Black Books

How time flies… it’s been over 2 years since we started the Marou adventure and in that short, intense period of time, the initial idea has grown into something real and big(-ish!) and much more complex than we could ever envisage. The result of those decisions we took on a whim, years ago, sometimes still impact us today. What if we had chosen that path instead of this? What was going through our head when we were building the blocks on which we stand today? We don’t have a time machine to question our younger idealistic selves, but something very close, a collection of 5 well-worn black Moleskine notebooks where day after day I have recorded scores of projects, meeting notes, sales plans, a never-ending list of to-do lists, squiggles and doodles…

Those notebooks were scattered all around my house, not exactly lost, but not really organised either, so when the other day our old friend Sasha asked us to unearth the notes from the days when we were conceiving the original moulds for our bars I took the opportunity to gather all the books in one place and take a few steps back to a time when…

Our chocolate bars could have taken a different shape…

Our factory could have been in a colonial townhouse…

Our production process was still theoretical…

The Black Book saga still continues and with it the recording of our adventures in Marou-land. The fact that all of these notebooks are of the same brand and the same colour (though not all have the same number of pages or the same finish…) is not entirely accidental. Call me a hipster if you want but I have long admired what Moleskine has done for the humble notebook: turning a commodified and often overlooked product, infusing it with the mystique of artists long gone and supernatural build qualities to make it a powerfully discreet attribute of the ‘creative type’.

PS: Black Books is also the name of an old beloved English sitcom…