Last week’s post about new Moleskine products for Spring 2019 got me looking back at my various posts over the years with ideas for what I thought Moleskine should be doing. They’ve sort of done a few of them, but here’s my current favorite ideas I think they should try.

Moleskine Daily Art Journal Notebook

In this 2014 post, I suggested creating some kind of daily art journal, a combination of the Moleskine Daily Planner, the Hobonichi Techo, and a sketchbook. I still think this would fill a gaping hole in the market. It would have a slightly thicker paper, chunky format, available in pocket and large sizes. An unlined page per day for the whole year, with a page header noting the day and month, but no day of the week, so it can be used in any year. Or they could do a dated version every year, with some slight difference each year– a few pages of frontmatter or backmatter, maybe an essay by a writer or artist, or a different pattern stamped on the cover. Just a little something to get people excited about the new version each year. The other option would be to make thinner booklets, each with a month’s worth of daily pages. They could be sold in a set like the old Color-a-Month Planner. With either of these options, just get a few Instagram influencers to start using it and legions of aspiring daily art journalers will follow. Some people will just use it as a free-form planner. Some people will do a doodle a day in it. But it would be a satisfying tool that fills a need, rather than the soggy mess of tissue-thin, wrinkled, bled-through pages people get when they try to do art journals in the current daily planners.

A Fountain Pen Friendly Moleskine

Another audience Moleskine really needs to address is fountain pen users. Moleskine claims their 120 GSM paper found in Sketch Albums and Smart Notebooks is fountain pen friendly, but from my 2015 tests of a Sketch Album, that claim doesn’t hold up. (I only tested two fountain pens in that review, but I’ve since tested others with even worse results– lots of feathering and bleed-through. I really wonder what pens Moleskine tested themselves.) Even the 165 GSM paper in the hardcover Moleskine Sketchbook isn’t good with fountain pens– they may not feather or bleed, but many inks will bead up, as watercolors sometimes do because of the smooth surface of the paper. This makes everything look blotchy and washed-out. I have older Moleskines in which the regular notebook paper can be used with one or two of my fine nib pens and certain inks without too much bleed-through or feathering, but even in those, it’s not really a good option. There are cheapo notebooks I’ve found on Amazon that are far more fountain pen friendly than any Moleskine.

Back in the early days, maybe Moleskine thought fountain pen users were a bunch of cranky old guys who were too small a niche in the market to be worth catering to, but it seems like fountain pen use is becoming more and more popular. I don’t have any hard numbers on this, and of course I may be biased in my view of this market, but I think there has been a huge surge in interest in calligraphy, hand-lettering and handwriting in general, especially among young women, largely due to Instagram and the popularity of Bullet Journaling. Fountain pens and markers are very popular tools for these users, and Moleskine should want to get a bigger share of this market, which they’ve been alienating for their entire 20+ year history*.

So why not do some kind of limited edition partnership? “Moleskine Tomoe River Edition?” I thought they could just find their own paper and do a “Moleskine Fountain Pen Notebook,” but that would force them to admit they were lying about their other paper. A partnership with a name associated with high-end, high-quality paper from Japan would justify a premium price and side-step the question of why their regular paper doesn’t have the same qualities.

It isn’t unheard of for two notebook brands to join forces: if Leuchtturm could partner with Whitelines, why couldn’t Moleskine also partner with Clairefontaine? Moleskine + Rhodia might be too much of a team of rivals, but Clairefontaine, even though it’s from the same parent company as Rhodia, doesn’t compete directly in the same formats or pricepoints as Moleskine and Rhodia’s Webnotebook. And people love Clairefontaine paper. Do a hardcover Moleskine that is plain on the outside and has an iconic retro Clairefontaine pattern on the endpapers, and luscious Clairefontaine paper inside. Stamp both company logos on the back cover. Talk about European Unity! (Of course in envisioning these fantasy products, I want the cover to have the quality of the late 1990s/early 2000s Moleskines, not their current clunkier ones.)

A Modular Moleskine

The other big notebook trend Moleskine hasn’t addressed is the modular Traveler’s Notebook-type binder. In a 2009 wishlist for new Moleskine products, I suggested that they consider offering modular cahier-style inserts for some sort of cover. I compared it at the time to the Kolo Essex Travel Book (see my Kolo Essex review), because that cover was a bit more structured and Moleskine-like than the floppy leather Midori Traveler’s Notebook. They could make something that holds the existing Cahier journals, and offer planner inserts (including monthly page-per-day booklets), city map inserts, and other formats along the lines of the Passions series so users could mix and match. If I had one of these right now, it might contain a January page-per-day art journal insert with heavy sketchbook pages, a month-per-spread planner insert for jotting appointments, a squared page insert for general notes, and a travel insert with maps and info about Tokyo. (I’m not going there anytime soon, but I can dream!) There are so many people making travelers notebook covers now, Moleskine almost wouldn’t need to design a binder, but it would make sense for them to have something that fits their own aesthetic for those who want it. It could have the usual Moleskine hardcover design, and instead of elastics, perhaps use some sort of hidden metal pin to grip the notebooks, like X47.

Other Accessory Products

I’m still waiting for the Moleskine underwear.

What Else?

Those are my favorite ideas for how Moleskine could re-connect to some of their core audience that has slipped away. Would you buy these products? What other products or improvements would you like to see from Moleskine?

*In writing this, I just realized that the Moleskine brand is now over 20 years old: Modo e Modo launched their first notebooks in 1997. Most companies would celebrate an anniversary like that, but I suppose that would put Moleskine in an awkward position. You can’t celebrate being 20 years old when you’ve spent that entire time pretending to be the notebook used by the long-deceased Hemingway, Picasso and Chatwin!