

Turning an obsession into gold - hawke
http://ninjasandrobots.com/obsessions-to-creativity

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dkrich
I think this is somewhat over-simplified. A lot of people have great design
sense and love vintage stuff. Creating good products is necessary but not
sufficient to make a business. Not too many people have a forum like Coudal to
sell from.

~~~
nate
Thanks a ton for checking out the post!

But I wasn't trying to make a point about simplifying anything. I definitely
wasn't trying to say Step 1 obsess over something. Step 2. Profit. Coudal is a
master at marketing and both he and Draplin have a tremendous reach into
groups of people that helped get the ball rolling on these notebooks.

The point was merely that I've noticed that many of the people who I admire
the most creatively seem to take "loves" and "interests" and made obsessions
of them.

Aaron has taken a "love for vintage stuff" and turned it into quite an awesome
collection. Which then turned into inspiration for his design/identity work
for clients, and eventually it became the source of a great and well designed
product idea. A lot of us could probably learn from this, and go much deeper
into something that merely interests us in order to find better ideas.

------
pikewood
_These guys have figured out how to create a tremendous business out of
friggin notebook paper._

Can you explain the appeal here? All I see is the Beanie Babies concept for
paper nerds, but am I missing something?

~~~
nate
Well, I'm probably not the one best to explain why this business has become so
popular with a mass audience as I was really just pointing out where the idea
came from. But if it helps, this business has gone onto be much more than just
stuff for "paper nerds". An example on the top of my mind: J Crew carries
these notebooks in their retail stores and online:
[http://www.jcrew.com/mens_feature/ingoodcompany/fieldnotes.j...](http://www.jcrew.com/mens_feature/ingoodcompany/fieldnotes.jsp).
But I think Aaron captures it best:

“Will they go out of style? Oh yeah!” Draplin says. “The people who have a
loop for frivolous shit, they’re one out of 100. There’s 99 other
motherfuckers who take notes because that’s their job. The UPS guy that comes
in here, he uses them. I gave him one a year ago he just fills full of shit. I
would much rather see him using the things. It’s just paper. It’s not cool.
The fonts aren’t cool at that point. But it works for him. And that is a cool
thing."

<http://wweek.com/portland/article-17913-the_write_stuff.html>

