Paper nerds, the time has come. The famous Italian notebook company Moleskine will open its first U.S. store tomorrow at the Time Warner Center in New York City.
The store is one of three new international locations for the company. Each will sport their distinct store design and carry the complete range of Moleskine products, such as journals, bags, pens, cases, and those items that are particularly hard to find (we’re talking about you, coveted Florence City Notebook).
The international expansion comes along with the news of Moleskine’s IPO in Italy, a gutsy move considering Italy’s volatile economy. But Moleskine believes it can convince the Italian public to support a growing luxury brand, with its prized possession being paper. You may scoff at that, and rightly so, but compared to other luxury brands, Moleskine is making a decent living off the pulp-based writing medium. The company’s operating margin, its profit as a percentage of revenue, was 41.7 percent last year, and that’s not too shabby when put up against other luxury brands like fashion firm Prada (27.2 percent) and luggage-maker Tumi (19.7 percent). Just over half of those sales have been in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, but Moleskine is probably hoping to change that with these devoted international stores, building upon the brand recognition spike it had in the United States last year.
Most importantly, Moleskine’s international stores will work to spread the company’s unique ideology. All but one of the current Moleskine store locations are in Italian transportation hubs like Milan’s Malpensa and Linate Airports, and the other in Shanghai’s shopping destination, Xintiandi Style. The new stores in the Time Warner Center, Heathrow Terminal 4 in London, and Sanlitun Village in Beijing follow Moleskine’s wanderlust philosophy by being centers of cultural creativity and travel.
The Moleskine store design is no different than its iconic product, using a classic black rectangle to evoke creativity in a physical space and a map covering the floor to symbolize mobile identity. There’s an experience table that lets visitors play with different products to figure out which is best for them (and seems to be oddly reminiscent of tables in Apple and Microsoft stores). Some stores will even have a Stamp Station, an area that will let visitors record travel memories using interactive customization tools with a variety of location-specific designs.
That being said, Moleskine’s prized possession isn’t simply paper—it’s the culture and lifestyle that accompany the paper.
You’re buying something more than just a notebook or an address book when you buy a Moleskine product, and the company reminds you in nearly every purchase with its history printed on tiny ecru paper quietly slipped inside its notebooks. You’re buying the same notebooks first made by Parisian bookbinders for a creative class dominated by expats and the likes of Wilde, Picasso, and Hemingway. You’re buying the notebooks that symbolize culture and travel, and were the first to capture bursts of creativity by some of the most famed thinkers and artists—if you care. And chances are if you’re buying a Moleskine book, you do care.
Moleskine is banking on its ability to make a society of people obsessed with their digital lives remember that the days of sketches and note-taking aren’t necessarily over, and that they can be paired with our digital worlds. And now, we'll find out if that strategy will continue to work overseas—or more importantly, if it will steadily convert enough non-believers over the coming years to keep the company moving strong.
Or maybe we should start filling up all the notebooks we've had lying around.
