I think this is somewhat over-simplified. A lot of people have great design sense and love vintage stuff. Creating good products is necessary but not sufficient to make a business. Not too many people have a forum like Coudal to sell from.
But I wasn't trying to make a point about simplifying anything. I definitely wasn't trying to say Step 1 obsess over something. Step 2. Profit. Coudal is a master at marketing and both he and Draplin have a tremendous reach into groups of people that helped get the ball rolling on these notebooks.
The point was merely that I've noticed that many of the people who I admire the most creatively seem to take "loves" and "interests" and made obsessions of them.
Aaron has taken a "love for vintage stuff" and turned it into quite an awesome collection. Which then turned into inspiration for his design/identity work for clients, and eventually it became the source of a great and well designed product idea. A lot of us could probably learn from this, and go much deeper into something that merely interests us in order to find better ideas.
Well, I'm probably not the one best to explain why this business has become so popular with a mass audience as I was really just pointing out where the idea came from. But if it helps, this business has gone onto be much more than just stuff for "paper nerds". An example on the top of my mind: J Crew carries these notebooks in their retail stores and online: http://www.jcrew.com/mens_feature/ingoodcompany/fieldnotes.j.... But I think Aaron captures it best:
“Will they go out of style? Oh yeah!” Draplin says. “The people who have a loop for frivolous shit, they’re one out of 100. There’s 99 other motherfuckers who take notes because that’s their job. The UPS guy that comes in here, he uses them. I gave him one a year ago he just fills full of shit. I would much rather see him using the things. It’s just paper. It’s not cool. The fonts aren’t cool at that point. But it works for him. And that is a cool thing."
