How Moleskine Brought Its Iconic Notebooks Into the Digital World

Tech Features

Moleskine may be famous for its high-quality notebooks and organizers that evoke turn-of-the-last-century Paris, but the Italian company is leaping into the digital age with paper products designed for connectivity. The goal is to bridge the gap between the physical world and the increasingly connected online one.

“Human beings are physical and mental, you could say we have hardware and software. We need both kinds of activities,” said Maria Sebregondi, Moleskine co-founder and vice president for brand equity. “What we are seeing these days are that the young people, especially the digital natives, the so-called millennials, are the ones most interested in embracing very physical activities.”

While Sebregondi would not use the term reinvent—she prefers to think of Moleskine as evolving along a continuum—the cardboard bound paper products have taken a virtual turn. Three years ago, Moleskine partnered with Evernote to create “smart notebooks” that allow for easy digitization of handwriting. “Evernote ruled” and “Evernote squared” page styles have dotted lines to ensure a clean image when digitally capturing your notebook, and images can then be shared in an iOS or Android app.

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“We’re trying to combine the advantages of the handwriting, hand sketching, together with digital advantages—the fact that you can work on your text or your drawings, you can change, you can transform, you can share, you can elaborate in different ways,” Sebregondi said.

Moleskine also has a notebook designed for Livescribe smartpens, where each page has a dot pattern to easily digitize handwritten notes. The company recently rolled out its Timepage app for iOS, which is a “warmer, more meaningful” way to manage a personal calendar.

Sebregondi added that Moleskine’s digital partnerships are exemplary of how handwriting can improve cognitive development. “The gesture of handwriting is activating a larger part of our brain, especially involving an emotional part. There is a big difference in the kind of memory and learning you get when this kind of motory part is available.”

Moleskine has developed another smart notebook with Adobe, Creative Cloud, which turns writing on paper into an instantly workable digital file. Much like Evernote, the app uses special page marking to process and optimize the image as a JPG before converting it to an SVG file. Users can then sync their artwork with Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop.

In April, the company held an event in its headquarter city of Milan where more than 100 designers used Creative Cloud notebooks to capture hand drawn designs and exhibit images. Moleskine will also open a brick and mortar store in San Francisco this fall, where shoppers can try the app.

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It’s hard to determine how successful Moleskine’s digital initiatives have been from a financial perspective as sales of the company’s digital-focused notebooks are included with its analog paper products (responsible for 91.6 percent of the company’s 2014 net sales). Sebregondi is confident that Moleskine users will feel comfortable with and excited about new print-to-digital technologies.

Still, a professor quoted in a New York Times article about Moleskine was wary about partnerships between so-called traditional companies and digital ones. Traditional companies may not understand the technology they are implementing and “there’s often no substitute for getting in there and getting your hands dirty.”

Moleskine was founded with the goal of developing relationships, Sebregondi said, and the company has partnered with distributors and stores since its reintroduction in 1997. Since that date, Moleskine has expanded to multiple countries and gone public.

“We are not a digital company and we don’t think to become a digital company. We stay with what is our origin and what we are good at doing,” Sebregondi said. “But since we are living in this analog-digital continuum, we partnered with the best in class in the digital world to offer the best to our public.”

As Moleskine is proving, sometimes reinvention is less about throwing away the past and more about reimagining the future.

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