Moleskine's borrowed heritage

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Moleskine's heritage page describes its notebook as "the heir and successor to the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries." Among them, it says, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway.

Van Gogh died in 1890, Hemingway in 1961, and Picasso in 1973. Moleskine sold its first notebook in 1997.

Every word on that page is technically accurate. But it’s easy to come away believing this company made the book van Gogh carried. That belief is Moleskine’s most valuable asset.

Bruce Chatwin was a British travel writer who, in 1987, wrote about buying stacks of small black notebooks from a Paris stationer before a trip. He once tried to order a hundred of them, reckoning that would see him out. His supplier told him there were no more, the small family workshop that bound them had shut down after its owner died.

He called the notebooks carnets moleskines, lowercase, the way you would say "ring-binder". Moleskin is a heavy cotton fabric brushed until it feels like a mole's skin, and a version of it covered the notebooks.

By the late eighties the object had a shape people recognised on sight, a following among writers and artists, a name already in circulation, and a famous author's story attached to it. A branding fairytale. The people who made it were small workshops selling through Paris stationers, and by 1986 the last of them had closed the doors.

The ingredients were all there, but no one owned them.

Modo & Modo was a small Milanese publisher and design firm. In 1994 Maria Sebregondi, working with them on products aimed at a new kind of traveller, proposed bringing back the notebooks she had bought in Paris a decade earlier. She suggested using the name Moleskine for the same reason Chatwin used it. It carried the heritage of the notebook materials and every writer who had ever filled one.

Her pitch was explicit about what she was selling. "Let's remake them, beautifully… and we'll hide in the pocket the story behind them to inspire all those who work using their talent." The story was written into the product specification, and every Classic still ships with the history printed inside it.

They registered the trademark in 1996, shipped 5,000 notebooks in 1997, then 30,000 in 1998.

What they had acquired, for the price of a trademark filing, was the right to capitalise a common noun. French binders had made the notebook for a century. Moleskine, with a capital M, got to claim that heritage from the moment Modo & Modo wrote it down.

The way Moleskine talk about their heritage is very clever. "The heir and successor to the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries". The subject is the notebook. "Heir and successor" hands a lineage to a black oilcloth book with an elastic band, and it stops well short of claiming anyone from Modo & Modo was in a room with Hemingway. The page never says what any of those famous artists and thinkers did with a notebook, or which notebook they did it with. They are name dropped in a subordinate clause, and they do all the persuading. A few lines down, the same page tells you that in 1997 "the company known today as Moleskine brought the legendary notebook back to life".

Moleskine has never hidden any of this. The revival date is on the page, the wording has held up for twenty-nine years, and Wikipedia covers the same ground and softens the artists to "reportedly favoured". Nobody has ever needed to issue a correction. Trade write-ups of the brand land on the same reading, that the company was careful never to say those artists had used the reborn notebooks, and let people draw the connection themselves.

It's a lot of nice marketing fluff that's no doubt gone through more than a few legal reviews. At a glance it's easy to walk away thinking this is the very notebook van Gogh used.

That impression is what sells notebooks.

What it sells is a set of attributes nobody at Moleskine has to claim out loud. Romance, craft, the sense that serious creative work happens in a small black book made by people who have been doing it for a century. A large Moleskine Classic lists at US$19.95 on the company's own site, against a few dollars for a notebook with the same paper in it. The gap is the story, and a distribution decision is what made it stick. Moleskine launched in Milan bookshops rather than stationers, which put the notebook on a shelf beside novels instead of beside pens. Sold next to books it is a cultural object. Sold next to pens it is stationery. In 2024 the company reported revenue of €122.3m, around US$140m, on a product that is card, paper and elastic.

What your customers believe you stand for is the asset. What you believe you stand for is nothing more than a plan.

Sebregondi co-founded the company on a borrowed story and stayed until 2015 as its Director of Brand Equity and Communication, eighteen years of proving a sentence she wrote in 1994. The notebooks have come off the line every year since, in the same format, at the same standard, and the romance and the craft the page implies are now things Moleskine has actually done for longer than most of its customers have been buying notebooks.

The story arrived first and the substance went in underneath it. That order is unusual, and it is the reason Moleskine survives being checked.

Heinz ran the same two ingredients the other way round. The substance came first, a hundred and fifty years of it, and the heritage claim only became available once the years were already banked. That is why Heinz can run print work with no logo on it and still have 70% of people name them. Both companies hold real heritage positioning today. One of them was founded over 150 years ago, and the other is only as old as I am.

Once you start looking, you'll notice a lot of brands carry a borrowed thread. Stella Artois was first brewed in 1926, but the label claims 1366. That's the origin date of another brewery its owners later traced themselves back to. The lineage belongs to the place and the trade, and the label lends it to the actual bottle in your hand.

None of that is inherently wrong or misleading, but it does leave you on the hook for two things.

Find out what people outside your company actually believe about you, from their mouths rather than your positioning deck. Whatever they say back is your brand, and the gap between that and your intentions is the only version that costs you anything.

Then ask what you have added since you started telling the story. Abercrombie & Fitch launched Hollister in 2000 and gave it a founder called John M. Hollister, a rubber plantation in the Dutch East Indies, and a 1922 date on the label. All of it was written in-house. The BBC and Dave Eggers in the New Yorker both took it apart, and the invented history is now one of the best known facts about the brand. Borrow a story for a quick win and that is what you get.

In 1997 Modo & Modo bought a dead man's notebook for the cost of a trademark filing. Every year since, they have paid it back one notebook at a time. Van Gogh never owned a Moleskine, and after almost three decades, that has stopped mattering at all.

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