3 posts tagged “tokyo”

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.

Among all cities I travel to find stationery goods, Tokyo is probably the most abundant city in terms of stationery, craft and hobby products.  I can stay there for a whole month and still find exciting things on daily basis, I'm not kidding coz I look at stores as detail as possible.  There are large department/category stores like ITOYA, Hands, Loft, Maruzen, Yuzawaya ... .  There are lifestyle stores like 5th Alley Studio, Archimedes Spiral, Delfonics, Smith, Amadana, Cibone, Spiral Market, Living Motif .... . There are small but unique stores like 36 Sublo, Postalco, SCOS, Six, Shoshaikan ... etc etc, I can't name them all here.
When I visit all these stores, I would collect their store address cards and gradually I built up stacks of them for different cities/countries.  Naturally Tokyo stack is the biggest, talking about 3 times visit each year and I can always find new ones to visit.  This September trip to Tokyo I arranged an interview with a small stationery store owner, Murakami Yuki from 36 sublo, who's continuing a family tradition of maintaining stationery store with a twist.  She is the 3rd generation to have a stationery store, her grandfather created one, her father revamped it and it is still in Kyoto (京都) while she pursued new challenge by coming to Tokyo with significant deviation from previous style, yet retaining the mood from her grandfather's.  I will post the interview soon. So with referral from friends in Tokyo, I found Yuzawaya (ユザワヤ), the biggest store for art/craft supposedly and established since 1955.  I went to one near Kichijoji station (吉祥寺駅) as my last stop for market research and it was near store closing, I was rushing around feeling all excited, so many things, so many raw material for great art projects, yet so little time.  I finally bought several scrap leather to make my own pen case and mouse pad.  Think of it, 1,000 yen for a piece of scrap leather 12"x12" to make a leather mouse pad it is super value!  You simply can't find any leather product this cheap, that's the power of creating your own stuff using raw material.

Yeah, everytime I pulled out my camera to take photos of stationery stuffs my friends and colleagues would call me "Otaku" or in English "Nerd".  Well if you think nerds are people who are obsessed with details, meaning, perfection and ... well, try to see the other sides of me coz I'm a Gemini extreme :)

Anyway, I got all these clips from visiting some stationery stores in Tokyo after the International Stationery Show (ISOT).  The show was exhausting coz we were there to place orders for the coming seasonal calendar and schedule book for 2008, we were so busy and couldn't get to enjoy seeing the rest of the show in our own pace.  But it was a rewarding trip.

The picture above was taken from just outside Narita airport before we left Tokyo for Hong Kong.  I decided to find out the source of all these clips and put them in glass bottles in our stores for customers to choose.  It's a tiny little project which may take time to get done but it is just plain fun.

Now that I got all these clips and want to make them handy, putting them in my pen case won't work, so a natural place is to put them on my Moleskine combo (soft cover 18 month diary + blank notebook, secured by 2 clips between them).

Errr... one of the clip you see in the above picture is used for price tag holder in many Japanese stationery stores, somehow I love it and put it on my M combo cover.  Yeah what the hell is that doing on a notebook you asked?  I don't know, someday I'll find good use of it :)

So here I'm, everyday carrying my favorite M and all these clips.  The last picture I took for this trip was a Polaroid photo on these clips outside Narita airport showing here in addition to the digital one I took.  The picture reminds me of this rewarding trip a lot.

On the other hand, do visit Tadashi Tsuchihashi san's web site Pen-info.  He is a well-known stationery commentator in Japan, I had a privilege to meet him and had dinner with him amoung several stationery vendors, both of us find passion in stationery and update our encounters on blog.  Here's an entry he wrote about our meeting.  I will talk about him more in upcoming posts.

Oh BTW, if you are wondering what that little camera is, it is actually a lighter using zippo fluid made in Japan.  It looks like a very classic Leica III camera isn't it.