to the extreme, consider the cautionary tale of , the Seinfeld sidekick whose own billfold was so overburdened he could barely even fold it.
Such a monstrously thick wallet is no joke—it can lead to sciatic-nerve-induced back pain, and encourage hoarding to boot.
Enter : the company Cox founded to formalize his quest to make the ultimate minimalist wallet.
The key ingredients in the Hawbuck secret sauce are a clean minimal design and smart material spec. These wallets are made with a Dyneema composite fabric hybrid, which combines the world’s strongest fiber (UHMWPE —Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene, of which Dyneema is a name-brand variant), with a 50D woven Polyester skin over top of the wonder-fiber, giving the wallet a abrasion resistant performance without any undue heft.
Sewn together with precision polyester thread in Hawbuck’s Chicago studio, the final product has proven itself over years of testing.
Measured empty, the Dyneema Wallet hits the scale at just 5 grams, and measures less than a millimeter thick. The average leather wallet will come in at more than ten times in both weight and girth.
Each of these Union X Hawbuck Dyneema wallets will easily fit 5 cards on each side, as well as a short stack of bills (no knots) and an odd business card or two. And that’s all, folks. This wallet’s payload will never reach Costanza proportions, and that's exactly the point.
Dyneema hybrid material is made in Arizona
Polyester thread made in Germany
Wallets made in USA.
Size: 2.8" x 7.75"
Weight: 5 grams
* Pictured below: 1) The measured thickness of a well-worn simple leather wallet; 2) the thickness of an empty Union Garage Dyneema Wallet; 3) a 2-year-old Dyneema wallet maxed out with a dozen cards and a few dollar bills.
