Nomad Goods Leather Mag Wallet Review

Minimalist wallets are great when you want something small enough to fit in your sling or pants pocket, but if you really want to simplify things, you might want to stick it right to the back of something you have with you nearly all the time: your phone. Plenty of brands make adhesive wallets that stick to your phone case—you may have gotten a freebie at a conference, school, or festival a time or two—but what happens when you want to switch things up and take it off or charge your phone? Well, you’re out of luck. You either have to remove your case to charge your phone, or deal with sticky residue if you’ve decided you no longer want to use it.

That’s why we prefer MagSafe options like the Nomad Goods Leather Mag Wallet. It’s there when you want to carry your cards with you, and it pops off when you don’t need them, for ultimate versatility. And as long as Apple made your phone, it has another trick up its sleeve: Find My tracking functionality. How well does all of this work, and do we recommend it? Our tester has been primarily using the Nomad Goods Leather Mag Wallet on her phone for over a year, if that tells you anything about how much we like it. Keep reading for the details.

The Rundown

The Nomad Goods Leather Mag Wallet is made with Horween® leather, which is worth noting if you prefer to avoid animal products. You can get it in two standard colors, Black and Rustic Brown, and, at times, in a special-edition colorway. At the time of this review, that’s Olde Dublin, which is a hair redder than the Rustic Brown. We’ve been testing the Rustic Brown for more than a year, though, and for a majority of that time, only it and Black were available.

Since it is leather, it will develop a patina over time, and our sample has also sustained scratches from being in proximity to keys and other objects in slings and purses over the past year. You can use a leather cleaner to buff it up if you have it, or realize that all the bumps and nicks just show how much experience the wallet has. That can happen with leather wallets that aren’t attached to your phone, too, and it doesn’t bother us much, but keep that in mind if you’re looking for something to look pristine for years. This wallet ages like Indiana Jones: rugged yet still handsome.

There isn’t any visible branding or logo on the portion of the wallet that faces out from your phone, so it has a very clean aesthetic. The side that sticks to your phone features a MagSafe logo with “Nomad” centered inside, a small button in the bottom-left corner, and a message that you can “Locate with Apple Find My” in the bottom-right corner. The MagSafe symbol is what you’ll want to line up with your wireless charger to juice up the battery. It’s slightly off-center, but as long as the wallet shows it’s getting more power when you check the app, it is working.

You can check that in the Apple Find My app, but first, you’ll need to pair it with your phone. It’s easy to do: press and hold the button for 5 seconds, then press the + symbol in the app to “Add Other Item,” and it will be added to your Find My Items.

Why would you need that for an accessory that’s supposed to be on your phone? Well, as the primary tester, there are plenty of times that I take the wallet off. If I’m wearing an outfit with slim pockets and won’t need my ID or credit cards, I’ll pop it off to just carry my phone. I also take it off to charge my phone wirelessly each day. When I do either of those things, I don’t always leave the wallet in the same place, so there have been times when I needed to open the app to figure out which bag I put it in or whether I left it somewhere else. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s a nice feature to have just in case. Of course, this only works if you’re in the Apple ecosystem; Nomad Goods offers a tracking card for Apple or Google, but the wallet is only available for Apple.

If you can’t remember where you left the wallet, open your app, select your Mag Wallet from the list, then tap “Play Sound” to find it wherever you are. You can also set up left-behind notifications to pop up on your phone and alert you if you’ve gotten too far away, if you want. I turned that feature off since I often walk without my wallet but with my phone.

The Nomad Goods Leather Mag Wallet can hold 1-4 cards, and there’s a small cutout at the bottom to push the cards up when you need them. You can’t always just push one card at a time. More often than not, we’re pushing up at least two, if not all three, of the cards we regularly carry to grab the one we want. It really comes down to how dexterous your fingertip or fingernail is, whether or not you can grab just the top card or not.

You don’t have to worry about the leather stretching out if you carry three to four cards at a time and then want to drop down to one, either. There’s a little metal tab at the bottom that holds onto your cards instead of the leather case doing all of the work. That made it very convenient when I took a weeklong cruise: You don’t need credit cards or ID on a cruise, since they already have your information tied to your stateroom card. I was able to leave those in another wallet in my room safe and simply carry my cruise card in the Nomad Goods Leather Mag Wallet on my phone. It held just as tightly to the one card as it routinely does to three, so I didn’t have to worry about it sliding out, yet I had it with me at all times without having to wear a lanyard like the other passengers.

It has a built-in rechargeable battery that lasts for about 5 months. It will beep when it needs to be recharged, but it will eventually stop if you miss it. You can check the battery percentage in the Find My app to see if you need to recharge it.

Packability

Packability is where the Nomad Goods Leather Mag Wallet shines. It basically fits anywhere your phone does, whether that’s in a pocket, a sling, or another bag. You don’t even need a bag if you use a separate phone strap; you can carry everything you need with you through an amusement park or on a downtown stroll. We find the MagSafe magnet to be quite sturdy; it’s never slipped off our iPhone.

If you do need to carry it separately from your phone, the wallet fits anywhere that a typical minimalist wallet would. It’s not much larger than the cards it carries, so you can slide it into a pocket of your sling or daypack if you’re using your phone in a car holder for navigation or just don’t want your wallet for some reason.

Quick Comparison

A great comparison is the Bellroy Mag Wallet. Both are MagSafe ways of keeping your cards on the back of your phone, and both are available in leather, though you can get a leather-free wallet from Bellroy if you are vegan or just prefer materials other than leather. It’s not for everyone, so you’ll want to check out the Bellroy if you’d like another option. We haven’t tested it as long as the Nomad Goods wallet, but the leather-free Bellroy didn’t get as many battle scars during our testing period as the Horween leather on the Nomad Goods wallet has.

The Bellroy Mag Wallet has a built-in stand, though we weren’t a big fan of it, so we don’t miss having one with the Nomad Goods version. The Bellroy wallet, however, doesn’t include the Nomad Goods’ built-in tracking feature.

Card capacity is similar—four for Nomad Goods and three for Bellroy—but the Nomad Goods wallet has a bottom notch that lets you push the cards up for easier access. We still usually end up pushing up more than the card we need, but that makes it easier. It also has a built-in tab at the bottom that holds one card just as securely as four, though the magnetic flap atop the Bellroy holds cards in place just as well.

The Bellroy wallet is the same thickness; it’s just ever-so-slightly longer to lock your cards down behind that magnetic flap, while the Nomad Goods one shows your cards out the top.

Which is better comes down to personal preference. We prefer the leather and tracking with the Nomad Goods, but if you’re not a fan of leather or have an Android phone, you might be paying for features you can’t use.