Moleskine: a dead notebook brand resurrected in 1997 and sold in 92 countries

The moleskine was a plain pocket notebook with an oilcloth cover and an elastic band, sold by Paris stationers and used by Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse and Breton as sketchbooks and journals. In 1986 the last manufacturer, a small stationer in Tours, France, closed down and the notebooks went extinct — mourned in Bruce Chatwin's 'The Songlines' with the bookseller's verdict 'Le vrai moleskine n'est plus.'

In 1995 Maria Sebregondi, a Milanese publishing consultant, read Chatwin's lament and pitched a resurrection to Modo & Modo, a small Milanese design and publishing firm. The firm trademarked the brand, found a Chinese manufacturer for the stitching and assembly, and hand-finished the first notebooks in Milan in 1997, selling 5,000 to Italian distributors. Volume hit 30,000 the next year, and in 1999 the brand expanded across Europe.

Marketing spend was close to nothing. Each notebook carried a booklet retelling the legend of the 'legendary notebook,' and its buyers — young tech workers and travel-minded 'culture-worshipping nomads' — evangelized it online: the fan site Moleskinerie drew 5,000 visitors a day, and more than 50 Facebook groups formed. By 2011 Moleskine sold about 10 million notebooks a year in 61 countries. In 2006 the private-equity firm Syntegra bought Modo & Modo for €60 million and renamed it Moleskine SpA.

Positioning did the rest. For its April 2013 IPO — the first listing on the Milan exchange in over a year — Moleskine presented itself as a luxury-goods company rather than a stationery maker, with the prospectus charting its identification with culture over commerce. By 2014 it sold in 92 countries, ran thirty of its own stores, filled a 200-page catalog, and was collaborating with Evernote, Lego, The Simpsons and Star Wars.

From 5,000 notebooks in 1997 to about 10 million a year by 2011 in 61 countries on almost no ads; Milan IPO in April 2013

The brand died but its legend did not: Chatwin's lament and the avant-garde pedigree gave the relaunch a story no competitor could copy.

Modo & Modo secured the trademark and rebuilt the object faithfully — same format, same elastic band — so the return read as continuation, not imitation.

Devotees marketed it for free. Fan blogs and communities, not ad campaigns, carried the brand from Italy across Europe and into 61 countries.

It priced as culture, not paper. The luxury-goods framing let a mass-manufactured notebook escape the commodity price war that killed the original maker.

A dead brand's legend can outlive its factory: resurrect the object faithfully, keep the story intact, and let devotees do the marketing.

Moleskine kept growing after the revival: revenue rose every year through 2014, and the company branched into bags, pens and digital tie-ins like the Evernote smart notebook. The April 2013 IPO made it the first company to list on the Milan exchange in over a year. But the fan energy that built the brand proved harder to sustain — its 'creativity contests' drew only a hundred or so entries despite nearly 200,000 Facebook likes — and the company kept stretching from iconic notebook to lifestyle catalog in search of new growth.