Everything you need to know about the Parliament

The parliament is smart, speedy, slim storage side-kick for your everyday life. It’s been gracefully designed with the movements of your day in mind. Elegant quick card access mechanism, RFID protection and tracking capabilities, delicately stitched premium leather exterior - it’s our bestseller for a reason.


When our design team set about designing the ultimate modern wallet, we wanted to keep that same luxurious feel of a traditional leather bifold.

There are so many smart wallets that look like jack-up carabiners, with hard metal clips all over the place. We looked around at the best smart wallets and didn't find what we wanted. As an accessories geek, I’m always attracted first to the outside of a wallet. I want it to look like a classy and elegant leather wallet on the outside with innovative hidden features on the inside: being smart doesn’t have to mean looking industrial.

That’s why we chose to design our flagship wallet with premium leather in 7 unique colors, and a vegan leather option, to maintain that old-school allure of a finely crafted piece.

But looks aren’t everything.

Leather has been a staple of design for centuries because of its innate properties as a material. It’s naturally water resistant and gets better as it ages, gaining uniquely beautiful marks that on other materials would present as wear-and-tear.

It was also major for us to find a way to make our wallets sustainable and environmentally friendly.

We partnered with ECCO Leather (you’ve probably heard of their ergonomic shoes) because all their leather is produced under gold-rated LWG standards. Unchecked leather production and tanning can be harmful to the environment and population around it, leaking toxins into ground water and leading to increased cases of disease. Our leather uses innovative techniques to avoid this and reduce water waste.

We also want to keep the cows happy. All our leather is a byproduct of the meat industry, sourced from farmers that give their cows a happy and healthy life. You can read more about the Leather Working Group (LWG) and how they protect the environment.

But making just another nice leather wallet isn’t our game. If you take a look under the hood, things get a bit more interesting.

The Parliament takes the classic bifold and turns it on its head.

Well, on its side really. We looked at the profile of an average wallet and decided a vertical build makes much more sense than the classic horizontal one. You want your wallet to be discrete in your jeans (which nowadays are trending tighter and tighter) and to fit easily in the palm of your hand, unlike a chunky dad wallet.


The best smart wallets are the ones designed for everyday life. So for each design feature there is a well thought out choice that reflects the way people actually move through the world.

Skinnier jeans = slimmer wallet, you get the idea. One of the main ones for us was seeing a global shift away from cash and towards cards - a trend ignored by a lot of the wallets we see out there. In our home country, the Netherlands, there’s so little cash used nowadays that it hardly makes sense to carry any.

So we designed a cardholder wallet with slim storage (while still having huge carry capacity) and quick card access.

This brings us to the most exciting part of the design: the fast-access cardholder.

This is one of those features that genuinely made me sad that I hadn’t thought of it first. At the click of a button in the bottom corner of the wallet, cards are ejected in a staggered fashion, displaying them all and making it super easy to grab only the one you need. This innovative design makes checkout and travel faster, simpler and stress-free. After living with this wallet for a week, I can literally never go back.

We also wanted to address the increased danger of identity theft.

Our lives are now governed by data, but with every technological advancement comes another way for our personal information to be stolen. We chose to make our wallets RFID-blocking, so that the information contained in contactless cards can’t be stolen via skimmers - a fancy way to say someone beeping your card without your knowledge.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention - this wallet is trackable. No seriously, trackable.

What's the one thing that happens to every single wallet? At some point, it gets lost. So we decided to make this an unlosable wallet. The Tracker Card is a wallet tracker the size of an average credit card, slips clandestinely into a special hidden pocket and gives you the ability to locate your wallet on a map no matter where it is in the world.

Trackable wallets are something we see as a necessary and no-brainer evolution in the design, concept and function of our everyday money-carrying accessories.

So while this leather wallet might look classically luxurious on the outside, the inside contains smart features that are doing the work of streamlining and protecting your life for you.

About Ekster

Here at Ekster, we're in the business of making your life easier.

We started with upgrading the traditional leather wallet, making it easier to use and harder to lose. Now, we're taking on the rest of your essentials to make each day easier for you.

Learn more about Ekster

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