Founder Amy Cooper-Wright
In 2015 Amy set up Mark+Fold, bringing together a number of threads — a very personal love of good stationery, professional experience in print production, and an ambition to create a brand with integrity.
An early love of stationery
Amy grew up around paper and specialist stationery, thanks to her two architect parents (originally from Glasgow, but at the time working from a studio in London Soho). She developed expensive taste in notebooks and was quite happily indulging it well into her teens, when she relied on notebooks for nightly journaling (a great remedy for teenage angst) and for her academic studies, which eventually led her to Oxford University to read Philosophy and French, followed by a Masters in Design at University of the Arts London.
Frustration with poor quality notebooks
Digital tools caught on and stationery quality declined (around the year 2000) and the notebook industry panicked. Suddenly notebooks were being made as cheaply as possible and designed for mass appeal. Amy’s experience, on the London high street, was that you could not lay your hands on a plain and simple, well-made notebook, even if you were willing to pay more for it.
Fifteen years in branding and book design
Fifteen years later, Amy founded Mark+Fold in 2015. By then she had worked in some of the world’s top design agencies includingsuch as Pentagram and EdenSpiekermann, for clients ranging from Transport for London to Fabergé. She had also trained in traditional book-binding, and designed books for Vancouver Art Gallery, Josi Miro Gallery New York and Stiff + Trevillion Architects.
100 White Papers
Amy developed her expertise and encyclopedic knowledge of paper during her Masters, where she conducted research into a very narrow range of papers — all white, all 100-120gsm. She examined their properties and carried out a series of tests, which eventually led to the shortlist of papers used by Mark+Fold.
Going on press
From the north of Scotland, to a small town in Belgium with printing in the blood, these pilgrimages to be among the noisy rhythmic machines of production have been an integral part of the Mark+Fold journey, and they always will be. The transparency that naturally comes from this, in sharing these visits with the Mark+Fold Community is equally important and something we feel more brands should be doing.
Building a community
Mark+Fold is like a magnet for people with a similar obsession with stationery, and it's an endless source of joy for Amy to connect with like-minded people. The motivation behind everything we do is the email from someone who says how much they enjoy using their diary. It is the person who tells us she's doing all her PhD notes in one particular Mark+Fold notebook, building an enviable catalogue of ideas. And that her husband used the Planner Pad to make notes ahead of a successful job interview.