THE PERFECT PAPER PRODUCT
Why, in a digital age, Moleskine notebooks survive while the PalmPilot died,
While paper use may have shrunk in certain areas since the introduction of digital communications, in other uses and purposes, paper’s emotional, functional and economic value has increased. Paper may be used less, but where it is growing, paper is worth more.
No product better captures this niche than the Moleskine notebook and the company behind it. It is the defining paper object and brand of the Internet age, growing parallel to the digital technology that was supposed to supplant notebooks. (The PalmPilot digital planner came out the same year as Moleskine’s first notebook.) Not only did the Moleskine notebook succeed in the face of disruptive digital competition, it situated itself as the ideal companion to smartphones, tablets, virtual note management services and digital illustration software. It grew so successful that it has changed the behaviour of a generation that was supposed to eschew handwriting into one where the paper notebook is omnipresent.
Moleskine today is a profitable, publicly traded company worth several hundred million euros, with annual sales of over 100 million, 700plus products sold in over 100 different countries, and more than 200 employees spread between global offices and its rather anonymous headquarters in Milan (tucked into a courtyard, with no sign on the street). At the heart of all this is Maria Sebregondi, a woman an Italian newspaper once called “Mamma Moleskine.” Although she carries the somewhat innocuous title of VP of brand equity and communications, Sebregondi is the soul of Moleskine. I first met Sebregondi at the start of Design Week, in her sunny office. Dressed in a bright pink dress and purple glasses, in a uniquely Milanese way that’s effortlessly elegant and imaginative, the silvery blond grandmother in her mid 60s told me how a design career led to the creation of the familiar notebook on the desk in front of us.
Sebregondi was born in Rome; her father was an economist and her mother ran an editorial and graphics studio. After studying sociology, Sebregondi worked in publishing as a designer, wrote for design magazines, and set up her own studio in Milan, teaching creative thinking at the intersection of design, sociology, and trends.
“My focus to design was the kinesthetic approach,” she said, describing a method that emphasizes sensorial engagement. “We as human beings need to be stimulated with our senses, very physically. With sight, smell, taste, touch and sound.”
During the summer of 1995, Sebregondi was sailing off the coast of Tunisia on the yacht of her friend Fabio Rosciglione. He consulted with the distribution company Modo & Modo, owned by another friend, Francesco Franceschi, which distributed design items and Tshirts around Italy. One night over dinner, under a sky bursting with stars, Franceschi started to talk about what kind of products Modo & Modo could manufacture on its own, rather than importing the designs of others.
The conversation shifted to a question about who would buy those goods, and then to the changing nature of the world, which had just emerged from the Cold War into the heady dawn of globalization. International travel was not only less restricted but more accessible, thanks to low-cost airlines. Technology, including inexpensive cellular phones, websites and email, allowed independent thinkers to become entrepreneurs and pursue their dreams unbound by geography. Speaking late into the night, the three realized that a new global creative class was emerging, driven by curiosity and passion. Sebregondi proposed that Modo & Modo create a toolkit for this individual, whom she labelled a “Contemporary Nomad.”
Back in Italy, Sebregondi thought about what this nomad’s kit would hold. There would be a great bag, a versatile T-shirt, the perfect pen and maybe a utility knife. At the time, she was reading the book The Songlines by British travel writer Bruce Chatwin, an embodiment of her prototypical consumer. In one of the book’s essays, Chatwin wrote about his preferred notebooks, which he bought in a particular stationery shop in Paris. “In France, these notebooks are known as carnets mole- skines,” Chatwin wrote, “‘moleskine,’ in this case, being its black oilcloth binding.” The last time he returned to Paris, Chatwin discovered, to his great horror, that the family firm in Tours that had made his beloved notebooks was now out of business and the carnets moleskines were no more.
Still, Sebregondi couldn’t let the idea go. Soon after, she went to a Henri Matisse exhibit in Rome, and noticed that the artist’s notebook matched the ones she had from Paris. Same with sketchbooks she saw at the Picasso museum, and in a photograph of Ernest Hemingway’s desk. They all seemed to come from the same defunct French company. Sebregondi realized that the first product in Modo & Modo’s nomad kit should be this lost notebook.
“This was something that could be re-created in a most refined way,” she said. Over the next two years, Sebregondi and Modo & Modo worked to redesign, manufacture, and distribute the “moleskine” notebook, which they positioned as a travel journal. Although there were many fine Italian paper manufacturers, in the end they settled on a supplier in China that was able to combine handmade details (tight binding on the spine, a hand-stitched pocket in the rear, perfectly flat seams) with the scale and cost needed for massmarket distribution. Their goal was to sell notebooks where notebooks had never been sold.
“The notebook market then was a completely unbranded market,” Sebregondi recalled. There were cheap school notebooks, as well as fine handmade notebooks costing hundreds of dollars at stationery stores, but all were essentially nameless commodities. The only recognizable brand name at the time was the office organizer Filofax, which had already seen declining sales, thanks to computer calendars and other digital organizers. “The Filofax was strongly related to productivity and functionality,” Sebregondi said. “If those are your focus, technology will kill you every time. That’s why we went with imagination, image and the arts.”
The first branded Moleskine notebook saw an initial print run of 3,000, hitting store shelves in Italy and a few select European cities in 1997. Initially, the company refused to distribute to stationery stores. Instead Moleskines were sold in display racks at the cash registers of modern bookstores and design shops. It was presented as a “book yet to be written,” one buyers were invited to fill with their own stories. The product quickly sold well among a small niche of writers, travellers and the other global bohemians Sebregondi envisioned. Moleskine’s market presence grew across Europe and into North America (I bought my first one at an art supply store in Toronto in 2005), but Sebregondi remained a “very part-time” contract employee at Modo & Modo, and mostly fo- cused on other work.
The heart of Moleskine’s transformation from a paper product into an analog cultural icon lies not simply in its artful design — soft, creamy paper that practically invites a pen’s ink; rounded corners that ease the notebook into a pocket; a cover that’s hard enough to keep pages from bending, but soft and almost leathery in feel — but in the myth that Sebregondi wrapped it up in. Through the packaging, and a story that folded out from the inside cover, the Moleskine (a name trademarked by Modo & Modo in 2006) was presented as “the Legendary Notebook of Hemingway, Picasso and Chatwin” with tales about its place at the core of modernity’s greatest art and literature. Whether the new Moleskine notebooks were actually the same ones used by these canonical artists was not specifically the point.
That foundational myth, which Moleskine continues to hammer home in all its press releases, marketing materials and interviews, is essential to understanding the emotional power of a resurgent analog brand. From the get-go, the company knew that its notebooks wouldn’t exclusively contain the brilliant creations of the next Picasso. There would be a lot of melodramatic teenaged diaries, half-baked doodles and class notes, and grocery lists. But because they were written in a Moleskine, they would still feel more cre- ative than if they were scribbled on another piece of paper.
“Creativity is a word that’s now completely sold,” Sebregondi said, “but the concept behind it is strong and real. People want to be creative and feel creative, even if they are not. Creatives have the ability to create an emotional trigger, and the analog world is the one able to create this emotional attraction and experience.”
This formed an almost tribal identity around the Moleskine notebook and those who used it. The notebook became a symbol of aspirational creativity, a product that not only worked well as a functional tool, but that told a story about you, even if you never wrote on a single page. Like a Patagonia jacket or a Toyota Prius, it projected someone’s values, interests, and dreams, even if those were divorced from the reality of their lives.
This is why Moleskine never needed to advertise, and never does to this day. Each notebook spotted at a coffee shop table, or in the hands of a journalist, was worth more than any billboard or magazine page. “This is a company that went from being a category maker to a category icon,” said Antonio Marazza, general manager at the Milan office of the global branding agency Landor Associates. “The emotional and aspirational capital Moleskine can deliver goes beyond stationery.”
Branding is nothing unique to Moleskine, but a great branding campaign is only one half of the equation. The other indeed goes back to those qualitative attributes of the paper notebook itself. “This notebook,” Sebregondi said, holding up a classic black Moleskine, “is a physical experience that can leave space to the imagination. That is greater than technology.”
Creativity and innovation are driven by imagination, and imagination withers when it is standardized, which is exactly what digital technology requires — codifying everything into 1s and 0s, within the accepted limits of software. The Moleskine notebook’s simple, unobtrusive design makes it feel like a natural extension of the body. It doesn’t interfere in your personal style, and because of this, it allows for an undiluted physical recording of your mood. “All that is lost when you standardize,” said Sebregondi.
“This notebook is a physical experience that can leave space to the imagination. That is greater than technology.” MARIA SEBREGONDI CREATIVE FORCE BEHIND MOLESKINE