From the Vault: The Return of Tyvek

I have a love-hate relationship with Tyvek. My initial insight for a minimalist wallet came from a simple question: Instead of putting credit cards into scratch-resistant sleeves and then into a wallet, why not make a wallet itself from the material those sleeves are made of?

By combining this nugget of an idea with several others, the Original Tyvek wallet was born. Then I followed that with the Micro Tyvek Kickstarter. That set me on the road to turning the product into a business.

Making the wallets was full of challenges though. I’ve used several different US-based companies to print them and each print run was a gamble. The first one turned out well, but then they wouldn’t do a reprint when I needed more because it was a bit more difficult. It’s understandable- if they have enough work to stay busy then it’s easier to take on jobs that are more predictable.

I had to bump up my production volume significantly to find a partner that would do would do the next run. Printing several years of stock at once, with tens of thousands of dollars on the line. I flew to be on site for the press check, which flowed straight into printing while the press was running.

The quality was quite good especially for the darker colors. But I wanted to do better by adding some vibrant ones as well. As I explained in this post, there’s no Pantone book for Tyvek. Sometimes, I would do a color test in a small part of a press sheet during one print run as a test to use in a wallet design in a future production run.

Finally, I found a printing company that was amazing. I got to know the guy that operated their multimillion dollar press and looked forward to going to the press checks because I had confidence that the results would be great.

Then they folded, following the trajectory of many US-based manufacturers they couldn’t keep up with global price pressures. They lasted longer than most because of their specialty services, but finally the end came.

We still had quite a lot of supply, but by that time, our Soft Shell wallets had become our best sellers. While Tyvek is amazing in many ways, it’s a bit niche and makes some sacrifices in terms of durability compared to leather. Being paper-thin, it lasts way longer than you’d expected to, but Soft Shell was an ideal solution for most folks. So rather than look for another Tyvek printer, we continued expanding the Soft Shell line.

Then out of the blue I got an email from the local company who does our Tyvek cutting. They were clearing out a corner of the shop and found some press sheets and asked, “Is it ok if we throw these out?“ 😱

I immediately went over to have a look. They had some solids, cubic, and even the beloved Monyou series! So I had them cut it all. We just finished sewing the Monyou series and it’s currently listed in the store.

It feels like I’m in a time-warp of sorts. I am super happy to have these available because I know some of our customers are diehard fans. I also know that the new products we're making are even better and since we’re making them in house, we don’t need to rely on outside companies quite as much.