photo credit:  Flickr usr bluman

I don’t like the last thing I wrote on Moleskine, don’t like it one bit.  There’s no moral to the story, just a grumpy old man kvetching about how he can’t get his favorite esoteric notebooks.  It’s time for a do-over.

Moleskine is giving us a glimpse of the future, a glimpse of what products and production and stock shelves will look like when it’s drop-dead-simple to make a new product.  The magic of Moleskine is in the production–they have a set of machines that can literally make anything within a certain class of product.

Take a look at this moleskin-esque notebook supplier in Guangzhou:  They have a production line that can make just about any style of notebook, and they specialize in custom orders and low volume production.  A notebook costs $.5, and they have a minimum order of 1000 notebooks.

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/448946289/OEM_high_quality_hardcover_notebook.html

So, with production like this, it costs $500 to go from a design to production.  They deliver seven days after you pay them.  That’s insanely accessible.  The barrier to entry is so low, it can’t even really be considered a barrier.  It takes far more  money and time to design the product than it does to bring it into production, but even the design effort isn’t a big deal.  If you’re a company like Moleskine, that has a brand and a way (web stores, retail shelves, etc) to put new products in front of people, why not experiment with a lot of new products?  The cost of designing, of experimenting, of trying out a new idea is so low (and Moleskine’s ~1000% profit margins on their $16 dollar notebooks are so high), that even if a new product sells terribly, it’ll probably break even.

What’s interesting here is that Moleskine’s retail presentation hasn’t caught up with the flexibility of its production.  They have 400 products that they’re actively selling, but you haven’t heard of most of them.  Their store shelves have no advertising, no way of telling consumers about a new product.  They just have an undifferentiated pile of products on a shelf.  Who knows, maybe that’s enough.  The bottom line, though, is that Moleskine is a business where the bottleneck isn’t the design or the production, and Moleskine is pushing it for all it’s worth, cranking out new, different products at a mind-boggling rate.

I have mixed emotions when I look at the Moleskine shelf.  On one hand, I see a pile of exceedingly similar products, where the product I love is buried somewhere in a pile of shit I don’t care about.  One the other hand, I see a product meritocracy; a world where the barrier to entry for a new product is almost nil, and it’s so easy and cheap to try out a new idea that it happens all the time.  Where the products people love rise to the top and the others fall to the wayside.  Where sales aren’t correlated to advertising efforts, but to the utility of the product.  The low barrier to entry does for journals what online blogging did for publishing–it’s cheap, it’s easy, and anyone who cares can contribute and get ideas out into the world.  There’s one thing the Moleskine shelf lacks, though, and that’s a way to search for the product you want in a field of similar, but inferior products.  It needs a search engine.

My Moleskine craze has just begun.  More on Moleskines soon.

photo credit:  flickr usr flyingturtle