In Hong Kong, Where No One Designs Original Stationery, He Wants to Win on Details | 100 People With Ideas

"Making something ahead of its time is a great thing to do, of course. But a product that satisfies the players already in the market is a real success too."

Paul Lam's reason for starting his own stationery brand was simple: he was tired of doing the work and watching someone else take the credit.

For the eight years before that, Paul worked at a gift company. His job, put simply, was to design stationery that would work as a corporate gift, to whatever the client asked for. The stationery then went out stamped with the client's brand. "However good the design is, it ends up as a present someone else gives away."

So in 2009, he and three colleagues asked the company to let them start a sub-brand, Ten Design Stationery, and began designing stationery of their own.

Not many Hong Kong designers or companies concentrate on stationery. Paul told QDaily he has yet to meet a designer in Hong Kong who works on stationery and nothing else. Even when he brings in outside designers, they often lack the experience to judge whether a design can actually be made.

The reason is that Hong Kong's stationery market has already been taken by big Japanese, European and American companies, and what is on the shelves is good enough for ordinary writing. "All we can do is use a few functional design points to reach the market they haven't touched yet."

Ten Design Stationery's first product was a pen called Origin, and the name says what it is: the design idea was "the origin of writing." Paul and designer Wan Sui Ping wanted customers to see that the company was about one thing, writing, so they took away the tapered tip and every other decorative element, adjusted the pen's weight and feel, and arrived at the plainest design they could.

The idea landed well. Paul entered Origin in design competitions, and it won Germany's Red Dot Design Award and Japan's Good Design Award.

Ten Design Stationery's product cycle is not short: nine months to a year. Paul talks the concept through with a designer and settles it first — the starting idea for Hang-On was just "a pen that's easy to carry." The designer then sketches the product, works with engineers to turn the sketch into something that can be built, and makes a sample. After that comes the long stretch of testing samples: revise, make a new sample, revise again, round after round, until they have something they are happy with.

To make I am, the business-card case Paul is proudest of, the Ten Design Stationery team spent six months adjusting the stretch and length of the silicone ring, the height of the cards, and so on. "Getting the cards to slide out was never the hard part. Working out how any customer could push them back in easily, so they sit all the way inside the case again — that took a long time."

For Ten Design Stationery, those details are the whole competitive edge. Paul defines his customers as people aged 20 to 40 who "care about design and how they live." He believes the company has no real competitors right now: the big brands have taken the high-end luxury segment and the cheap student segment, and almost no one is working in the space Ten Design Stationery sits in.

To learn what customers want, Paul often goes to stationery talks as an ordinary consumer. These days, though, more of what he learns comes from Facebook groups. "The talk in those groups gets lively — writing habits, what people just bought." That is where he finds the frustrations and the unmet needs.

For Paul, design comes in two kinds: "Making something ahead of its time is a great thing to do, of course. But a product that satisfies the players already in the market is a real success too."

For the first kind, Paul points to Steve Jobs designing the iPhone. Before the iPhone, he says, customers could not put their needs into words; once it existed, they saw it was exactly what they had wanted — "finding the need a user hasn't felt yet, the one they never noticed themselves."

Paul says Ten Design Stationery is now trying to make a fountain pen like that. He reads what people say about fountain pens in Facebook groups and studies the shapes and finishes already on the market, and he hopes the pen they are designing — still built on the idea of "the origin of writing" — will meet a real need when it launches, and also make people say, "Right, why has no one made a fountain pen this way before?"

Balance and PenGB, which the company released earlier, were clearly built to the second standard. Balance is symmetrical end to end, an ordinary pen on one side and a stylus on the other; PenGB has an 8 GB USB drive built into the barrel.

Paul himself hesitated at first over whether to make a stylus at all. But he does not see these technology-adjacent pens as a compromise. He thinks users genuinely need them, and he insists that in meeting that need the company kept the feel of writing and its focus on writing itself. "You can see the feel and the shape are identical at both ends. That's what we wanted to say — you can't favor one side, and that's where the meaning of 'Balance' comes from."

Ten Design Stationery has taken wrong turns too. It once licensed the Swarovski name and made The Stage, a pen with a base set with Swarovski crystals. It had a magnetic cap as well, so the pen could stand on its base or go in a pocket — but when most people first saw it, all they looked at were the crystals.

"Our design elements are in there, but the style sits a bit apart from our brand image." Paul admits the pen does not fit the brand, and the company plans to drop it and take it out of the catalog.

Marketing and promotion, in Paul's view, are not Ten Design Stationery's strength. The company has four full-time employees, him included, and only one of them handles marketing — and the products' selling points are not easy to pitch. Paul is confident about the products themselves; design and development, he believes, they can do well. Sales are where they get stuck: "It's like fitting out a beautiful shop. If nobody walks past it, the work is wasted."

Ten Design Stationery sells through its own website, but most of its sales still happen offline, at places like City Super and K11. After the goods pass through layer upon layer of distribution, the staff in those stores may not know what is special about the products, or may not demonstrate them to customers, which means customers rarely notice the point of a product on their own. Hang-On, for instance, extends when you unclip it — but on a shelf it looks like an ordinary pen.

Online, where a feature can be shown at once, Ten Design Stationery does post on Facebook, but the posts have not traveled far. And in mainland China, at the moment its most important market, the company still does not understand how social platforms like Weibo work.

These gaps are the direct cause of weak sales, and part of why Paul will not give figures: "Frankly, sales aren't great right now. If I were selling a lot, I wouldn't mind telling you."

The blow that technology is so often said to be dealing the stationery trade does not worry him. The damage, he thinks, has "already bottomed out": people who still read paper books and write by hand will go on doing it.

That does not mean the company is sitting still. It keeps finding ways to show how much it values pen and paper, and to nudge customers into writing by hand. Paul's own business card is not like the ones we usually get: the front carries his details, and the back begins with "Paul is," followed by blank ruled lines where whoever receives the card can write down an impression of him, or anything else.

Paul is not worried about the company's prospects. Beyond the mainland and Hong Kong, he says, Ten Design Stationery has begun to find its footing in Japan, South Korea and Europe. The team is now rushing the new fountain pen, hoping to take it to a stationery show in Japan in July.

He hopes the company can eventually remake the brand and strip it down. That could mean a run of changes: a new logo, dropping the products that do not fit the brand image, shortening the brand name further — "so customers can pick out what makes us different more easily."

Asked what the new brand image would actually look like, he had no concrete answer: "It's hard to put into words. We're still working it out."

Q=QDaily

P=Paul Lam

Q: Compared with designing other products, what's particular about designing stationery?

P: There's very little room to work in, really. A pen is one size, so it's constrained, and that leaves you less to play with. It isn't like toys, where any design goes, where you can make anything and nothing forces you into a particular size. Stationery has limits.

Stationery is also a tool, so solving a problem is the basic premise. Other products can be decorative — glasses, for instance, are a decorative product. They have lenses, of course, but the lenses are the lens maker's responsibility. When we design a frame, we're focused on shape and material.

Q: What do people get wrong about this industry?

P: In Hong Kong, if you mention a Hong Kong brand, people assume it has to be very obviously Hong Kong. The distinctive things about Hong Kong are neon signs, harbor views, tall buildings. So people ask what Hong Kong elements you have as a Hong Kong brand; they expect you to put something of the city's look into the product before it counts as local.

We don't think that's right. A Hong Kong brand shouldn't be confined to some Hong Kong-flavored appearance. Otherwise it gets reduced to a city souvenir. Say you come to Hong Kong and want a pen from a Hong Kong brand — put a picture of Victoria Harbour on it and it's called a pen with Hong Kong character. I don't think it should work that way; it turns the product into nothing more than a tourist's keepsake.

Sometimes at trade shows they ask us to write up our brand's Hong Kong character, and I say we don't really have one. Our products are aimed at an international market, not just Hong Kong. Hong Kong is one of our markets, of course, and we'd like to be seen as a Hong Kong brand, but we're not only selling here. That's my own view, and it isn't only about stationery — it's a misunderstanding about Hong Kong brands in general.

Q: Who's your favorite designer?

P: Tomoaki Murata. His brand is METAPHYS. His products are quite spare, and there's real functional value in them. METAPHYS has also helped many Japanese industries add design elements so their products can sell again. Tomoaki Murata's design is very human: he watches what people need and how people use things, and makes that the starting point.

Images courtesy of Ten Design Stationery