How to turn a notebook into a pop icon: the Moleskine business

In New York, the young journalist Andy Sachs has just started working as an assistant to the feared editor-in-chief of the fashion magazine Runway. She spends the day running through the corridors, noting down her orders in a black notebook. In Paris, Amélie Poulain is also carrying one in her hands. She is a waitress in Montmartre who is trying to find Dominique Bredoteau, the owner of a box of memories that she discovered hidden in her home. She has located three men with that name in the phone book and has written down their addresses to start ruling them out.They are two scenes from different movies –The Devil Wears Prada and Amélie–, but they share the same object: a Moleskine. It is a notebook with black covers, rounded corners, and an elastic band that, since the turn of the millennium, has become a design icon and the star product of a brand with a presence all over the world. In 2025, the company generated 117.8 million euros in revenue, and during the first half of 2026, sales grew by 2.2%, to 52.2 million. But where did these notebooks come from? And how did Moleskine manage to turn such a simple object into a brand known all over the world?Bruce Chatwin's notebook

The story begins almost 40 years ago. For a long time, the British writer and traveler Bruce Chatwin had used small black notebooks that he bought at a stationery store on the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, in Paris. They were simple notebooks, handcrafted by a small family business in Tours, in the center of France, which Chatwin took on his travels to take notes, draw maps, and jot down everything that could later end up becoming material for his books. In France, that type of notebook was known as a moleskine, because of the black, waxed material used to cover its cover.In 1986, however, the manufacturer closed. When Chatwin returned to the Parisian stationery store to buy more, the owner told him that the notebooks had stopped being manufactured. Before leaving for Australia to live a new adventure, the writer tried to collect all that they had in the back room. The episode ended up being explained in The Songlines, the book about that trip that he published the following year.Almost a decade later, the book fell into the hands of Maria Sebregondi, a designer who worked for Modo & Modo, a small Milanese company. In the mid-nineties, the company was looking for a product that could connect with a new generation of readers, travelers, and creatives. Sebregondi was reading The Songlines when she stumbled upon the story of the lost notebooks.Sebregondi proposed to the company to reproduce that small black notebook, preserve its most recognizable features and convert the generic name with which the writer had described it into a brand. In 1997, Modo & Modo put the first 5,000 Moleskine notebooks on sale.From notebook to global brand

Success, however, did not depend solely on the design. Modo & Modo decided to sell Moleskines mainly in bookstores and design shops, instead of treating them as a simple stationery item, and incorporated into the product the story that had inspired it.The formula worked: by 1999 it could already be purchased throughout Europe, in the United States and in Japan and, over the years, the company expanded its catalog with planners, writing instruments, bags and other accessories. The appearance of laptops and, later on, smartphones did not slow down its expansion. On the contrary, the notebooks generated communities of enthusiasts on the internet who shared photographs of their notebooks and contributed to turning them into a cult object.The growth ended up attracting investors. In 2006, Modo & Modo was acquired by a group led by the fund Syntegra Capital and the company definitively adopted the name Moleskine. In 2013, it went public on the Milan Stock Exchange, but the period as a listed company was short: in 2016, the Belgian group D’Ieteren acquired control of it and the following year withdrew it from the stock exchange. Almost three decades after those first 5,000 notebooks, Moleskine continues to be part of the Belgian group and has turned the small notebook that Bruce Chatwin missed into a business that generates more than one hundred million euros annually.