New Filofax releases

Filofax UK have released four new models just before Christmas. Each is available in Pocket and Personal size.

We see a 'Denim' model returning after so long too...

Order from Filofax UK today.

Filofax UK Offer

Click on the images and get 3 for 2 on paper and accessories the offer will be applied automatically at cart, no promo code needed. Offer applies to organiser paper and accessories category only and does not apply to any other products.

Offer valid until midnight 09.11.15. This promotion can not be applied to previously placed orders and only valid on orders placed on www.filofax.co.uk.

Filofax New Models

It was refreshing to receive some news about new models from one of the Filofax retailers of some new products for which I'm very grateful.

So below is a photo of a Saffiano Gold Limited Edition and will be released in September, it will be available in pocket, compact, personal and A5, prices the same as the other colours.

We have also heard that there will be a Nappa in Vanilla and Cerise, quite colourful! We expect the release date to be in September, but as always release dates and availability might change. 

We will share buying links once these are available. 

Filofax UK seem to have shutdown using social media and bloggers to promote their products, quite why they have taken such a drastic step I don't know. I wish they would engage with us and work with us again I'm sure it would be mutually beneficial to both parties. 

New Filofax Original Colours

Filofax UK have today released this years new colours for the Original in Personal and A5 sizes.

They are:

• Dark Aqua
• Monochrome
• Patent Nude
• Pillarbox Red

And here are some pictures of the new colours shown here in A5 size:

Go to the Filofax UK website were you can order them today.

What do you think of the new colours?

Filofax Spring Collection Revealed - Press Release

From Tuesday 11th March the new Filofax Spring collection is available in the Filofax online store – www.filofax.co.uk

Spring is the time when Filofax unveils its new prints and non-leather designs and this year it’s all about floral patterns, pastels and glossy finishes.

Floral Burst is the second Cover Story competition pattern to be revealed by Filofax. Designed by the winner of the 2013 competition, the stunning print is beautiful in its simplicity. Winning designer Alexia Clare says “I am very led by colour choices when it comes to my designs. The colours in the design were inspired by a vintage dress I have had since childhood”. Floral Burst comes in two sizes - pocket £28 and personal £35.

Floral Burst

Willow is inspired by the symmetry and lines of willow tree leaves. With its pastel tones and soft feminine simplicity, it complements the Spring catwalk fashion trend for all things pastel and pretty. In pocket £28 and personal £30.

Willow

Domino Patent is in contrast a vivid and stunning high gloss texture in the season’s must have colour, hot pink. The familiar Domino elastic closure is the perfect finishing touch for this contemporary organiser. In pocket £20, personal £23 and A5 £35, it’s perfect for a handbag or making a statement on your desk.

Domino Patent

Patent, a well liked design launched last year, is updated in cool pastel shades of lemon, lavender and duck egg, and comes in pocket and the increasingly popular compact size. Saffiano also gets an update with chic poppy red and ever classic black and Fusion is refreshed in Stone. Bright new colours in the folio range will also be revealed next week.

Fusion

Patent

Patent

Patent

Patent

Saffiano

Saffiano

Filofax will be launching new organiser models with an added value offer.

New leather ranges and tablet cases and organisers are still to come from Filofax this year.

Miracle Bind by Blueline

Filofax UK have today introduced another type of notebook in both A4 and A5 sizes.  It is from Blueline in Canada so our readers in North America might already be familiar with the system.

The notebook has a wire binding and this allows the cover to fold write back on itself. The pages are punched so they can be easily removed and replaced or moved around in a different order.

This video shows the details of this system:

The full range is available now on the Filofax UK website

Cover Story 2014 Winner’s Design On Sale Now!

The last couple of years Filofax have run a competition for a design graduate to design a cover for a new Filofax organiser.

Today they announced that English Bloom, a winning design in the 2014 Cover Story graduate competition, is now on sale on their website.

Alexia Claire won the competition with two floral designs, both chosen to adorn the covers of personal and pocket sized Filofax organisers. Alexia explained that “the British plant/flower illustration was based on Alpine Rock-cress (I will take her word for it!) which is only found in certain areas of Britain.”

Julia Langhein, New Product Design Director for Filofax, chose Alexia as the winner because “it was clear she had carefully thought through her designs, which were beautiful in their simplicity. All had great proportions and an excellent use of colour. They are very attractive cover designs that will definitely appeal to our discerning users.”

The interior design includes a selection of card pockets on the inside cover and a notepad pocket on the rear inside cover. I know there were a lot of comments about the omission of card pockets on some of the 2013 range so it's good to see they are back on these new models.

Buy English Bloom in Pocket (£28) and Personal (£35)

The second winning design, Floral Burst, goes on sale later next month.

Enthusiasts Collection Monthly Planner – now on sale!

The Enthusiasts Collection Monthly Planner is now on sale! in A5 and Personal size only on the Filofax UK website. 

The Undated Monthly Priority Planner, exclusively available on the Filofax website. Achieve your monthly goals with ease using the pack, which contains a monthly date column and sections for Monthly Goals, Important Events & Occasions and Notes.

The Filofax Enthusiasts Collection competition to design a diary or undated refill was recently won by our organisational hero Coralie Mckeivor. She explains that the design was created to act as a monthly summary or plan of action, and provides a quick ‘at a glance’ reference page. Coralie says “You can use it as a diary summary, a goal management tool or assign it to a particular project. For example it can help plan your life, your blog, your job, your health… anything.”

Buy it now

Filofax Ring Mechanisms

As you know, at our meeting at the end of last year, we raised the issue of ring mechanism quality with senior representatives of Filofax.   Since then, a petition has been submitted and Filofax responded assuring that they were working with their supplier to mitigate these issues.   Filofax has recently commented further on this, as below.

We would like to reassure that we have taken action in response to concerns brought to our attention about the quality of ring mechanisms – a fundamental component in our organiser products.  In response to the petition organised by Kate Bernasconi earlier in the year, we responded that we were working closely with our ring mechanism supplier to mitigate issues.  Since then we have reinforced this commitment by spending a great deal of time re-educating all suppliers involved in the chain on our quality expectations –  not only the manufacturer of the ring mechanism component, but handling points, assembly (which is done by hand) and final inspection at our warehouse and distribution centre. 

To explain further, our ring mechanism supplier is the largest in the world its field and they have excellent, world class production facilities.  The ring mechanisms we buy are not their standard product and we have our own enhanced Filofax specification and quality criteria.  This includes, amongst other things, their operatives regularly checking the product for consistency of ring dimensions, alignment, straightness, trigger tension, marks, dents or scratches during production.  Filofax ring mechanisms are stored according to strict guidelines to ensure they maintain their structure.

When  the ring mechanisms arrive at the organiser assembly point, another set of inspections are put in process during the hand assembly of our personal organisers.  All fitters wear gloves when handling the products and supervisors are constantly carrying out random checks throughout assembly and the finished, assembled products are checked again at the packing stage.  The organisers then undergo further, final QA checks when they arrive at our distribution centre.   Unfortunately it is not practical to do a 100% check on all products received at our distributor centre although we have increased the rate of final inspection.  Hopefully we are demonstrating that there are several points during manufacture, packing, shipping and warehousing process where someone is physically handling and checking the mechanism against numerous criteria.

Whilst we would obviously have expected this detailed checking process to happen as a matter of course, sometimes in any manufacturing process, it is necessary to re-educate all parties involved.  We hope this will result in far fewer unsatisfactory products getting into the hands of consumers.  The re-education and heightened measures have been introduced recently and products that have gone through this process are in the system.    

Whilst there has been lots of comments about ring mechanism quality in the social community in recent months, we do believe that as a percentage of our total worldwide production, these issues amount to less than 1%.  Of course we hope that the actions outlined above ultimately reduce this and we will continue to address any individual consumer concerns quickly and appropriately through our customer services team.

Thank you to Filofax for taking our concerns seriously

Filofax Blogger Challenge: Set The Scene For Summer

I was given the opportunity to take part in the 2013 Filofax Blogger Challenge.


The challenge was to take a photo of yourself, family or friends with a Filofax to 'set the scene for summer' and submit it to Filofax.

I had a choice of Filofax from the new range and I went for another Fusion Personal

So Mrs M. and I got busy yesterday I had a few ideas in my head for photographs, I couldn't find a 'cute kid' to photograph so I had to think of some other ideas.

Summer seems to have been so long time in arriving this year I think we are all looking forward to warmer weather.

The photos along with the other bloggers photos will be posted on the Filofax Website, the Filofax Facebook page, and tweeted through the Filofax Twitter account.

The photo that receives the most likes on the Facebook page, will win 5 organisers to give away on their blog. The two runners up will each receive 3 organisers to give away on their blogs.

The date that the photos will be posted is yet to be confirmed, but if you like my photos when they go live, please vote on Facebook and hopefully I will receive some Filofaxes for a give away.

Snippets of News from Filofax

No big announcements, but just some snippets of information I've been sent.

Following the favourable comments you have made about the Doodle pen loop insert, Filofax are considering but not promising to make this type of insert more generally available.

So if you have an organiser with only one pen loop, you could add one or two of these inserts to add some more.It has the advantage of course of being moveable between organisers. It's not a permanent fixture and will not damage the leather or the covering of the organiser like the stick on ones might do.

I wasn't aware of this but apparently early Osterley Compacts came with 2 pen loops this went down to just a single pen loop on more recently made versions of this particular model. Other sizes though now all have elasticated pen loops.

The elasticated pen loop is becoming more common across the range, this of course allows for 'fatter' pens.

Work continues on the development of the new website, I've been contributing some historical information that I have to go in to the 'History' section.  I have also been asked to help test the beta site when it is ready. The new site is due to go live this summer, which ever week that happens to be!

Filofax is very aware of the limitations with the current site and they are very keen to get the replacement site up and running as soon as possible. They are investing all their efforts in to the new site, while trying to ensure the current site still does it's job for the remainder of its life.

More news on the 2013 range coming next week hopefully......

Important Notice - Please Read

Firstly I apologise for the length of this post, but I think it is important to share this news with you as part of the Philofaxy community immediately. 

A few weeks ago we highlighted this post which featured an interview with the current MD of SlamPR, the PR agency for Filofax in UK.  [That post no longer exists, but it does exist using the Web Archive]

The bit people didn't like amongst other things was:

Following a usage and attitudes study, we identified that lapsed users and current Filofax users share the same common ground – they like to write notes and are very interested in fashion / stylish accessories. With this in mind we needed to make Filofax fashionable again to recapture this audience’s attention, so we set up a fashion-focused press office targeting key fashion and style journalists in aspirational and mainstream media, as well as influential bloggers with style focused tactics to change their perception of the brand.

After a few people moaned and groaned a bit, David Popely one of our readers published this open letter to Slam PR, about 15 other sites also published this letter that week, which was also London Fashion Week and the launch of new Temperley Filofax products. [David's original page no longer exists, but again it can be seen on the Web Archive]

SlamPR responded in the comments of the above blog post offering a meeting in November.

An email was received yesterday from Slam PR, the content is as follows:

Following on from the recent post by Filofax on David’s blog, we would like to invite you to a meeting with a Filofax representative/s on  the 19th November at 11am. Note 1

The Philofaxy community is very important to Filofax, however to ensure we make this session as productive as possible we think it’s best to limit the number of people attending. We would therefore like to invite five representatives to speak on behalf of the community at this meeting.   We will ultimately leave it to you to decide the representatives but we ask that whoever attends expresses not only their own points but those of the community. 

We would like to highlight that this meeting will be for Filofax to listen to your ideas and concerns and not to answer questions in relation to the company or its strategic direction.

The forum will be held at a central London location on the 19th November. Note 1

Over the next four weeks it would be useful if you could: 

• Decide who will represent the community
• Collate and filter the communities thoughts and concerns
• Share the details of who will be attending with Dee at SLAM PR

Please pass this email onto anyone in the community that is not on this mailing list. Unfortunately we do not have everyone’s direct contact details.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards

Note 1:This date and time has since changed to the following week 26 November at 2pm at the Conduit Street Store. 

A few people were slightly 'upset' at the content of the email and did express their concerns back to SlamPR......

Then come forward to today, I received a phone call from the Marketing Services Department of Filofax itself.  It was like a breath of fresh air suddenly wafted in to the room! The frustration of the last 18 months of trying to make contact with the inner workings of Filofax melted away and it was like talking to a long lost friend again!

Well nearly an hour later on the phone, we had talked ourselves silly, but it has I think set the way forward from what was a low in our relationship with the company and I can only see it getting better, with us working together with Filofax with a positive attitude.

I discovered that we have quite a few fans in the company....who all got caught out by my French take over joke earlier this week... which made me chuckle!

So the climb to the summit isn't over.... but I think we have established a good footing at base camp.

So can you put your thinking caps on and come up with any ideas, thoughts, concerns you have with anything related to Filofax....

You can leave these in the comments of this post or. Email them to me at: philofaxy [AT] gmail (Dot) com

I will sort this feed back in to different categories so that it is given to the right people within Filofax present at the meeting.

I will be unearthing our 'wish list' from earlier in the year to include in our feedback for the Product Development Team.

David and I have agreed to attend on the 26th November, but would anyone else be interested in attending with us?  Again please contact me by email if you are free on the day. The number of people is limited due to the size of the meeting room, but another couple of people should be able to join us.

Again thank you for your time and patience.

Steve

USA vs UK/European Ring Sizes

I'm often see people questioning the ring sizes of different Filofax personal organisers for sale on Filofax USA.  I sometimes end up 'throwing my toys out of my pram' in frustration that someone somewhere can't do the maths or math correctly to convert Metric millimetres in to old Imperial Inch fractions...

I've actually written to Filofax USA more than a few times pointing out the errors on their website.

So in a lazy afternoon moment I constructed a table to show how and why they get the measurements wrong:

Fraction			Imp	mm	mm	Filofax Ring Sizes
1	/	16	0.0625	1.5875	1.6
1	/	8	0.1250	3.1750	3.2
3	/	16	0.1875	4.7625	4.8
1	/	4	0.2500	6.3500	6.4
5	/	16	0.3125	7.9375	7.9
3	/	8	0.3750	9.5250	9.5
7	/	16	0.4375	11.1125	11.1	11 mm
1	/	2	0.5000	12.7000	12.7	13 mm
9	/	16	0.5625	14.2875	14.3
19	/	32	0.5938	15.0813	15.1	15 mm
5	/	8	0.6250	15.8750	15.9
11	/	16	0.6875	17.4625	17.5
3	/	4	0.7500	19.0500	19.1	19 mm
13	/	16	0.8125	20.6375	20.6
7	/	8	0.8750	22.2250	22.2
29	/	32	0.9063	23.0188	23.0	23 mm
15	/	16	0.9375	23.8125	23.8
63	/	64	0.9844	25.0031	25.0	25 mm
1	/	1	1.0000	25.4000	25.4
17	/	16	1.0625	26.9875	27.0
9	/	8	1.1250	28.5750	28.6
19	/	16	1.1875	30.1625	30.2	30 mm
10	/	8	1.2500	31.7500	31.8

So as you can see there is plenty of scope for who ever fills in the details in Imperial Factions of an Inch on which ever side of the Atlantic they happen to be to get it wrong...

Lets look at the standard size Personal ring size of 23 mm, you will often see this expressed as 7/8" or 15/16" neither of which is correct you have to go to 29/32nds of an inch to get reasonably close to 23 mm.  Similarly 25 mm rings are sometimes described as 15/16ths or 1 inch rather than 63/64ths... I think 1 inch is the accepted 'practice'

Because Filofax (generic) don't go below an 1/16th of an inch in their Imperial measurements you will see that they can easily over or under estimate a ring size.

I wonder when the USA will move to metric measurement.... Steve runs for cover!

Holiday Essentials Mood Boards

My entries are in and here they are.

We have been set the task of creating three mood boards, something I've never done before.  Each mood board had to reflect the particular Filofax personal organiser and the suggested location.

So I will start with the Swift in Sage which was perfect for a country side jaunt or a visit to a country house or chateau. Great for taking notes and recording details of your trip and page reference reminders from your guide book.

The Swift is a rather understated appearance, not too flashy, it will not attract too much attention when you are carrying it or making notes in it. The textile exterior will blend nicely with your surroundings.

The Metropol in Kingfisher Blue is ideal for a holiday by the beach.

Ideal for journalling about your holiday, those lazy days by the beach, listening to music or reading that book you bought in the departure lounge. The Kingfisher Blue of course complementing your beach towel just perfectly.

The Metropol has quite a tough exterior so it's not going to be bothered by the odd bit of light rain or salt spray, just wipe it clean and it will be like new again.

The Domino in violet is the best choice for a city break.

It needs to match your outfits, slot in to your bag and carry your travel details, hotel arrangements, be a reminder for those recommended restaurants that friends have passed on to you for your first visit to Berlin.

The Domino is a great value for money Filofax personal organiser, whilst it might not be tough on the outside it certainly stylish and up to the mark on the choice of colours, whilst the interior is soft suede type finish. 

I quite enjoyed the challenge of doing the mood boards, not only the photography but joining the photos together afterwards and also thinking up what should go with what.

My entry will soon be on the Filofax Facebook page, take a look at all the entries next time you log in to Facebook

Watch out for the announcement about how you can win one of these three organisers in our giveaway competitions starting on Monday 16th July.