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Monday 24 September 2012

My thoughts on the new Temperley for Filofax range

Disclaimer. The following post are a description of my own thoughts and feelings of the products.

Where do I begin????

Filofax..............
I love Filofax, but am not liking the direction they seem to be heading at the moment.

Temperley..........
To be honest, before the Filofax collaboration I hadn't heard of Alice Temperley.

As much as Filofax will not admit it, the first Filofax/Temperley collaboration was not a success. If you speak to retailers, not
many of the Affair rrp £375 or the Guinea rrp £399 have been sold.

So it begs the question "why did Filofax go there again????"

But they did. And did it badly.

So where do we start?? Lets start with the lesser of two evils.

Introducing the Violet
Filofax say "A fitting addition to any fashion enthusiast's wardrobe". Mmm. Let me think about that............No. Obviously I'm not fashionable.





To be honest it doesn't even look like the photo on Filofax website. It feels like it is made from the thinnest leather ever, and isn't as shiny.

As Helena Bloomer of SlamPR says, Filofax users are note takers, it's just as well we don't need the diary space as its filled with multi-language.


I would like to be convinced with this Filofax though. So if Filofax or SlamPR would like to send me one to trial, then I would happily do so to be proved wrong.

Now onto the next one.

The IKat-

Breathes a heavy sigh at this point....……

Why did you do this Filofax????





I'm sorry but this is truly tragic.
This Filofax is awful and I would be ashamed to tell people if I owned one of these. The Ikat is selling at an rrp of £45. There are far better Filofaxes for sale for less, than the Ikat. This is the worst thing since the release of the Apex

I can't even bring myself to go through the description of the Ikat. It makes me angry. Words used include ideal, accessory, fashionista, unique, (well it is definitely that) perfect for the party season.

It is cheap looking and I was mortified to find the way to remove the diary to become a clutch bag was to pull it out. The diary slides into a back pocket with a piece of plastic!! No fancy fastenings to make it nice and pretty.

Filofax need to focus on what their real customers want. Something which they have become very good at ignoring. They need to stop tragic collaborations such as these and focus on reliable binders,decent inserts, and listening to their fans and followers.


So Filofax. It's over to you.

Thanks for reading.

:)


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Philofaxy meet up. 22/9/12

Hello everyone.

Today I'm going to give you a round up of the Philofaxy meet up held in London on Saturday.

This was my 3rd meet up and I was very excited to be going.





My journey started by train, travelling down from Retford station to Kings Cross.

As it was a nice day and no one was meeting me at the station, I decided to walk to The Tate using ios6 maps on iPhone (risky I know, but worked).





I arrived there early and was pleased to see Steve there already.
Slowly other members arrived and very soon we were able to go inside for lunch.

People in attendance were;
Me
Steve
Imy
Thomas
Alison
Rebecca
Jess
Yasmin
Keji
Sarah
Andy
Preethi
Christa
Anita

As soon as we sat down the Filofaxes were out.





We were split into two tables which worked quite well actually. It gave us the opportunity to chat with those on our table during the meal, then all swap around afterwards.













Anita waving her Filofaxes at me in the background :).

After we had finished lunch, we headed over to City Organiser.









Andy had very kindly agreed to option the shop once again for us to browse/purchase to our hearts content.

Our first port of call once inside City Organiser was to check out the new Temperley range.





As you can see I was not impressed with the Ikat.





And Alison looks horrified by the Ikat.

I will be doing a separate post on the new Temperley range, so keep an eye out for it.

After we had finished at City Organiser, people split off to do their own thing. Some people went home/hotel, but me, Imy, Anita, Sarah, Preethi, Christa and Keji went shopping in Artbox, Muji and paperchase.

After we said our goodbyes to Christa and Keji, we made our way over to Vapiano where we met up with Steve and Thomas for a meal. It was a lovely place and the meal was fantastic. You can watch them cook your pasta meal.

At the end of the night we said goodnight to everyone and headed towards our hotel. I was sharing with Imy, and Steve was in the same hotel, so we had a drink in the hotel bar, then retired for the night.


This was a fantastic meet up, and my favourite to date. It was lovely and chilled out. I loved meeting new Philofaxy members and of course seeing the old ones again.

It was a very magical weekend.

:)


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Tuesday 18 September 2012

An open letter to MD of Slam PR.

For quite a while now Philofaxy fans have become more and more frustrated with Filofax. Their lack of interest in listening to their loyal customers has made people such as Steve and Ray create their own inspirational pieces for us all to use and enjoy in our Filofax. They listen to what people want and need.

I will admit to spending a lot of money on various Filofax items over the years, but sadly their standards seem to be slipping, and don't seem to put as much attention to detail.

In a recent interview, Helena Bloomer, MD of SLAM PR had a lot of unfavourable things to say about Filofax and the direction the company was heading.

In response to this interview Dave Popely wrote this open letter to SlamPR. I really hope both SlamPR and Filofax start listening to their LOYAL customers.

Enjoy.


Dear Ms Bloomer

This letter is a response to the interview recently conducted with you by FeaturesExec Media Bulletin, and is being posted simultaneously (more or less) on a number of blogging sites in the UK, the US and beyond.

What binds us together as bloggers is that we are all members of an international community and website devoted to all things Filofax, and are all passionate about personal organisation, and the Filofax brand in particular. We have read, as a community, and with increasing disbelief, your comments concerning the Filofax brand, and this is our response.

We note from your comments that, as a result of a ‘usage and attitudes study’ you have conducted, you have been led to the conclusion that the distinguishing features of Filofax users are that we ‘like to write notes’, and that we are ‘very interested in fashion/stylish accessories’. We can assure you this is not the case in either respect, and that we find being pigeon-holed in this way to be demeaning and insulting in a way you most probably cannot understand. We are a community whose passions are for good organisation and a flexible, functional system to underpin that organisation. Some of us, perhaps a minority, have considerations of fashion, but all of us care that our systems of personal organisation assist us in the lives we live and the tasks we undertake.

In short, if all we wanted to do was to ‘write notes’, it is highly unlikely we would invest in relatively expensive binders, refills and systems such as your client provides. We wonder just who you have asked to participate in your ‘usage and attitudes study’. Whoever they are, we can assure you they are unrepresentative of your client’s core customer base, many of whom have been loyal customers for over twenty years and now feel ignored by your client.

We want to suggest to you that the direction you are taking your client in is ultimately going to prove fundamentally damaging to their business. The fashion ‘business’ is notoriously fickle and fast-changing, and you seem to have convinced your client that ignoring and alienating their loyal core customer base will bring dividends in terms of a new, fashion-conscious, high-spending corpus. We want to suggest to you, and by extension to Filofax themselves, that when the fashion ‘carousel moves on, your client will be left neither their newly promised client base, nor the client base you have led them to abandon. Do you really think this is smart business advice?

You say in your interview that you consider your brief with Filofax to ‘make (your client) fashionable again’. We would suggest to you that your client’s products, if they were ever ‘fashionable’ at all, were so because they fulfilled a function and a need which was perceived to be important to their customers. We now have growing evidence of a lowering of standards of manufacture in Filofax binders, of poor paper quality in refills, and of a lack of willingness to listen to your customers’ opinions. Several of our members, on voicing opinions similar to these, have been invited by Filofax (or whoever runs their Twitter feed) to communicate those opinions directly to your client. This has been done, and no further comment or reaction from your client has been forthcoming. We would like to know whether this is really the kind of public relations you wish for your clients? Or are you merely concerned with putting fashionable, well-heeled ‘bottoms on seats’ at London, New York and other Fashion Weeks with the aid of free give-aways of ranges of binders priced beyond the reach of the average core Filofax user and similarly poorly manufactured? We would suggest that your ‘fashion focused press office’ would be better employed communicating with the loyal, core customer base of your client, the majority of whom, it now seems, are on the point of abandoning your client’s brand in favour of providers who will listen.

We write as concerned individuals and not as representatives of the community to which we belong. However, it is worth noting that many of us have a very high annual spend on Filofax and related products, and we suggest that Filofax is in danger of sacrificing this loyal customer spend in exchange for something far less reliable in the long term.

In conclusion, we have every confidence that these opinions will be ignored as ‘unfashionable’ by your ‘attitude studies’ and ‘fashion focused’ executives. However, we care enough about the Filofax brand to communicate these opinions plainly to you, and to hope that Filofax will one day return to the business in which it flourished for over seventy years, of providing highly functional, attractive but reasonably priced, personal organisation systems to those who need them, which is an increasing number of people in the societies in which we live.


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Philofaxy meet up Saturday 22nd September 2012

I just thought I would do a quick post to say how much I'm looking forward to the meet up on Saturday.

 If you follow me on Twitter @icclewu I will try and tweet some pics as things are happening, but I may forget in the excitement (so give me a shout if I do).

Then hopefully on Sunday or Monday I will do a roundup post of the meet up.

See you soon.

:)

All Stars Guest Post - Femke - Recipe Filofax

Hello everyone.


Today I have got a special guest post as part of the Philofaxy Allstars Tour 2012. more info about this tour can be found here.  http://philofaxy.blogspot.co.uk/p/all-stars.html

It is a post by Femke whose blog is http://deligted.blogspot.com/ who can be found on Twitter http://twitter.com/deligted

Femke very kindly agreed to do a post on her Recipes Filofax, so without further a do here it is.

:)

My Recipe Filofax.

Here is my recipe Filofax. It’s just an A5 Metropol in Black. 

 This is what you see when you open it:

 On the left there are recipes I’ve taken from magazines which I wanna try someday. 
  
This is a more close up version of the right side. I found the personal shopping pages on a Dutch Filofax website and they’re very useful! 
I then have two lists which I try to update and they show my what’s in my pantry and my freezer. This comes in handy when I make my grocery lists. 

After that, there’s the A-Z index in which I’ve handwritten all my recipes. 

 At the back on my Filofax there is a list of the recipes I want to try. Not only the ones from magazines but also from my cooking books. 


And of course I have a notepad at the back. I use this for the lists and for writing down the recipes. 
Hope you enjoyed the tour of my recipe Filofax and thank you, Tracy for letting me post on your blog! 
Thank you very much Femke for your guest post. I LOVE the personal shopping pages you have. That's a fantastic idea!!!!!!!
Look out soon for a guest post from me featuring on  http://deligted.blogspot.com/  as part of the Philofaxy Allstars tour.

Monday 10 September 2012

A tour of my Osterley compact

Hey everyone.
Today I have for you a tour of my Filofax Compact Osterley in grey.
It is a video, yes that is right a video tour of my Osterley called Oscar.




Now I apologise for the crapness of this video. I hate doing videos and having photos taken of me, especially when I can see me.
So I hope you enjoy it, click on the link, and any comments/questions feel free to comment below.
:)
My Osterley tour
:)

Monday 3 September 2012

30 days of lists-September. Where in the world do I want to visit?

Day 3 of the #30filolists brings us where in the world do I want to visit?

Now this was a tricky one, as I would like to visit loads of places. Just to narrow it down here is a short list.





:)

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30 days of lists-September

Hey everyone.
This month I am starting a new blog challenge. It is taken from the 30 days of lists, but has been tweaked for the Philofaxy peeps. There is a Facebook page to go with it, which when I get on the laptop will put a link. Every month someone else makes a list for the month ahead. The first and last day of the month will generally be the same, being goals for the month and a review of the month.

This is this months lists.




The idea is you do one list a day according to the date.

So. I will start off with the 1st and 2nd of September.








I may blog these daily, or may end up being every few days. I will see how it goes.


Thanks for reading.

:)

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