Planning the best version of yourself with pen and paper

For these indie businesses and their customers, digital planning can never replace the joy of pen and paper

- Somak Ghoshal

In 2022, Shampa Kabi, a graphic designer based in Mumbai, left her job with an art gallery and decided to start a small business. It was the last stretch of the covid-19 pandemic and most of the world was reeling from the aftermath of the lockdowns. For the previous two years, people had been pushed to the edge working from home, struggling to stay organised in between Zoom fatigue, virtual schooling and grocery runs. Simply staying afloat, if not organised, had been a full-time job for millions across the globe for over a year.

It was against this backdrop that Kabi decided to launch her brand, Decluttercat, featuring her own line of paper planners. "I have always been a pen and paper person," she says on the phone, "but I never found a planner I liked. And so, I started designing my own planners." The elegant, minimal notebooks caught the eye of friends, who began to demand similar products for themselves, which led Kabi to print 100 copies of her weekly planner in 2022. It sold out fast—the kind of proof of concept every aspiring entrepreneur wants to see.

Kabi wasn't alone in noticing a surge of interest in planners and journals in the early 2020s. In another part of the country, in Coimbatore, Harini Palanisamy, founder of a premium stationery brand, The Journal Lab, then just a couple of years old, also saw traction for her flagship planner, Find Your Balance, which doubled up as a self-care journal.

"Most of our products are created for a general audience, and not just for women, who are the typical target customers for a lot of stationery brands," she says of her journals, planners and productivity tools that have minimalistic cover designs, muted colour palettes, and mostly gender-agnostic vibes.