Moleskine
Description: To give brand lovers a unique and continuous Moleskine experience that drives customer demand.
Company: IED Madrid – Moleskine
Job title: Design strategist
Location: Madrid, Spain
Year: 2016
Context
Moleskine is “a creatively infused premium lifestyle brand that everyday people can afford”. The client knew about the design process and brought us a challenge: “to give brand lovers a unique and continuous Moleskine experience that drives customer demand”. Our team picked one of the provided thought-starters “the infinite possibilities for individualizing your Moleskine notebooks” for this 4 days sprint-workshop.
What problem did I solve?
Our team of 3 took this opportunity to search for a new market. The transition between paper and numeric has always been a challenge for the stationary industry. Technologies to “print from paper to digital” never really got accepted by the creatives. For the savviest, they moved to digital painting with a tablet. For the analogue, they prefer to scan. If they want to share it online, they would include the book, their pens and the table on their picture.
So we tried to take the reverse path:
“How might we enhance our time on the Moleskine using technology?”
How did I solve it?
Productivity was our answer.
We found two different and parallel trends based on productivity:
– The “Bullet journal” (bujo): a community of influencers and millions of followers that are sharing tips to create and run their bujo notebook.
– Apps for better productivity and automation: Todoist, Google calendar, Zapier, IFTTT are applications & platforms which have millions of active users.
We discovered the Bujo through field research and five interviews on the street.
– A bujo book helps people to organize and plan their life with defined templates and “keys” (symbols).
On the other side, all our team was using applications to plan our daily tasks. Zapier, for example, is an online platform gathering APIs from different used services to create cross-automation: “every time I post a message on Facebook, -automatically- repost it on Linkedin”.
Our idea was simple: to implement automation on Moleskine notebook, using bujo technique and a pen to track the commands: “every time I draw a candle followed by a date and a name, add a birthday’s event on my phone calendar”.
What was the impact?
We created during this four days workshop a new product and service that could bring back an existing community that knows the brand. The less creative or more pragmatic part of this community buys other brands that are selling already-made Bullet journals.
By implementing this new technology and service we offer this group an excuse to invest and try Moleskine again, to change their mind. Moleskine would need to promote relevant content using the existing influencers to test the product.
A lot of research and prototyping needs to be done with the pen and its interactions with the users to reach what makes Moleskine a unique and essential everyday luxury.
