Why we stopped selling wooden wallets, a 2018 retrospective
The honest version of what closed the Madera Woodworks Co production line at the end of 2017. Three reasons, in order of weight.
One. The category was saturated
When we launched the Union in 2014, the wood wallet category had maybe a dozen serious players globally. By 2017 it had several hundred. Most of them were drop shipped from one of three Chinese factories that had reverse-engineered the cardholder format and were retailing on Amazon for between fifteen and twenty US dollars. Our sixty Australian dollar price was justified by the materials, the finish and the small batch run, but the market increasingly could not see the difference. A buyer typing "wooden wallet" into Amazon got a thousand results that all looked broadly similar in a thumbnail.
Two. The currency moved against us
We were buying our hardwood billets out of the United States, paying in US dollars, and selling almost half of our units back into the United States, again in US dollars. On paper this was hedged. In practice it was not, because the New York supplier we used sourced its kiln dried stock through brokers who priced based on the contemporaneous USD rate, and the Australian shipping costs and the local labour did not move with the same curve. Between mid 2014 and late 2017 the Australian dollar fell from roughly 0.93 to 0.76 against the US dollar. Our cost base moved up. Our retail price did not, because the wood wallet category above us had collapsed by then to under twenty US dollars.
Three. We had said what we wanted to say
The third reason is the one that mattered most when the call was finally made. The Union had reached a point where it was a finished piece. There was no version four we wanted to ship. The Poquito had done the same job at a smaller footprint. Convoy had taken the brand into the phone-case category honestly, but the iPhone 6 was already three model generations behind the current iPhone by the end of 2017, and re-tooling the elastomer body for the iPhone X form factor was a serious capital outlay against a category that was, by then, saturated. We did not want to keep producing the same three pieces for another five years just to keep the storefront live.
What we did instead
We sold through the remaining stock during the first quarter of 2018 at the original retail price. We did not run a closing-down sale. The tooling was decommissioned. The supplier relationships were closed out honestly. The Indiegogo backers from the original 2015 Convoy campaign had received their units two years earlier, so there was no outstanding fulfilment to manage. The brand was put into archive mode. The journal kept running. The site stayed up.
What we would do differently
If we were running the same brand again in 2026, we would price in USD from day one and accept the AUD as a secondary market. We would build a single product to a higher specification rather than three products to a good specification. We would publish more openly about the supply chain and the unit economics, because that turned out to be the durable interesting thing about the business, and it is the material that has aged best in the journal. The product line was finite. The story was not.