Nik Bentel Studio Has Made a Golf Wallet. Yes, It Comes With a Tee.
The New York design studio releases leather golf wallet complete with fake turf, a mini ball, and a tee holder.
I have a soft spot for what I call novelty wallets: wallets that do not necessarily need to make sense, designed purely for fun, for a specific niche, or just because someone had a genuinely strange idea and followed through with it. The wallet industry can be a remarkably serious place, and I find it genuinely refreshing when someone makes something that just makes you smile. The Golf Wallet from Nik Bentel Studio is exactly that.
Who Is Nik Bentel Studio?
Nik Bentel Studio is a four-person design studio based in New York City, founded by Nikolas Gregory Bentel in 2017. Bentel holds degrees from Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture. The studio describes its goal as creating objects that tell stories, and its output is best described as curated chaos: limited-edition performance art objects that sit somewhere between product design, conceptual art, and a very good joke.
The studio is best known for the Mac folder wallet, a leather wallet designed to look exactly like the macOS folder icon. They have since added a Windows folder variant, a floppy disk wallet in collaboration with Japanese retailer BEAMS, a Grand Budapest Hotel pastry box bag, a Wes Anderson-inspired piece, and a TUMS antacid bottle bag in partnership with the brand itself. It is a catalog that is difficult to describe but impossible to scroll past without stopping.
Wallets are clearly where the studio keeps returning, and the Golf Wallet is their latest. A Penny Loafer wallet from the same studio is also apparently in the pipeline, which I will be covering separately.
The Golf Wallet
The Golf Wallet is a leather card wallet measuring 4 by 3 inches with two card pockets. That is the functional side of it. The other side is what makes it worth writing about.
The front of the wallet features a patch of fake turf. A mini golf ball and a tee are included with the wallet, the tee fitting into a dedicated slot on the wallet itself. The idea, as the studio puts it, is a wallet so you can practice your swing anywhere. Whether you are actually going to be chipping a mini golf ball off your wallet at any point in daily life is beside the point. The point is that someone thought of this, designed it properly, and it looks brilliant.
What I appreciate beyond the concept is the execution. The fake grass on the front, the tee holder, the inclusion of the mini ball: these are not afterthoughts bolted onto a generic wallet. This has been thought about, and the result is something that feels considered rather than cheap. That smile it produces when you see it for the first time is entirely unforced, and I think that is the studio’s whole point.
For anyone who plays golf, or anyone who knows someone who plays golf and is looking for a gift that is actually memorable, this is as good an answer as the category has produced in a while. A golfer with a sense of humor is the specific target here, and I suspect they will love it.
Price and Availability
The Golf Wallet is priced at $100 and is available as a preorder now, with shipping beginning September 1. Given the studio’s track record of limited runs that sell out and do not come back, if this appeals to you it is probably worth not leaving it. I will be keeping a close eye on Nik Bentel Studio going forward. This is not the last time they will appear on this site. The Golf Wallet is available to preorder now at nikbentel.com.
Check out the Golf Wallet