The First Product - The Pocket Tomoe River Notebook

The first products from Pebble Stationery Co – the Pocket Tomoe River Notebook and Pebble Pencil, were launched on Kickstarter in November 2018.

The Pocket Tomoe River Notebook was developed from a love of writing, creating, organising and learning and a love of pocket notebooks. After years of using pocket notebooks, we couldn’t find one that we really loved, so we decided to design and develop our own. 

We found that typically pocket notebooks had too few pages – we were constantly migrating tasks and lists and didn’t have the right notes with us because they were in the previous notebook. The paper quality usually couldn’t handle fountain pens, and we snagged clothing and fingers and scratched our pens on the staples.

During the product development process, we created a number of prototypes, made through different suppliers, with different papers, covers and binding methods and tested through a lot of different use cases to finalise our design.

Our Kickstarter campaign was fully funded in the first 24 hours of launch and ended with over 300% of our initial funding goal. Following funding, we were able to successfully fulfil and deliver our products 1 month ahead of our optimistic schedule.

Pebble Stationery Co also made a commitment to donate 1 pencil for each packet of Pocket Tomoe River Notebooks to a child in need. As a result of our first Kickstarter campaign, we were able to donate 200 pencils to the children of the Shree Annapurna Panchankanya Primary School in Nepal, which were shipped to Nepal in January 2019.