Tomorrow, 11:30 AM EST. A new format, and it arrives with eight designs on day one.
This is the Paperwallet MagSafe wallet. It snaps onto the back of a MagSafe phone, it holds three cards and some folded cash, and that's the entire spec sheet. No bifold, no snap, no strap. The phone is the wallet now. We just put art on it.
What It Is
A MagSafe wallet is a card holder with a magnet ring in it, built to lock onto the magnet array in the back of an iPhone or a MagSafe-compatible case. You stick it on, it stays. You pull it off when you need the cards. Apple makes one. So does everybody else. Almost all of them are plain leather or plain something-else in six colors.
Ours is different in the way you'd expect from us. It's Tyvek, so it's thin, light and waterproof at the fiber level. And it's printed, which means the back of your phone is now a Hokusai, or a Van Gogh, or a hotel full of frogs.
Three cards and cash. That's the minimalist carry, the one where you've already admitted you only use two cards and a folded twenty anyway. If that's you, this is the last wallet format you'll need, and it's the first one you can't leave behind, because it's attached to the thing you'd go back for.
The Eight
Some of these you know from the Micro. Some are brand new.
Wayfarer, by Micha Huigen. The desert hiker bent over a succulent, halftone grain, a torn page from a seventies comic album. If you missed the Micro in August, here it is on the phone.
Frog Hotel, by Marcos Abdallah. An isometric line-drawn hotel in blue ink on cream, every balcony and café table occupied by round green frogs. One's playing a board game. One's leaning on the rail. None of them are in a hurry.
The Starry Night. Van Gogh's sky, the cypress, the invented village. The most famous night in painting, now on the back of the device you look at all night.
The Great Wave. Hokusai's claw of foam with Fuji sitting small in the trough. The print that taught Europe how to crop.
Wild Red and Feral, both by Manuel "El Stitch" Cetina. These two are new, drawn for this format. El Stitch is the artist behind Tiger and Knives on the Micro, the one who mixes old woodblock energy with glitch-art corruption and a horror-movie palette. We're not spoiling them here. Product pages go live tomorrow.
Jet Black and Carbon Fiber. The two stealth options, for people who want the format and not the conversation. Solid black, and the dark crosshatch weave that reads plain from across the room and technical up close.
Who El Stitch Is
Manuel Cetina, working as El Stitch. Mexican art director and illustrator based in Guadalajara, with a style built out of comics, horror films and streetwear graphics. He's on the H+ Creative artist roster and has been doing music and apparel graphics for years. If you own the Tiger Micro, you know the purple jaguar and the glitched error dialog. Wild Red and Feral come from the same place.
Why Tyvek Belongs on the Back of a Phone
The obvious MagSafe wallet problem is bulk. Leather adds thickness, and a thick wallet on the back of a phone stops fitting in the pocket it used to fit in. Tyvek doesn't have that problem. It's the thinnest material we could put cards behind, and it weighs close to nothing.
The less obvious problem is weather. A phone lives in your hand in the rain, on a café table next to a sweating glass, in a gym bag. A leather wallet stuck to it takes all of that and shows it. Tyvek beads water off, and the print doesn't darken or shift when it's wet.
And there's a third thing nobody talks about. The back of your phone is the most-looked-at surface you own. Putting a designed object there is a better use of it than a plain rectangle in "midnight."
Which One
If you already carry a Micro and want the same design on the phone, Wayfarer, Frog Hotel, Starry Night and the Wave all match existing pieces. If you want something nobody has yet, Wild Red and Feral are the only two designs in the launch that don't exist anywhere else. If you want the format to disappear, black or carbon.
Who's Copping This
The two-cards-and-done crowd. You've been carrying a phone and a single card in a phone case for years. This is the version with art on it and cash in it.
Anyone who's ever walked out without their wallet and never once walked out without their phone.
Micro Wallet owners who want a matched set. Same design, pocket and phone.
El Stitch collectors. Two new designs, launch day only on this format, and you've seen how fast Tiger moves.
Drop
Tomorrow, 11:30 AM EST. All eight go live at once: Wayfarer, Frog Hotel, The Starry Night, The Great Wave, Wild Red, Feral, Jet Black and Carbon Fiber. Limited runs. If you want the pocket version of any of the matched designs, the Micro Wallet collection is where they live, and the full collection has everything else.
