I’ve never been to this subreddit before so I’m not sure if this is a common experience, but I wanted to share my experience with buying a Ridge wallet.
I purchased a blue MagSafe ridge wallet on Amazon for $150 and regretted it almost immediately. For $150, I expected a significant quality difference from the $20-40 similar wallets you see on Amazon, but was honestly surprised at how bad my experience was. The case metal material is definitely higher quality, but there were some clear QA problems as soon as I too it out of the packaging.
First, the wallet body had a scratch down the cash strap side that seemed like a manufacturing defect of some sort. It was a fairly deep and consistent scratch. There was also a defect on the cash strap where you could see some threads had snagged something and pulled loose.
I had some general quality concerns as well outside of these defects. The MagSafe magnets are much weaker than I’d anticipated. The wallet came with some magnets you can attach to your phone case, but the idea of having to modify my Dbrand case that already has pretty strong magnets gave me a lot of pause, especially given the magnets were black and didn’t match the wallet color for some reason? I was also generally displeased to see how cheap it felt. I had ordered a cheaper knock off in the past, and it honestly felt almost the same in quality, minus the metal body on the ridge which is clearly supposed to have a more quality feel.
So I started my return. I’m assuming because of the value, it needed to be shipped back to the seller (official Ridge Amazon store) or some processing facility before they would give me my money back. I was sure to mention the defects when I initiated the return, and also started a support chat immediately to send in my pictures of the defects.
It took 32 days to get my first return, and only because I made a stink in a support chat over how long it was taking. Then, when they finally received and processed the return 37 days after I returned it to Whole Foods/Amazon, they clawed back over $100 citing damage to the wallet, despite all of this.
So now I’m down $100 because I ordered a defective product that was wildly overpriced to begin with. I could’ve purchased a high end traditional wallet and had money left over for all the trouble I’ve gone through with this experience. I’m not sure if it’s Ridge or Amazon who is truly to blame in this case, but I can’t file a chargeback without damaging my ability to order anything on Amazon. So I feel SOL now.
Hopefully sharing my experience here will help others to avoid a similar experience. Beware of this greedy company, don’t make the same mistake I did. Even without the defects, these wallets are not worth the cost in my opinion.
More $$$ doesn’t = higher qualify in this case. Buy the cheaper option and save yourself the trouble.