Carbon Fiber Wallets for Women

Carbon Fiber wallets aren’t just for the guys anymore… We now make a ladies version.

Ladies Carbon Fiber Wallet: Black / Red

Bragging rights on your next date? You betchya!

You might be thinking… If this is really carbon fiber, how come this doesn’t look like the carbon fiber you’re probably familiar with?

The call sign of carbon fiber is that tight square weave of grayish blackish fibers, typically seen with a hard glossy finish. The actual carbon fiber is the fibers that make up that weave. The carbon fiber cloth we use is sailcloth, adapted to bring high strength, low stretch, and lightweight to the high performance sailing world. It is made with a lower density weave that is then sealed and finished with a flexible UV resistant resin that makes it waterproof. This composite cloth offers us a unique opportunity to create flexible carbon fiber goods unlike anything you have ever seen before.

If you like our style, don’t hesitate to check out whole lineup of carbon fiber wallets made from this material.

Carbon Fiber Backpack PROTOTYPE

We make a lot of carbon fiber bags, and yet we’ve never had a carbon fiber backpack in our lineup. Well that is about to change. Below are the prototype pictures of our much anticipated backpack design:

Side View

Interior View

Cell Phone Pocket Access

Pre-Sneak Preview: Backpack Design

At long last we have a serious backpack design nearly complete. Many a customer has asked us for either a sailcloth backpack or a carbon fiber backpack. It has taken us a long time to get it to the design table because backpacks have so many different uses,that we got stuck on wanting to design the perfect backpack for everybody (which was impossible), rather then designing the perfect backpack for us (which is how we’ve designed all of our other gear).

Our backpack is small, simple, and sleek. It is just big enough to hold a Macbook in the built in padded laptop sleeve at the back, maybe a lightweight jacket, a book and a bottle of water. There are just two zippers, both on the side, so they are easily accessible by swinging the backpack around your right side, with one strap still on your shoulder. One zipper is full length and gives access to the laptop and the entire interior space, the other zipper is smaller and gives direct access to a simple sleeve pocket designed to hold whatever you want to keep handy, be it an ipod or a cell phone.

That’s all the details I’m going to give you for now. I will post prototype pics tomorrow.

Sometimes downtime isn’t such a bad thing

We are just coming off of nearly a month of enforced downtime. Not something we ever would have done willingly, and not something we expected to bring about exciting new changes, but that seems to be the exact result. Rather then scrambling trying to make up for lost time, feeling behind, etc, we are actually slightly in awe of where we are after a month of almost no energy spent on RAGGEDedge. As it turns out, the downtime provided us an unforeseen opportunity to take a step back. Our time away from being engrossed in the daily day to day activities of running RAGGEDedge (tweaking the website, updating Etsy, making product…) enabled us to take the time to think about where we are, how we got here, and where want to go in the future.

Instead of just continuing to do what we what we were doing, we were able to see things with a fresh perspective. Conversations with potential distributors and wholesale accounts, combined with statistics we’ve known about our sales and our customers for a long time, suddenly became a reason to revamp the message and marketing of our website in its entirety. Getting feedback on that (so far entirely positive) has further pushed us to explore including new materials (such as machined titanium webbing hardware) into our designs that would not be on our horizon otherwise.

The fresh mindset has also got us in the midst of a backpack design. A long awaited project that we’ve been staunchly avoiding, even as a custom project (although many a person has tried to bribe us).

As entrepreneurs its easy to get caught up in working really hard in order to be successful, and not so easy to justify not working as a way to be even more successful, but I think its a worthy consideration.

Big Plans and Tiny Plans

You must have a plan. From the time we were children they teach us to have plans for what we are going to be when we grow up. Plan for it, and it will happen, just exactly how you imagined it. The thing about plans is that they are too big and unwieldy to really be of any use. But people want plans to be big, they even need them to be big. Otherwise they aren’t significant. They aren’t worth having meetings about and they don’t impress anybody. A plan must be big in order to be convincing.

What if your plan was tiny. What if it was really only a step. An obtainable short term goal. Given the current circumstances, the best possible course of action, and by course of action, I really just mean single action. Make a plan that is really just the next step that is going to take you in the direction you want to go. It doesn’t need to impress anybody. It needs to be focused.

A plan like this is flexible. It isn’t rooted in guesstimations of what the future holds. Tiny plans don’t become irrelevant the second you walk out of the meeting, because that is exactly when they happen. The problem with planning like this, is it requires trusting instincts, there is no grand plan to fall back on and point fingers at when things don’t work. Now you just get to make and act on another plan, the best one for the moment, not the outdated one that didn’t predict where you are right now.

What is This Flexible Carbon Fiber Sailcloth Material?

Most things people make out of carbon fiber are hard as a finished product. Like fiberglass, the typical carbon fiber comes in cloth sheets that have to be laid up in a mold with resin and left to set. This limits applications to hard objects.

So how do we make flexible carbon fiber bags and wallets you ask?

Enter the high performance sailing world and the desire to have ever lighter and stronger sails. White sails are for cruisers, the racers want the ultimate in low stretch, and strength without giving up weight. So along came the invention and introduction of sailcloth laminates that utilize high tech fibers (the first well known one being Kevlar) encased in flexible resin. Fast forward to today, and as with everything, technology has gotten better, high tech fibers have progressed, and now they’ve incorporated carbon fiber into their materials.

The specific cloth we use is Dimension Polyant’s G.P.L. carbon fiber racing laminates. It is the first laminated sailcloth line to capture the strength of high performance carbon. G.P.L. laminates utilize high strength carbon warp sheet fiber, super rugged Technora base and Technora X-PLY to create racing fabrics with incredible resistance to flex, elongation and degradation from U.V.

You’re Either Going to Like us or You’re Not

This is essentially a continuation of the last post where I talked about being tiny (300 unique visitors a month) but growing and happy.

As I said, at least one person a week contacts us about the possibility of setting up a wholesale account, or perhaps becoming a distributor, or some other, potentially big, non retail endeavor. All of these people fit into one of two categories:

1. They love our products, love our story, and love that we are still tiny. The fact that we are still tiny makes our company that much more appealing to them, because they’re pretty darn sure we aren’t going to be tiny for very long and they want to get involved early.

2. They love our products, love our story, but the “unknown” factor makes them nervous. These people want me to tell them that they’re going to be able to sell our products. Obviously they see potential, otherwise they wouldn’t have called, but they don’t like how much risk is involved at this stage of the game.

I can’t move people from one group to the other. As a growing company, we are where we are, right now we’re tiny, and people are either going to see the potential that that presents (trusting that we’re going to keep at it and keep growing) or they’re going to be nervous (choosing to believe that tiny presents too big of a risk).

So like us or don’t. I’m not a slick talking salesperson or marketer that’s going to say all the right things to make you feel warm and fuzzy about investing in our products. I’m going to be honest.

The New Face of Opportunity

In the scheme of the web (and the world) our company barely qualifies as a blip. If you do a “Whois” domain search on us, it says that less then 300 different people visit our website every month. Until we saw that, we didn’t even know the number was that tiny! And yet, it didn’t throw us into a panic. Neither one of us thought, wow, we need to get more traffic, ASAP. In fact, I think we both just kind of thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.”

Now, three days later, I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s really pretty cool.” We are tiny, and we are proud of where we are. In a year and half, we went from miniscule, to tiny, and we did it organically. Little by little. Failure by failure by success.

Do we get the calls for huge crazy awesome opportunities that would pad our bank account a little and potentially put us on the map a little bit more then 300 visitors a month? Oh most definitely. As often as once a week. We used to latch on to each one, thinking that every one was going to turn into something real. Now we just keep a list. We respond to all of these inquiries with an open mind, not judging any of them by the likelihood of one actually turning into something real. To us, they are all viable opportunities, just not in the way somebody intent on building a traditional business would see them.

But now is not really the time for traditional.

Changing Directions

I’ll be the first to admit this blog was merely a way to help us get found by the great Google. It wasn’t about writing good or interesting content, so much as it was about writing SEO content. The SEO geniuses tell you to have a blog… and so we did. It just wasn’t a blog that anybody cared about, and for good reason.

From today forward we are changing our blog mentality to match our business mentality. First step: write something worth reading.

We have been seriously (as in full time) working on RAGGEDedge since December 2008. And it took me until about three days ago to think of ourselves as entrepreneurs (a word I have just taught myself to spell). We have ideas, and we pursue them with unrelenting tenacity and an open mind. And along the way, we have learned a lot about business. How its “suppose” to work (old school traditionalist style)  and how it can work (when people see potential and opportunity and have a willingness to think outside the norm).

So here I am, changing this blog midstream, because I want to and I can.

What? Dishwasher Safe Wallet?

Yup. That’s us. Finally a wallet you can wash and it won’t fall apart or “never be the same” as it was before.

How is this possible? It starts with the pure awesomeness of the material. The wallet is made from a laminate carbon fiber sailcloth. This cloth has woven strands of carbon fiber (with strength superior to steel, and lightweight to boot), that are encased in a waterproof resin and heat set- making it impervious to water. Cool right?

But wait! That awesomeness doesn’t stop there! Next is our unique construction. Most wallets are sewn together with a single straight stitch seam that directly stitches together the layers of cloth. We have found this not to be sufficient for long term wear and tear so we took things a little to the extreme. Every seam on our wallets is stitched with a triple step zig zag stitch (think 3x the strength). And that stitch isn’t even the only thing holding the wallet together- we also use a binding or edging as reinforcement. This makes our wallets a little bit bigger all the way around, because it adds 3/8″ on every side, but we think its worth it.