The Holdfast Backstory
Like most months, this month we'll be doing a product launch on the last Friday of the month. And of course I'll be doing a big drop preview for YouTube, and a writeup for our email newsletter. But I've been on a bit of a writing kick lately and enjoying the process.. and this month we've got a couple things where a bit of story time is warranted, so I thought it would be worthwhile to take a little more time with some of them.. explain where the ideas came from, and give a bit more context than they'd get in the usual rundown.
First up is a paperclip.. a sturdy little bugger we're calling the Holdfast.
The idea here started with money clips. My interest in money clips goes back to a time before I really had any money to speak of. I think it was aspirational for me at the time.. Carrying a money clip seemed like the sort of thing somebody with money would do. I had wallets, sure, but I would go big with the wallets so I could put my passport and plane tickets into those. The slimline cash in the pocket was my EDC.
The first time I was actually earning any real money was my first year out of university. I took a job teaching in Guatemala. At the time, daily life there ran heavily on cash. I’d get paid by cheque, go to the bank, cash that sucker, and for the first time in my life, I had a little stack of bills to carry around. The currency there is the quetzal (GTQ), and fittingly, I bought myself a slick little silver money clip with a quetzal bird on it. Loved that thing, but before long, I discovered what would become my recurring complaint with conventional money clips.. they functionally wear out.
As the clip gets stretched by a stack of bills, it gradually loses its spring. Eventually you take a few bills out and discover there isn’t enough tension left to hold the remaining ones securely. You can try bending it back, but because of the basic U-shaped design, it’s difficult to restore good contact between the two sides. Once it gets stretched out, it never quite seems to come back. I kept using mine for a while, replaced it eventually, and more or less came to regard money clips as consumables.
At the end of my contract, I was entitled to an air ticket back to Canada. But I wasn't quite ready for that, and instead negotiated cash in lieu and went home by ground. I travelled north through Mexico and the United States over the course of several weeks, mostly on Greyhound buses, with a little hitchhiking thrown in. I slept wherever I could, but mostly tried to take overnight buses which felt like the best combination of budget and security, and would eventually get me back home.
One of the places where I lingered was New Orleans, somewhere I’d wanted to visit for years. And somewhere in New Orleans I found what I thought might be my forever money clip. It was silver, but instead of the usual folded-over design, it was shaped like an oversized paperclip. This made immediate sense, and even though it was a stretch for me, I didn't think twice before grabbing it.
A paperclip solves the problem that had annoyed me about every other money clip I’d owned. If it gets bent too far and loses tension in one direction, you can simply bend it back through the other. The geometry gives you a way to restore the thing. Rather than gradually becoming useless, it can be brought back to life. Brilliant.
Unfortunately, somewhere between the buses, hostels, wandering around unfamiliar cities, and occasional stretches of sleeping wherever I happened to land, the clip disappeared. Whether I dropped it, left it somewhere, or somebody liberated it from my pocket, I’ll never know.. but it didn't make it back to Canada. I was bummed, but couldn’t find another. After a couple more disappointing clips, I eventually moved on to a wallet.
And then wallets themselves started becoming unnecessary. Cash mostly disappeared from my day-to-day life. Then cards became tap cards. Then the cards moved onto the phone. For a while I really enjoyed the minimalism of it. There was something liberating about leaving the house with almost nothing.. grab your phone and go. Your money is in there. Your cards are in there. Everything is in there.
But after a few years of that, I started to feel like something may have been lost along the way. So many small daily transactions had become almost completely mindless. You order something, dumbly tap your phone against a little console, wait for the beep, and move on. There's barely an exchange at all.
Maybe I'm just old school, but I really started thinking about the hidden curriculum of all this frictionlessness. It felt like money had stopped being a thing. Those little actions were gone.. handing something over, receiving change, counting.. the little pauses where two people had to actually interact. The whole process had become streamlined, optimized, and abstracted to the point where the soul of it had been lost.
So, a couple years ago, I decided to go backwards and start carrying cash again. Not exclusively, but just sticking a little stack of bills in my pocket for small purchases and whatever else came up during the day. I dug up an old money clip I’d bought years earlier in Cairo. I’d actually bought several at the time because they were inexpensive and I already knew they would eventually stretch out. One unused survivor remained, so I put it into service.
Naturally, this brought me back to thinking about that old paperclip from New Orleans again. I figured surely someone was making those. I looked around for another silver one and couldn't find one that I wanted. But silver isn't really my thing these days anyways.. titanium is. So I looked around and did indeed find one from a boutiquey-looking shop. It looked promising, albeit a bit expensive. I paid €71 for the clip, another €35 for shipping, and then duties on top when it arrived. By the time it reached me, I had spent a fairly serious amount of money on a paperclip. And it was… fine. It arrived slightly bent out of shape, and, no shade, but for what I had paid, I was a bit underwhelmed.
That was the point where I realized that I owned a company whose core competency is basically obsessing over small metal objects. So, now we're making paperclips. This turned out to require a little exploration. It isn’t the sort of part our usual machining suppliers produce, so we went through the process of sourcing new suppliers, getting quotes and samples, revisions, refinements, and so on.
And now here we are with the Holdfast. We've got them coming in brass, copper, stainless steel, and, of course, titanium. They’re substantial little things: strong, resilient, nicely rounded, and robust enough to feel more like a piece of hardware than an office supply. Each has a small Aroundsquare word mark, kept deliberately discreet.
And although the money-clip story is where the design began for me, the object itself turns out to be pleasingly multi-functional. It's obviously works well as a money clip. And it's an extremely overqualified paperclip. Use it for your index cards, notes, receipts, or your ever-growing stack of unpaid parking tickets. But the Holdfast can also function as a kind of miniature carabiner. The wire is too thick to thread most keys onto directly, but put your keys on a normal split ring and you can clip the whole thing onto a belt loop, a bag, a lanyard, or wherever else you tend to keep them. In other words, it’s just a simple, useful object.. which is increasingly something I appreciate.
And for what it’s worth, I’m going to continue making the case for carrying a little cash. As crypto goes mainstream, cash is almost at the point of being the countercultural turn. These days, people almost do a double take when you pull it out. All those small daily transactions feel different. When you hand someone a physical bill, there's a genuine connection across space, and dang, there may even be eye contact. And if you tell them to keep the change, it just hits different. Or heck, hand someone a fiver as a tip, and it feels like a five-dollar bill in a way that being opted in to a 25% gratuity on a screen just doesn't. It's tangible and it registers. It's inefficient. And I'm very good with that.
