Selling tens of millions every year and expanding successfully into the US, they acquired Filofax* in 2001 before, after seven generations in the business, they finally sold up.
* Filofax deserve a footnote. In the 1980s and 1990s the Filofax 'personal organiser' swept large swathes of the world with its chunky leather ring-bound folders and loose-leaf inserts, including not just diary pages, address lists and note pages but maps of metro systems, travel planners and business expenses. The Filofax was a classic yuppie accessory – potentially disastrous for those who opted not just to organise their whole life in its pages but to add plastic holders for their credit cards (a feature added at the request of Diane Keaton). The idea dated back to a 1910 product called Lefax, designed for power plant engineers in Philadelphia, and was used by engineers for many decades, as well as by the army (the Filofax archives show their product on an early military expedition to Everest). In its 1980s incarnation, Filofax info pages (sold individually) recalled the almanacs of the old table-books. Its core market of professionals, inevitably, transitioned to digital devices, but the Filofax has found a new audience among a generation of journal-keepers who treat it more like a scrapbook.
"The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper" - Roland Allen
