ALPAKA ARK Classic Wallet Review

Our experience with many of ALPAKA’s wallets has been hit or miss. While we like its tough and durable fabrics—whether it’s X-Pac, Axoflux, or Axogrid—we’re just not convinced that stiff materials such as those make for a good wallet. They just feel too constricting and cumbersome in everyday use.

Well, the ALPAKA ARK Classic Wallet might just be the exception. While it still uses the same stiff fabrics ALPAKA’s fond of, this wallet has a fair amount of wiggle room in much of its design, plus a more conventional layout that’s not overly ambitious, like a certain ARK Bifold Coin Wallet was.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into the details!

The Rundown

The primary material on the outside is ALPAKA’s 210-denier Axogrid fabric. For the uninitiated, it’s a fabric made of a four-layer laminate. Details are sparse on ALPAKA’s website, but we’ll assume that the 210-denier fabric is the one on the outside, which is likely nylon. The remaining layers include a reinforcing grid, a waterproof membrane, and a backing of some sort. All of this makes for a very water-resistant material, but it also makes it a very rigid and stiff one.

Putting our established skepticism aside for now, we can at least rest easy knowing that the wallet is well put together. Unlike the coin-oriented sibling we’ve tested, the ARK Classic Wallet doesn’t have any loose threads right out of the box. Now, it could just be a case of luck, but we do wish ALPAKA could tighten tolerances and quality checks to give all customers a consistent experience regardless of which ARK wallet variant they choose. That said, this particular sample is quite pristine, so we won’t harp on this point too much.

Being a bifold wallet, the interior layout is quite straightforward and nearly symmetrical. There are two card slots on each side, for a total of four, and each side also has its respective rear pockets. The cash slot is at the backmost side, spanning the wallet’s entire length, and also has a hidden card slot. It’s nothing too crazy, and maybe even a bit stingy, considering you’ll have to stack cards in most slots to achieve the claimed 10-card capacity. That said, there are a few notable details worth pointing out.

Firstly, the frontmost card slot on the right side is angled. This isn’t a manufacturing defect, despite being seemingly so minor that you’d think it was. It’s a deliberate design choice to make grabbing your most often used card easier. While it makes a small difference, giving you more leverage to slide out whatever card is inside, the other, non-angled slots also feel fine. We can slide cards out of all the slots without much issue. In fact, we don’t even have much trouble taking out cards we’ve stacked behind others.

This would usually be the part where we’d gripe about ALPAKA’s stiff choice of fabrics, which make card access tighter than necessary. Make no mistake, the Axogrid is still stiff, as is the orange-colored Axoflux liner. However, the crucial difference between the ARK Classic Wallet and other ALPAKA wallets we’ve tested is that there seems to be just a bit more wiggle room in each card slot. They’ve loosened the fit so that you have more room to pinch and maneuver cards around without making them feel too insecure.

With two cards in each slot and two more cards in each rear pocket, we get the claimed 10-card capacity up to 12. However, if you count the card slot in the cash pocket, you can bump that up to 14. That said, we recommend sticking to the 10-card capacity so that the magnetic closure can still effectively engage. You can also leave one slot for a card tracker. They tend to be thicker than credit cards, so we usually think of them as a two-stack.

The cash pocket itself has more than enough height and width to accommodate most currencies we’ve tried, whether Euros, Japanese yen, Philippine pesos, American dollars, Pound sterlings—you name it, it’s probably going to fit. More importantly, the cash pocket also has a built-in card slot. We use it for a debit card, effectively designating the cash pocket into a “daily spending” area.

Packability

Any way you slice it, the ALPAKA ARK Classic Wallet is quite beefy compared to, say, minimalist wallets. However, as far as ALPAKA ARK-series wallets go, the ARK Classic is one of the flattest we’ve tested. Yes, there is some arching and bowing out as you pack it full of cards, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the ARK Bifold Coin Wallet, which had a hulking coin pouch inside.

We have no problem fitting the ALPAKA ARK Classic Wallet in most pants pockets, let alone slings and backpacks. While undeniably large, it’s still not on the level of passport wallets, which are usually too cumbersome to use as daily wallets. Better still, access to cards and cash is fairly easy since, as we’ve mentioned, there’s more than enough leeway to maneuver and shuffle things around.

Quick Comparison

Harping on the ARK Bifold Coin Wallet probably won’t add to the discussion unless you really need to carry coins. And hey, some travelers do need that functionality, especially at destinations where coins are still the backbone of everyday transactions. All of that said, the ARK Bifold Cash Wallet is the more interesting comparison.

Both wallets have similar materials and footprints, but the ARK Bifold Cash Wallet has a more vertical orientation. In hindsight, it is kind of weird that the cash-focused wallet is the narrower one. Consequently, banknotes have a trickier time fitting since you have little to no leeway to maneuver them inside. As for cards, capacity is around 8-12, with three to four on each slot, depending on how willing you are to cram them. The only clear advantage the ARK Bifold Cash Wallet has is the handy pull-tab in one of the slots, allowing you to deploy cards more easily.