Midori / Designphil (ミドリ)
The leather Traveler's Notebook and MD paper, two objects that became global notebook cults.
- Founded
- 1950
- Headquarters
- Tokyo, Japan
- Parent company
- Designphil Inc.
- Flagship product
- Traveler's Notebook, MD Paper
Midori, a brand of the Designphil group, made the opposite bet to industrial stationery: few references, no loud colours, and a material that ages. The Traveler's Notebook, launched in 2006, is nothing but a vegetable-tanned leather cover threaded with an elastic, into which you slot refills; it patinates and gets repaired instead of replaced.
MD paper (for "Midori Diary") follows the same logic: a cream paper designed since 1960 for fountain-pen ink, sold in deliberately bare notebooks with no logo on the cover. Both products founded an international community that documents its notebooks online — one of the rare cases where a stationery object created its own media.
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