Review: Marlondo Leather ID wallet

Marlondo leather co. is a small company based in China which strives to produce top quality leather products. They do accept custom orders and are pretty easy to work with.

On to the review, I would like to start by saying I had built up a pretty high expectation for Marlondo's products due to all the good reviews I read.

Front

The leather is almost velvety and is soft to the touch. The leather on this ID wallet is pretty thin (1mm excluding lining based on my measurements) and lined with suede leather. The front ID cutout has a piece of plastic on the window to protect the cards inside.

Back

As you can see in this picture above, it picks up scratches pretty easily. Some leather enthusiasts consider this highly desirable as it makes the leather piece more personal to their use.

Top

There's a total of 5 pockets on this wallet. 2 credit card slots on the back, 1 ID slot in the front, 1 card slot behind the ID slot and the middle slot for cash.

Right off the bat, I noticed this ID wallet is actually huge. I was actually expecting it to be slightly bigger than a credit card but I couldn't be more wrong.

 
Picture above shows a standard-sized card on the ID wallet. The wallet is so much bigger than the card!

I went ahead and loaded it up with some cards and cash which I carry everyday. There's a total of 5 cards (1 in the ID slot, 1 behind it, and 3 in the credit cards slots) and 10 bills folded in half.

Well, after loading up the cards, the middle slot was pretty much useless. It was squeezed so tightly that I had a very hard time pushing cash in. The friction from the suede lining did not help at all. 
Update: After using it for a couple of days, I figured out how to slot cash in with relative ease. It's pretty slim for a front pocket carry. Not too bad.

After using it for a little while, I started noticing problems with it. With all the cards and cash loaded in it, the card in the ID slot would not go all the way in due to the way it bulges.
Update: If I pushed it in hard enough, the card does go in a little deeper.

Another issue I noticed was that the glue used was failing in places, though this does not affect the durability much. I'll show an example below.

Corner of the wallet where the layers of leathers are splitting

Then I noticed it happened to the plastic window part. Below you can see the stitching missed half of the plastic piece and the glue holding it has worn off. This has caused issues when I slide my ID card back in this slot as it always gets caught by the plastic piece.

Plastic window where the stitching missed and glue worn

Another problem I had was that some of the leather had not been glued down properly or the glue might have worn off. This one is pretty annoying especially when I need to pull the card out quickly and it just gets caught on the leather above it.

Card gets caught at the hidden slot

Card gets caught at the ID slot

The front and back pieces of leather are also not aligned properly. I can see that the back layer is aligned slightly more to the right of the wallet. This doesn't really affect the integrity of the wallet.

Lastly, the stitching is not very neat. The stitching gets tied off in many places and it creates bulges of threads everywhere in the wallet. A quick glance shows about 8 places where the thread gets finished off in the same manner. It would look much better if the ends are finished in between the leather layers. Another thing I noticed with the stitching is that some parts the thread used is much thinner. It kind of makes the stitching on the wallet weird. Again, this is more of a cosmetic issue.

Picture showing the finish thread and the thinner thread used below it

This wallet is being listed for $20 in Marlondo's website. With some minor adjustments, this wallet offers a great value for anyone looking to slim down their wallets.

In all fairness I know that Marlondo has relaunched his product line, and this ID wallet would most likely be an older model. So I placed an order for a new ID wallet in his website so I could do a comparison and see if it has improved over the older model.