How Secrid reinvented the wallet—by putting design at the center

Some objects die. Others morph. A few come back to life. Secrid has sold tens of millions of wallets. But it’s not the wallet our parents knew. A planetary success that didn’t come from an exit strategy or an MBA playbook: in a world burning through ideas and products at feed-speed, there’s another way to grow. By putting design at the center.

“We thought it was a small niche,” recalls Marianne van Sasse van Ysselt, who founded Secrid together with her life and work partner, René van Geer. I meet them at Secrid’s headquarters in The Hague — an elegant Dutch capital where greenery, modernist furniture and Space Age hints, Asian sculpture and gentle background music all coexist. 

At lunchtime, everyone queues up at the fully vegetarian canteen, a colorful hall overlooking the canal. It’s a place that mirrors the company’s soul: design and product at the core, human relationships on a pedestal. During lunch, I meet several Italian employees and discover that Italian has become a sort of unofficial lingua franca. Danielle, the founders’ daughter and the brand’s head of Collection Development, speaks it as we chat about Italy and tiramisu; so does Ilias Halbgewachs — a history graduate who now works in Sales & Marketing. A career path that would be odd elsewhere, but here makes perfect sense.

“Even Apple was small at that time,” Marianne notes of their early days. Secrid was born around the time of the first iPhone — and in one of the worst moments for her family: the 2007 subprime crisis. “We really had nothing. Nothing. Only minus. You cannot buy potatoes anymore,” she tells me. They even ended up accepting donated cheese from a shop — a photo of which they show with a proud smile. Failure, after all, is just as human as success.

Marianne van Sasse van Ysselt, co-founder of Secrid

In a world of startups launched by teenagers eager to flip them for the next investment, Secrid is a strange creature. It blends determination, restraint, creativity and craftsmanship. It’s rooted in the Dutch social and economic fabric, and shaped by a precise way of thinking about business. A slow, steady, countercurrent rise. “We never worked with investors because then you cannot work according to your values,” van Geer says. There is no exit in their vocabulary. Instead, “design was not a choice anymore — it was the only thing we could do,” adds van Sasse van Ysselt, describing that turning point.

Secrid’s first product, the 2009 Cardprotector, was far from an overnight success. It revived an idea the couple had developed in the 1990s, and introduced the feature that would become their signature: the thumb lever that slides the cards out. “The first retailer needed one year to sell twelve pieces. One per month,” van Geer says, laughing at the contrast with today.

Secrid could have folded before it even started. Instead, stubbornness paid off at the second try: the Miniwallet, wrapping the Cardprotector in leather, restoring a more familiar aesthetic. Van Geer explains how the product’s now-classic variants — with or without button, single or double — reflect regional preferences across Secrid’s key markets: the U.S., Europe and Southeast Asia. “We discovered this in stores, not in spreadsheets,” he stresses.

Secrid doesn’t sell online. It sells only through a dense network of physical retailers. A choice that slows revenue — perhaps — but builds a social infrastructure and deep market knowledge. “Retail is not just a sales channel. It has a valuable role in society,” Halbgewachs says.

Alongside retailers, Secrid has experimented with its own store for years. The current flagship in The Hague doubles as a platform for collaborations with like-minded brands such as Freitag or Victorinox. But above all, it’s a workshop: here, wallets aren’t simply bought — they’re made piece by piece, choosing colors, materials, details, even engraving. Forget online configurators: here, it happens in real time.

The headquarters are colorful and warm. The founders are friendly. But behind that warmth lies uncompromising resolve. Production is local and entrusted to ethical partners employing people with physical or social disadvantages. “We don’t adapt people to production — we adapt production to people,” they tell me while touring the facility. It’s now a clearly articulated philosophy, distilled in projects and the manifesto-style book Design for Impact.

Competition, however, is playing a different game — fast copycats, mediocre products, aggressive social ads and e-commerce tactics. “Margins and attention get eaten away,” van Geer says — and defending one’s identity becomes harder. If a decade ago we might have dismissed Secrid’s stance as naive or outdated, today it feels almost radical. In an age when Big Tech spirals into questionable futures and the new “tech bro” culture has turned the visionary idealism of Silicon Valley into billionaire cosplay in the style of Elon Musk, Secrid feels like oxygen: patient work, obsessive quality, people above hype. A model we should protect — even with its limits, and with its love for normality, which sadly reads as very uncool.

For years, we believed the wallet was doomed — swallowed into our phones and invisible payments. And to some extent, it was: cash, coins, receipts have vanished from our pockets. But something remained — even intensified. Cards, IDs, badges, tiny essentials that matter more than ever. In that shrinking yet precious space, Secrid is redefining what belongs in your pocket.

If the present is uncertain, Secrid looks ahead. Reinventing itself — but not too much. The company is working on pocketwear: the micro-objects we carry every day, the things that accompany us and define us. It’s the origin story of the brand itself. The iPhone radically altered what pockets are for — now they hold the things we truly rely on.

René van Geer, co-founder of Secrid

“We don’t want to make things we think are nice,” Danielle van Geer says, presenting research that will be central to Milan Design Week. “Pocketwear is connected to emotions,” she continues. “There is so much story in the things you carry every day. You can see what kind of person someone is just by looking at what’s in their pockets.”

Will Secrid become a full pocketwear company? Probably — without losing its soul. “We always start from the object,” the founders insist.

Thaat of Secrid is a story at least rare, if not unique. Should we imitate it? Perhaps yes. Because it proves that a company can grow without sacrificing its values — and that keeping design at the center isn’t a luxury, but a way to remain profoundly human