New Smythson Website

[snowblink]

The new Smythson website is up and makes it harder to find stuff and removes the bespoke setup they had before. You can still order bespoke, but you have to go to one of their stores. I wonder why they made it worse...

[tfwall]

You can still order bespoke, but you have to go to one of their stores. I wonder why they made it worse...

 

To ensure a higher level of customer service and satisfaction. There are just some things that you can't adequately handle through internet forms.

[Kaych]

Just came across the website that did the redesign. It seems like bespoke stationery was supposed to be a "key section" of the site, but for some reason it was removed.

 

http://blog.pod1.com/wp-content/uploads/smythson_stationery.jpg

 

Seems like they added the bespoke pages, but neglected to remove them.

Edited May 5, 2011 by Kaych

[AlecG]

I have the idea that Smythson is on the slippery slope of fashion. I see less and less of the nice black leather stuff and paper related things, and more and more of the fashion stuff with handbags, rouge-brush-rolls and what not.

 

I always like their thin paper, pale blue featherweight, but the more I learned about bookbinding, gilding and paper, the less I liked it. And the price was always a bit much.

Basically it is the same as Moleskine, but with (much) better quality. Smythson also is "famous" for being used by the rich and famous. Writers, journalists and some other happy few (we, the buyers) are allowed to use it.

 

I'm a bit negative perhaps, the notebooks are nice, good/decent paper, leather cover, good binding and consistent quality. But for £140, I would expect an A5 sized notebook to have acid-free and acid-buffered paper, lignin free, perhaps with 25% cotton, the leather to be real honest leather and not some embossing on pigskin leather and I expect the gilding to be gold and not spray-paint.

For less than £140, I now have a custom, hand-made book, spring-back binding, Crane's thesis paper (100% cotton, acid-free, buffered, archival quality) with a buckram cover that is much stronger than leather. For just a notch under 140 I could have had leather. Gilding would have made it really over the top expensive, (an extra 70 or 100 orso) but then I would have had real gold and not a plastic-spray-on-paint. And all made with age old techniques that are proven and still being used for restoration work and really nice books.

And ever since I experienced this custom made joy, I couldn't be really happy with Smythson. Not for that price. Even though I bought them at half price and free of shipping during a sale, knowing what I know now, I feel a bit robbed to be honest.

I still have about 6 or 7 of the dukes sized notebooks with "Travel Journal" on the front and I'll use them throughout the next couple of years, but they're no longer the highly valued notebooks I bought.

 

The Smythsons do however have one advantage, and that is they have 196 leaves in a book that is about a 1,5cm thick. (the custom made has about 350 leaves in 4cm) But when traveling I also write often while being outside, (wife shopping and me sitting on a bench in the square, sitting outside a coffee shop or tearoom, while walking the woods or mountains) and pages that are as light as the featherweight are very susceptible to be blown about by the wind. I once had a page torn by stronger winds. But the weight difference is enormous: 300gr for the smythson and 1050gr for the springback.

Edited May 6, 2011 by alecgold

[ealing123]

Hi

 

I just came across this forum and would like to respond to some of the points raised above.

 

Regarding Bespoke Stationery ordering on the website, rest assured that this has only been temporarily removed, and will be reinstated very shortly.

 

We have been working hard with our web developers to provide a new bespoke ordering process that is more interactive, provides better on-screen previews and gives an improved customer experience. The launch of the bespoke section of the site was delayed when user trials suggested that we needed to make some further changes to make it easier to use.

 

We decided that we would rather delay the launch of the Bespoke section of the site by a few weeks and offer our customers a superb experience, rather than launching early and providing something that wasn't up to scratch. The new Bespoke ordering process will be online very soon, and is a major improvement on the old site.

 

Regarding the quality of our products:

 

- Our leather is always 100% genuine leather. We use a variety of animal skins, such as pigskin, calfskin and goatskin, and the type of leather used is stated on each product. All of our leathers are worked in our own European factories to a very high standard.

 

- We don't use spray paint for our gold stamping. All of our items are hand stamped using real gold or silver. If you are able to travel to London, please come into our Bond Street store where one of our goldstampers will be happy to demonstrate the stamping process for you. Goldstamping is a real skill that very few people in the UK possess, and takes years to master. For that reason you'll find that many of our competitors use spray painting and machines to do their stamping. We don't!

 

- Our products are manufactured and hand-finished in Italy and the UK, unlike other notebook producers who manufacture in bulk in the Far East. For that reason we believe that our quality is significantly better than other items on the market.

 

Hopefully I've provided a bit more insight above. If you have any further queries, please feel free to contact our Customer Service team who will be happy to help. Their can be called on +44 0845 873 2435 or reached via email at enquiries@smythson.com

 

We are always keen to hear feedback - good or bad - and will look to make improvements to our website wherever we can.

 

Regards

Chris

Smythson Direct

[AlecG]

Hi Chris and a warm welcome to FPN, I really appreciate you being here, being able to give first hand information and correcting us where we are wrong!

 

Good to hear the Bespoke section is getting back and I appreciate that Smythson prefers to deliver a good site and not press on for the sake of sales.

If I may be so free, I have some questions.

The leather on my dukes notebooks is leather, no doubt about, but the typical pigskin relief on the leather is so regular that I can't think but being embossed/imprinted?

With the spray paint I wasn't talking about the stamping if the initials I know some companies have been doing that as well with spray paint, but I was talking about the gilding of the pages/bookblock. Or am I mistaken and is this gilded in the old fashioned way as well?

I'm asking a lot, but why the non-acid free non-buffered non-cotton paper?

I know this isn't some toilet paper, far from it, but I was a bit disappointed when I learned about this composition. It is said the paper is used by writers, rich and famous and it would be a pity to not have their original handwritten notebooks in a 100 years. Look at the notebooks of Darwin, still being studied. Or the drawings and calculations of the great engineer Brunel?!

I think it is a pity we don't have more real high quality (part cotton) paper these days.

 

Btw very good to hear the books are being made in Italy and England!

Ow and is my impression true that Smytson has been making more and more fashion items since Ms. Cameron? And perhaps less focus on the stationary?

Edited May 19, 2011 by alecgold

[ealing123]

Hi there

 

I've passed your questions to our experts here in the buying and design teams who have provided the following answers:

 

> The leather on my dukes notebooks is leather, no doubt about, but the typical pigskin relief on the leather is so regular that I can't think but being embossed/imprinted?

 

"The pigskin is indeed printed – so it is natural pigskin printed with a pig print. The reason for this is that it allows for the top layer top be reworked, which has insect bites which leave marks and scratches etc. Also the actual follicle print is irregular. We find that while people want natural leather, they also want it to be perfect and don’t want irregular holes, patches and so on."

 

> With the spray paint I wasn't talking about the stamping if the initials I know some companies have been doing that as well with spray paint, but I was talking about the gilding of the pages/bookblock. Or am I mistaken and is this gilded in the old fashioned way as well?

 

"This is indeed gilded in the old fashioned way."

 

> why the non-acid free non-buffered non-cotton paper?

 

"The paper we use is made especially for us and is pretty much acid free. It is not archival grade paper, but modern milling techniques allow removal of lignins which used to be responsible for the paper eating itself over many years. This is no longer a real problem. On the question of adding cotton to the furnish- Cotton is generally added to achieve a longer folding life, so banknotes and charts are generally high in their cotton fibre content. However the costs of importing cotton linters from round the world means increasing the green footprint of our paper, which is something that we try and avoid. We are confident that our papers will still be around many years from now."

 

> I think it is a pity we don't have more real high quality (part cotton) paper these days

 

"This is easily available, but at a price and we do not get enough call for it to be worth making 5 tonnes at a time, which is the minimum that our mill will make for us."

 

> Is my impression true that Smytson has been making more and more fashion items since Ms. Cameron? And perhaps less focus on the stationary?

 

We can't really comment on this specifically, other than to say that we closely monitor our sales and listen to feedback from customers about the products that they would like us to produce.

 

I hope you'll find the above information useful.

 

Regards

Chris

[AlecG]

Hi Chris,

 

Thanks for all the answers! Certainly useful and quick too! Just a quick reply from me, it's friday night and I need to go.

 

I find it a pity that the leather is printed as I like the unregular structure of leather, but ooh well, if it does sell, there is a market for that

But Kudo’s for the gilding, I like that a lot!

I know the paper is lignin free, but acid free differs from lignin free. And acid free doesn’t mater anything if it isn’t lignin free, or at least if there isn't an alkaline buffer against the lignin. But the carbon footprint, green footprint or that kind of stuff makes me sight a bit at times.

5 tonnes of paper is a lot indeed, even for a bunch of perfect paper loving folks like here at FPN. Finding cotton paper in Europe doesn’t seem to easy. At least I had a lot of trouble finding paper that was good for fountain pens, but also complied with ISO 11108. Only paper that I found so far was Crane’s Thesis paper, a 100% cotton paper, that comes from the other side of the pond and only in letter sized format. Ow and with shipping is was quite expensive. But that’s a bit beside the topic.

 

Ow and sorry for the cheeky question about Ms. Cameron