That Moleskine Cow...
It has been less fun to see all those Moleskine exhibitions nowadays, for me. In June I visited Tokyo's Lifestyle show and just last week I visited Tokyo again for the International Stationery show. In both event, Moleskine was elaborately exhibited there. My feeling towards the writing, journaling, drawing culture of the Moleskiners lowered significantly simply because it all became too commercial.
In both events, I got a little time to look at all those drawings from the Detour project, (as corrected by Paola - Moleskine brand equity & network relations, "the exhibition in Lifestyle show did not contain any works from Detour project, all the Detour events are listed on the official website www.moleskine.com/detour where you can take a look at the notebook and also read some lines on the single author's biography. The Detour Project is not a commercial event and it's meant to support the non profit foundation lettera27") as well as those from Invitation au Voyage. Who were the artists and what's their stories? I didn't care to find out anymore. They became one of the thousands of notebooks with drawings. The booth design and display however was great.
One large table was dedicated to all those examples of corporate-premium-limited editions. Do I want to collect them all? No. And look, in June I went to Shibuya's Loft and the space dedicated to a short-term promotion of Moleskine was so huge it spans nearly 4 meters wide.
The ever increasing SKU now becomes unbearable to me. Now the spinners made by Modo e Modo are invading retailers especially department stores. Yes these are negative feelings of me not liking product marketing being too commercial and people forget about the artists who contributed. I even heard that there will be more stationery products from Moleskine, e.g. maybe a ring binders with an elastic band (which was used as a catalog distributed to distributors last year).
Now many asked about when the leather version of 2009 diary will be launched. I heard that it will arrive in Hong Kong around end-August. So it will be around mid-August for people in Europe to buy them. The catch, only 1 retailer per country is allowed to sell the limited edition. It will be disappointing a lot of fans, I love the look and feel of the notebook though :)
A note from a recent meeting with a French stationery maker: Société Générale, one of the main European financial services companies which acquired Moleskine for 60 euros (3 times Moleskine's market value back then?) back in 2006, experienced a 4.9 billion euros trading lost in just three days in January 2008. They are going to milk the Moleskine cow!
Well, I have a thought. The tremendous success of Moleskine's revival is a true marketing success story. Millions of community effort to promote its branding. What have Moleskine done to return favor to the community? Now that Moleskine is made in China, a fact that not many people adore, what did Moleskine do when there was a great earthquake in SiChuan China when more than 71,000 people were dead? Well I did a search on Google "Moleskine Charity" and nothing really came up. Enlighten me if I'm wrong (and Paola did, the lettera27 projects are making changes that will certainly produce a larger results in longer run, the next Chatwin waves may change the world as we know it. As a retailer we are increasing our efforts to source from companies that encourage food chain sustainability such as farming/fishing, while on the product manufacturing side the burden is now on top tier vendors/manufacturers to set examples when fair trade, environmental protection and cultural preservation become common terms. I hope Moleskine as a global brand will create conscious efforts to localize the such practice in countries they appear and source from, especially when they enter the CHINA market in the near future. Yes, a huge challenge for a company with only a dozen of staff, but the impact they can make will be tremendous.). I mean I love the brand and product, just that I expected a little more from it to be more cultural instead of commercial, more world-class in terms of charity instead of world-domination.
Comments
I think you bring up valid concerns. As a manufacturer with similar challenges to Moleskine, we are in the process of evaluating how we "give back". We occasionally do give to charities of varying types within our means. But the companies that truly inspire me are companies like Patagonia and Burt's Bees.
It is a core part of their DNA and it is sustainable. It defines them as much as not giving back can define a brand or company.
We are probably all struggling to weigh the financial concerns of our entrerprise with our other responsibilities. However, I think most of us want to be proud of our contribution to the greater
Continued:
to the greater good of the world. We must all be guard to not put commercialism ahead of humanitarianism.