The Quartz Crisis Is Coming for the Wallet

On December 25, 1969, in a quiet release that almost nobody outside Tokyo noticed, Seiko launched the Astron. It was the world’s first commercial quartz wristwatch, accurate to within five seconds a month, and at the time it cost roughly the same as a Toyota Corolla. Within a decade, it would gut one of the oldest and proudest manufacturing industries in Europe.

Switzerland controlled around half of global watch production in 1969. By 1978 that share had collapsed to 24%. The number of Swiss watchmaking firms fell from roughly 1,600 to under 600 in fifteen years. Employment in the industry crashed from about 90,000 workers to 33,000. Names that had survived the Great Depression and two world wars simply vanished. The Quartz Crisis, as it came to be called, was not a recession. It was an extinction event.

I think about the Quartz Crisis a lot, because I sell wallets for a living, and I have started to suspect that what happened to mechanical watches in the 1970s is about to happen to my entire industry. That is to say, wallets, by there very nature are becoming obsolete.

The Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ.

The Slow Disappearance of Cash

The numbers are not subtle. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, published in May 2025, found that cash accounted for just 14% of American consumer payments by number in 2024. In 2016 the figure was 31%. Among 18 to 24 year olds, 45% of all payments are now made directly with a mobile phone. The average American consumer made eleven mobile-phone payments per month in 2024, up from four per month in 2018.

Apple Pay alone has somewhere in the region of 65 million American users. One Capital One Shopping analysis projected over $450 billion in physical Apple Pay purchases for 2025. In Sweden, in-store cash purchases accounted for just 10% of transactions by 2023. In Norway, only 3% of consumers say they prefer cash for daily shopping. The countries leading on this trend are not waiting around for the rest of us.

The state ID, the last truly indispensable thing in your wallet, is going the same way. As of late 2025, thirteen US states plus Puerto Rico support driver’s licenses in Apple Wallet, with at least seven more committed for 2026. Apple introduced a passport-based Digital ID in fall 2025 that is now accepted at TSA checkpoints in over 250 American airports. The trajectory is unambiguous. Within a decade, the average American carrying a wallet will be doing so for two or three plastic cards and a state ID that they already have a digital backup of on the phone in their other pocket.

If you make wallets, you should be thinking very hard about what your product is actually for.

The Swiss Did Not Die

Here is the interesting part of the watch story, the part that most people forget. The Swiss did not die. They mounted one of the most successful industrial counter-attacks in modern business history, and they did it by changing what a mechanical watch fundamentally was.

In 1983, Nicolas Hayek merged two struggling Swiss watch conglomerates, SSIH and ASUAG, into what became the Swatch Group. The plastic Swatch was the visible volume play, but the real strategic move was repositioning the high-end mechanical watch from a precision instrument into something else entirely. A status object. A piece of craft. An heirloom.

The most famous expression of this was Patek Philippe’s Generations campaign, which launched in 1996 with the now-canonical line, “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” Rolex perfected the waiting list as a marketing tool. Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin quietly elevated the visible craft of their movement finishing. The argument shifted from “this watch keeps better time than yours” to “this watch carries meaning that yours cannot.”

Fifty years on, mechanical watches are economically irrelevant as timekeepers. Your iPhone is more accurate than a tourbillon, and the cheapest Casio is more accurate than your iPhone. And yet Swiss watch exports hit 26 billion Swiss francs in 2024. Watches priced above 50,000 francs represented 33.5% of total export value and an astonishing 84% of the industry’s growth.

Four privately held brands, Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, and Richard Mille, accounted for roughly 47% of the entire market. Volumes have actually been falling for years, from 29.8 million units in 2011 to 13.3 million in 2024, while franc revenues have continued to climb. Fewer watches, more meaning, more money.

This is the playbook. And if you look closely at the wallet industry right now, you can already see who is reading it.

Ridge, Or, How To Build A Hundred Million Dollar Brand On A Twelve Card Holder

Ridge launched on Kickstarter in 2013 with a simple idea, a minimalist plate-and-elastic wallet that would replace your bulging leather bifold. For most of its first decade it sold itself the way every functional product sells itself, on features. Capacity, RFID protection, weight, materials. The classic Buy It For Life pitch.

Then something shifted. Sean Frank, Ridge’s CEO, has been admirably blunt about what changed. “Don’t sell wallets,” he said on a recent podcast, “Folks don’t care about wallets. We’re the biggest wallet company. It sucks.” The current strategy, in his own words, is to “transition it to be a modern American accessories brand.” His benchmark is Coach. Not one of the many hundereds of copycat wallet brands vying for your money.

The execution has been creator-led. Ridge has activated more than 600 content creators, headlined by Marques Brownlee, the YouTube technology reviewer better known as MKBHD. In February 2024, Brownlee joined Ridge as Executive Board Member, equity investor, and Chief Creative Partner. It is the deepest formal commitment Brownlee has ever made to a consumer brand.

The MKBHD x Ridge collection, with names like MatteBlackEverything, Light Mode, and Vapor, sells limited-edition aluminum wallets and key cases at $95 to $195, packaged in launch storytelling that owes more to Nike sneaker drops than to anything that ever came out of a leather goods company. Ridge says the wallet line alone now exceeds $100 million in annual revenue, and Frank is openly aiming for a $1 billion exit. He has done all of this without taking venture capital.

Most of the people buying a Ridge in 2026 are not buying it because they need to carry cards. They are buying it because it looks the way they want their pocket to look. Ridge has stopped selling a wallet and started selling identity. That is the Patek move, in aluminum, at one percent of the price.

Aviator’s Evermade, Or, The Watch Pitch In Titanium

If Ridge is the Swatch of this story, the volume play that funds the rest, then Aviator’s Evermade range is the Audemars Piguet. Aviator is a German engineering firm based in Bavaria, and their Evermade Hive Edition is, as far as I can tell, the purest expression of the watch parallel anywhere in the wallet industry today.

The Hive is machined from 99.9% pure Grade 1 titanium. Each one is individually serialized, the edition is capped at 24 pieces worldwide, and the price is $2,950. The brand publishes its production figures the way a watchmaker publishes movement specs. Roughly six hours of CNC machining per unit, followed by sixty four hours of finishing. The marketing copy reads “an invitation to own something rare,” “engineered for resilience,” “a companion for life.” Lay it next to an AP Royal Oak campaign from 2007 and you would struggle to tell which is which.

The standard Aviator wallet, the Titan Slim, has a German Design Award sitting on it. The brand is not pretending to compete on capacity or RFID shielding or any of the old utility metrics. It is competing on craft, scarcity, and provenance. There is no functional reason to spend $2,950 on a piece of titanium that holds your credit cards. There is no functional reason to spend $50,000 on a Rolex Daytona either. That has never been the point.

The Secrid Cardprotector+. Full review here.

Secrid, Or, The Patient Dutch Approach

Secrid, the Dutch brand founded by Marianne and René van Geer in 1995, has been quietly executing the same strategy for nearly thirty years, long before the rest of the industry caught on. The original Secrid Cardprotector won the Red Dot Design Award in 2010. The Miniwallet won the European Aluminium Award two years later.

The craft narrative is told in industrial design language rather than heritage leather language, but it is the same narrative. The brand collaborates with the Mauritshuis and the Rijksmuseum on art collection wallets featuring Vermeer and Rembrandt. It runs sheltered workshops in Leiden, Cruquius, and Delft, told as a public craft story rather than buried in a corporate responsibility report. The Cardprotector+, launched in 2024, comes with a seven year warranty and is described not as a wallet but as “the heart of the Premium+ collection.”

This is exactly how an independent watchmaker frames an in-house movement. A piece of design, made by people, with a story behind it. Secrid did not pivot during a crisis. They built the entire company on the assumption that the wallet’s future was as a design object first and a tool second.

The Luxury Houses Have Always Known

Of course, none of this is new to the luxury houses. Bottega Veneta has spent decades treating the Intrecciato woven cardholder as, in Harrods’ own words, something that “functions like a logo, signalling the brand’s identity without the need for anything as explicit as text.”

Hermès posted 12% organic growth in leather goods in the first half of 2024 and overtook LVMH in market capitalization in April 2025. Goyard operates fewer than 35 boutiques worldwide and refuses to sell online. LVMH’s Fashion and Leather Goods division, which includes Vuitton, Dior, Celine, and Fendi, generated approximately $44 billion in fiscal 2024 alone.

The cardholder is, quite literally, the cheapest legal way for most consumers to wear the logo of a luxury house. A $400 Goyard Saint-Sulpice or a $500 Hermès Calvi is the gateway drug, the entry-level flex that gets a customer into the brand at a price they can stomach in their twenties or thirties.

The luxury industry has been pricing wallets as identity objects for fifty years. The newer arrivals, Ridge and Aviator and Secrid and Bellroy, are not inventing a new playbook. They are noticing that the luxury houses had it right all along, and that the conditions are now ripe to apply it further down the price curve.

The Cards Themselves Are Becoming Jewelry

There is one other detail worth noticing, because it is the strangest and most telling. The credit card itself, the wallet’s most justified content, is becoming a luxury object in its own right. The Chase Sapphire Reserve weighs 12.6 grams, is made of metal, and now carries a $795 annual fee.

The new American Express Platinum, in stainless steel with a mirrored finish, runs $895 annually and reportedly drew 500,000 requests in its first three weeks. Robinhood released a 10 karat solid gold credit card weighing 36 grams. Brian Kelly at The Points Guy named the phenomenon the “plunk factor,” the satisfying sound of a heavy card hitting a restaurant counter. It is, unmistakably, jewelry.

If the cards inside your wallet are deliberately being engineered as objects of weight and prestige, then a $19 nylon billfold is not going to cut it. The container has to match the contents.

Where This Lands, and how does it end…?

I do not think wallets are going to disappear. Mechanical watches did not disappear, and they had a competitor that was objectively better at the job. The wallet’s competitor, your phone, is also better at the job, but the residual functional reasons to carry a wallet are real enough to keep the category alive for a long time. State IDs, key cards, business cards, gym tags, the occasional twenty dollar bill for a tip. Around 5.6 million unbanked American households still rely on cash. The wallet will not vanish on any specific date.

What the wallet will do, what I think it has already started to do, is bifurcate. The bottom of the market will be hollowed out, the disposable nylon and bonded leather product that nobody loves and nobody talks about. The top will inflate, with brands selling fewer units at far higher prices, justified by craft and scarcity and design and the kind of stories that the Swiss spent forty years learning how to tell about themselves.

The watch parallel is not perfect. A wallet, unlike a watch, lives in your pocket. Nobody sees it. The buyer of a $2,950 Evermade Hive is signaling something to himself more than to the world, which may put a lower ceiling on the category’s emotional value than horology managed to reach. The wallet may end up looking more like fountain pens, a serious enthusiast niche, than like Patek Philippe, a global wealth display. That is still a much better place to be than where the bottom of the market is heading.

If you are a wallet brand reading this in 2026, the strategic move is no longer subtle. Stop leading with capacity and RFID protection (which is useless anyways). Start leading with the people who make it, the materials it is made from, the limited editions you can credibly produce, the story you can credibly tell.

Treat the cardholder, not the bifold, as your hero product. Build collaborations with creators and artists who carry their own audience. The brands that get this right will inherit a smaller industry but a far more profitable one. The brands that keep selling functional utility will be the names nobody can remember in ten years, the way nobody under forty can name the watchmakers that died between 1973 and 1985.

Seiko did not kill the Swiss watch industry. It just killed the Swiss watch industry’s reason for existing in its old form. Apple Pay is doing the same thing to wallets right now. Whether the next fifty years of this industry produce a Patek Philippe or just a long, slow shrink depends entirely on which brands figure out, soon, that they are no longer in the business of carrying cards.

They are in the business of meaning.