Rare But Nobody Cares!

'Rare but nobody cares' is an idea or phrase I've borrowed from the car enthusiasts world and possibly others as well. 

In car terms it is a car that was in full production, you would see lots of them on the road, yet once out of production they would literally vanish in to thin air and within 15-20 years only a handful of them would remain roadworthy and in regular use. There's even a website that lets you look at how many UK cars are still licensed for each model of car! 

To give an example, I owned a Rover 216 GTi back in the 1990's over twelve thousand were registered in 1995, now it's less than 25 cars that are still on the road! 

If we transfer this idea to Filofax, think back to some of the models that were in mass production, but if you were to see one today that was still as new, unused, then you wouldn't really be that bothered about it. 

It would be a model that you never see someone showing off on Instagram, may be one that people would often admit 'I had one of those once' but they had since moved on from. 

Why no one cares? The reasons can be one of the following:

• Too fashionable, so short lived in terms of being relevant, colours and styling. 
• They didn't wear well with everyday use, hence why they became rare quickly once out of production.
• They were cheap and not considered a serious organiser. 

There are other categories such as 'Popular and still popular' these would be models that have had a relatively long production run with some small design alternations and colour variations over their long production run, two models that fall in this category are the Finsbury and the Malden. Both have been in production for over 10 years. The Finsbury nearly 20 years. 

I also think that there are some models that are 'More popular now than when they were on sale' these might be ones that were predominantly sold in the mid 1990's when sales started to dip because electronic organisers started to come in to vogue. Models such as the Cavendish and Kensington. 

What category does your favourite model fall in to? 

Rare

You will often see the words 'Vintage' and 'Rare' attached to the descriptions of various Filofax organisers in adverts. Whether that is a correct word to use in each case it debatable. 

We have covered what is 'Vintage' before and it recently resurfaced on one of the Facebook groups after Neil published his recent video on the topic: What exactly is a vintage Filofax? // Flatability 

There is no definitive definition of Vintage and how it applies to Filofax, people have their own opinions I know, is it a particular age or before a particular year or whatever. 

However, what about 'Rare' what defines that? 

In the case of a Filofax (a thing) 'not found in large numbers and so of interest or value. 

The one problem I have with that definition is who decides how many have to be made before it is no longer 'rare' ?? 

Some adverts seem to declare something as 'rare' if you don't often see them up for sale. To give an example, the Filofax Eton doesn't often pop up for sale on Ebay these days, so is it rare? I guess not hundreds of them would have been made in an overseas factory somewhere in the world in the early 2000's so not vintage either!

Do I have any 'Rare' Filofax organisers?  I do have an Eton Compact, which I consider to be 'rare' because it never made it in to full production and what I have is a production sample/prototype that escaped in to the open market. 

I suspect it didn't make it in to production because the PDA organisers that it was intended to carry were changing in design so fast. I'm just lucky that I still have a Psion 5MX that this design was intended to carry!. 

Read about the Eton Compact here. After doing some further research it turns out that there would have been no more than 10 of these made and they were sent to the different Filofax distributors to assess their sales potential. 

The other model I have in my collection that is considered by some people is the Journey Travel Companion Organiser. 

This model is from 2013 and I was told by someone at Filofax UK that they only made sixty of these. 

So rare or made in limited numbers? 

There have been other limited production runs by Filofax through out the years. Some didn't sell as well as others. 

What do you consider to be 'Rare' when it comes to Filofax organisers? And do you own any rare ones?