MEMO Whiteboard Wallet

I was struggling with smartphone distractions myself. I love pen and paper, and the clarity they give to my thoughts, so I wanted a way to take them with me always, without carrying extra bulk. Combining a whiteboard with my wallet was the solution.

MEMO is a wallet for your thoughts. It holds up to six cards, a pen and an eraser, and closes with a magnet. Open it, and a 6-inch whiteboard unfolds: made for professionals, creatives and anyone who loves analog writing and drawing.

From idea to aluminium

The first idea dates from June 2020, and a proof of concept followed in January 2021. Every iteration got a label and a place on the shelf, until the form settled into a milled aluminium body with a hinge, a card window and a place for the pen.

Finding the right surface

The whiteboard had to write silently and wipe clean. I tested acrylic, PET, PCB, FR4, stainless steel and aluminium. Some squeaked, others warped and were hard to erase. Aluminium with a heat-applied dry-erase paint won.

The design is protected in 29 countries: the 27 EU member states, the US and China (see below).

Making it real

MEMO launched on Kickstarter on 23 January 2023. Kickstarter selected it as a Project We Love, and a month later it was more than 1,380% funded, raising over $70,000 for a new kind of wallet, and respected wallet reviewers like All The Wallets and The Gadgeteer covered it. Before production we assembled samples by hand, measured the hinge and checked every detail of the packaging.

The pen, and the small things

The pen has to fit inside, write a line thin enough for a 6-inch board, and carry its own eraser. Later versions have steel tubes, so the pen snaps onto the magnets in the wallet. Smaller tools, like a card-sized eraser, go through the same rounds of prototypes.

Still refining

By putting a portable canvas in people’s pockets, MEMO aims to bring moments of mental clarity: less screen time, fewer distractions, more mindful habits. Every batch is inspected before it ships. In 2024 it won an iF Design Award. Today it has found its way to more than 10,000 customers, with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5.

Notes on a whiteboard are temporary by design. For the ones worth keeping, there’s the MEMO app since April 2026: scan the board and keep the note.

Design protection

MEMO is protected by EU registered designs 009207111-0001 and -0002, international registration DM/229281, US design patent D1,093,890 S and, in China, utility model CN 220220213 U.