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Field Notes cofounders Aaron Draplin and Jim Coudal have convened to ostensibly talk about their cult-fave memo book brand. But Draplinthe gregarious, hilarious Portland proprietor of Draplin Design Co.just wrapped up jury duty. And almost 10 minutes into our conversation, hes regaling us with courtroom sketches he made during the trial. (Of course, I had to figure out some way to exploit it for creative purposes.) Such freewheeling is just part and parcel of knowing Draplin, but Coudal has a knack for seamlessly and seemingly effortlessly steering the conversation back to the subject at hand. It underscores a point: Without Draplin, there would be no Field Notes. And without Coudal, there would definitely be no Field Notes. What Jim brought to the table is that he had the light bulb where he saw what this thing could be, Draplin says. Jims, like, reputable and stuff. People always say, well, youre half of the thingyeah, but I would have killed it because I might have gone to the next goofy little thing. Jim Coudal and Aaron Draplin [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] Today, 20 years and more than 10 million sold notebooks later, what began as a casual side project with no real expectation has yielded a cult product that is in 2,000 stores worldwide, has a robust direct-to-consumer membership program, and, Coudal says, just came off its best year for sales and revenue. And 2025 is on pace, he adds, with hopes to surpass it. It all goes back to Coudals light bulband, of course, Draplins before it. He had been drawing all his life and learned bookmaking at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. When Draplin left the Midwest for the West Coast in 1993, he began collecting memo books that agriculture companies historically gave out as promos, and was taken with their lineage and practical design. He decided to make some of his own notebooks in 2005, and the pragmatism and charm of those promosthe vernacular type treatments, layouts, voicefound their way into Field Notes DNA. He hand-printed 200 notebooks on a desktop Gocco and later invested $2,000 into a first run of 2,000 notebooks with FIELD NOTES printed on the cover in Futura. His goal? To give them out to friends. And one of those friends along the way happened to be Coudal, of Coudal Partners, the measured mind to Draplins mad scientist. [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] He just said, There’s something here, Draplin recalls. Coudals team made a website. On the day it went live, they made 13 modest sales via PayPal. But that was okayagain, he and Draplin both had their own gigs, and Coudal says Field Notes wasnt a priority for either of them. But, Before you know it, there’s media attention . . . and we’re seeing real numbers, Draplin says. According to Coudal: One by one we fired all our clients because this Field Notes thing was getting bigger and taking up more of our timeand it was a lot more fun than making work we were proud of for people we didn’t particularly like. Stanley Donwood, Is a River Alive? [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] THE FIELD NOTES FORMULA When the pair formally launched the brand, Coudal says projects at his studio had three mandates: They had to make money, as the team had mortgages and kids to put through school; they had to be something the team would be proud of; and they had to be able to learn something new from it. Field Notes checked the boxes. Draplins goals were more straightforward. He says he was making a buck for every grand the agency he worked for did. The mid-aughts were the dawn of the modern maker movement, and there was an opportunity to craft your own future. He did just that with a concrete design system for the brands signature notebooks from the get-go. There’s never been a piece of type on any Field Notes material that wasn’t Futura or Century Schoolbook, two beautiful, hardworking American fonts, Coudal says. Other assets like the highly structured copy on the inside covers, as well as the logo placement on the front, were likewise sacrosanct. We can do different printing techniques, and we can do different-size notebooks, and we do a lot of things. But we don’t mess with what made Field Notes Field Notes. [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] They sold the 3.5-by-5.5-inch 48-page books in packs of three, and the business grew slowlybut steadily. And as it grew, Coudal says, it became easier: he more notebooks you make, the cheaper each one becomes because youre buying in bulk. When they began scaling up their print runs, they were able to get the price down to a couple dollars per book, and sell the three-packs for $13 to 15which got them into stores. (Today, you can find them everywhere from indies to Barnes & Noble.) One critical moment came in February 2010, when J. Crew featured Field Notes in its catalog, alongside the retailers other personal favorites from our design heroes. There was a Timex watch, Ray-Bans, Sperry shoesand out of fucking nowhere, Field Notes, Coudal says. And when that happened, a lot changed for us. Coudal says it gave the brand instant credibilityafter all, if it was good enough for J. Crew, it was good enough for your store. In time, friends began sending him screenshots of Field Notes in TV shows; he and Draplin would see people jotting notes in them in bars and elsewhere; on the design web, they became an obsession. By 2014, there was even a subreddit dedicated to them titled FieldNuts. Meanwhile, Draplin dropped into a New York store where the notebooks were arranged amongst $600 sweaters and $800 jeans. And the proprietor told him he could be selling the notebooks for $29.95 or $40which is something he would not do. That’s my favorite partthis stuff is accessible, right? Draplin notes. [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] SUBSCRIPTION STRATEGY In 2009, Field Notes launched a set of color variants, and does a new installment every quarter, which subscribers can get annually for $120. They are up to 67 editions. And over the years, the program has grown to include elaborate series like the brands popular National Parks books, celebrations of spaceflight and letterpress, and dozens more themes. Coudal says the first few print runs were around 1,500 packs eachbut they have grown to the 30,000-to-60,000 range today. He adds that aside from a couple very strange years around COVID, gross revenue and DTC sales (which account for about 50% of the business) have increased almost every year since 2009. Rocky Mountain National Park by Rory Kurtz, Great Smoky Mountains National Park by Chris Turnham, Yellowstone National Park by Brave the Woods [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] The thing about the subscription model is, first of all, people are paying us now for a product we haven’t made yet, Coudal says. That’s really good for cash flow for a small company. But more important than that, having these four projects every year that people are funding ahead of time gives us a really great way to make a relationship with our customers and our retailers. Each one also fulfills Coudals third tenet for projectshe has an opportunity to explore an entirely new subject through the work. Emmy Star Brown, Flora [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] THE DRAPLIN FACTOR Of course, as Field Notes has risen in notoriety over the years, Draplin has been on a parallel path. He embodies the brand at design conferences like Adobe MAX and in his merch pop-ups, where he is treated like a rock star. I ask about the impact of Draplins industry celebrity, and Coudal jumps in. I can answer that because Aaron’s going to be humble about it. I think it’s made a lot of difference. I think that Aaron has brought a lot of people to the brand, and he’s also like our gospel preacher out on the road, telling the storythe gospel of Field Notes. Before the brand had an advertising budget, Coudal says that was critical. And for Draplin, those talks arent to simply shill. It’s a reminder: You can go make your own stuff, too, he says. With Draplin on the West Coast, Field Notes core team of around 10 is anchored in Chicago. While Draplin says he used to be far more involved in the day-to-day around seven years ago, these days he regards his role as a bit of a mercenary. He drops in with ideas; Coudal will, say, assign him to go make something weird. Hes also pissed the team off, on occasion, by going rogue with an idea. [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] Ultimately, I’m along for the ride at that point, because there’s a den mother watching over us, Draplin says. Asa result of being removed from the daily routine, he adds, I get to experience the buzz of what the customer gets. Which is, in all likelihood, a valuable temp check. A sample of Aaron Draplin’s collection of vintage farmer’s memo books. Explore the digitized collection here. [Screenshot: courtesy Field Notes, Eric Lovejoy, Leigh McKolay and Joe Dawson Jr. (site credits)] Aaron’s wisdom and inspiration are a constant good thing for the brand,” Coudal says. “And while he’s not checking the layouts anymore, he’s certainly a big part of the general direction that the ship sails. Looking to the future, Coudal says his goals are straightforward enough: Generate more interest, tell interesting stories, get wider distribution. Draplin, meanwhile, still seems a bit incredulous that the company exists in the first place. The biggest, funnest part about this thingnumber one, we didn’t lose any money. Isn’t that cool? I would have been okay if we did, he says. But, This can exist. This happened. [Weve done] it for almost 20 years. It’s fucking amazing. I’ll tell you what . . . it exceeded my dreams.
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E-Commerce
In 1995, Benjamin Santer was the lead author on a chapter of the second Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that would alter climate science forever. In a culmination of more than a year of meticulous research, the chapter came to a groundbreaking conclusionconfirming an international scientific consensus that humans were having a discernible impact on the climate. The pushback was immediate and immense. Lobbyist groups erroneously accused Santer of removing discussion of scientific uncertainty in the report. Frederick Seitz, former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a founding member of the environmental skeptic conservative think tank the George C. Marshall Institute, published an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal claiming, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process. Despite being backed up by the climate science community, Santer underwent congressional hearings, personal threats, and calls for his dismissal at his lab. Despite the pushback, Santer has continued to do groundbreaking research identifying human fingerprints in many different observed climate variables and received a number of awards for his work, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. Santer recently spoke to Fast Company about the threats the second Trump administration poses to the future of climate science and shared advice for the next generation of scientists entering a contentious time. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.) How does the current state of climate research compare to other peaks and valleys you have seen over your career? I think this is the deepest valley that I’ve ever been in in my entire scientific career. It feels different from anything else that I’ve encountered, and I encountered some pretty deep valleys after publication of the discernible human influence finding in the 1995 IPCC report. But this is different because it’s so targeted. The intent of the administration is to destroy, to tear down a capability to do basic science, to understand how and why the world around us is changing, to understand the inequities of climate change, to invest in low-carbon energy sources and support the development of low-carbon energy. All of these things have happened in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, and so much destruction has impacted not only our long-term futuresin academia, in research, the grants that will be available for us, the opportunities at universitybut also the leadership of this country and science and technology. And of course, not only in climate science and green energy, but also increasingly in health, the development of novel vaccines, the development of cancer drugs, all of that is imperiled. To turn away from those challenges as this administration is doing makes no sense whatsoever. What are some of the concrete steps this administration is taking to reduce climate protections? It’s been a full-court press, I would say: not only the illegal termination of probationary employees, tens of thousands of them across agencies like NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], and NASA, but the changing of language [around climate change]. This willful ignorance seems very reminiscent of COVID under the first Trump administration. You may recall that President Trump argued that COVID was no worse than the seasonal flu. He seemed intent on downplaying any danger to the U.S. public that might interfere with the economy. Why do I mention that? Because it’s the same deal with climate change. If you pretend it doesn’t exist, then you can go on with business as usual, Drill baby, drill, all that kind of stuff. And that’s what’s happening. The administration is pretending that human-caused climate change isn’t happening, and everything’s fine, when it isn’t. In addition to the firings, in addition to the censorship, againas has been widely reportedaccess to data is reducing. [For example,] because of some of the firings at NOAA, there aren’t scientists to launch weather balloons. At a number of locations, weather balloons are critically important. They make measurements of temperature and moisture, and those measurements are ingested by weather forecast models. They help the weather forecast models to know something about the current state of the atmosphere and the surface of the ocean, and that information is extremely important in making a reliable weather forecast. Because of the firings, we’re losing some of the weather balloon information that flows into weather forecasts. So all of this taken together, when you take a step back and look at it, is an effort to keep the public ignorant about the reality and seriousness of climate change. Do you think that there’s any possibility that other countries might be able to step in to fill the gaps the U.S. is creating? I hope that there are folks in space agencies like the European Space Agency, the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Aerospace Center), and in Japan and China, who understand the seriousness of the threat to the continuity of these records. These aren’t records that just the U.S. uses. The entire world uses these estimates of global-scale changes in the atmosphere, the ocean, the land surface for evaluating climate models, for doing fingerprint research, for improving our basic understanding of the atmospheric and ocean general circulation. And the U.S. has been a leader in this Earth observation enterprise and in making these datasets available to the international community. Now all of that work is imperiled, so the hope is that there are indeed folks who are contingency-planning in other countries who are trying to figure out, well, what do we do? But if these satellites go away, the unfortunate thing is that it takes time, right? You can’t just launch a satellite and do this gap-filling very quickly. The development of new satellites and the launching of new satellites is the stuff of years, not the stuff of months. It also would mean a huge financial investment in gap-filling, in the ocean, and in the satellite measurements of temperature, moisture, winds, you name it. So it is concerning. Hopefully there are those in Congress who will push back against the president’s budget request for NASA and will recognize that if the U.S hands off the baton of leadership in Earth observation to other countries, it will be difficult to flip a switch and restart. In part because they will lose hundreds, perhaps thousands of good people who have no prospect of employment given what’s happened with NSF [National Science Foundation] grants and firings and cuts to NOAA and NASA. If you lose that expertise, then even with a change of the administration, it’s difficult to restart. This is why it’s so critically important for folks to use their voices and speak publicly about the harms caused by this willful ignorance, and I’m going to try continuing to do that as long as I possibly can. Scientists don’t have the hippocratic oath that doctors do, but we should. If you see that harm to the stability of climate and to present and future generations is being caused, then, in my opinion, you have a moral and ethical responsibility as a climate scientist to speak out against that. Do you have any advice for young people looking to get into the sustainability world in this tumultuous time? Keep plugging away. If you’re passionate about the science, if it’s part of your identity, find a way to do it. I can’t imagine not doing research. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of what I think about when I get up in the morning. For anyone who is really concerned about the kind of world in which they and their loved ones will grow up, find a way of continuing to [work on climate research and advocacy], even if it’s only in your spare time and you have to have a different day job. Science has to find a way of continuing. It’s a harsh world out there now with a lot of powerful people wanting to fundamentally change the scientific enterprise in the United States and remove consideration of inequities in our society causing unequal impacts of climate change. Science has to find a way of continuing, of living, of tackling the big questions of the day, irrespective of whether the administration likes or does not like the answer.
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E-Commerce
A TV ad for Twix has been banned in the UK after an industry standards group said it promoted unsafe driving. The commercial “Two is More Than One” shows a driver in vintage sedan being followed on a remote road; to lose his pursuer, he swerves off the highway and into a ravine. The man lands safely upside down on top a right-side-up clone version of him and his car, and togetherwith Twix in handthey ride off into the desert as the sun sets. The ad is an absurd play on the double candy bars Twix is known for, but for regulators for the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), an independent advertising regulator in the UK that polices ads standards, the ad went too far. In a ruling Wednesday, the ASA said the ad encourages “dangerous driving” and banned it from airing again in its current iteration. Absurdity and fantasy are favorite ways for advertisers to sell products from candy to perfume, and Mars Wrigley argued their Twix ad had “a cinematic presentation” and was set “in a separate world that was absurd, fantastical and removed from reality.” Rather than encourage unsafe driving, the company argued the ad used imaginative storytelling, absurd elements, and Hollywood style to convey the message of the campaign, according to the ruling. Further, the company noted that Twix is known for playful, humorous advertising, like “Ideologies,” the 2012 ad that pitted the left vs. right Twix against each other. The ASA didn’t dispute that the ad had a cinematic feel, but they had a problem with the emphasis on a chase and speed, and ultimately the group believed the spot broke ad standards against encouraging irresponsible driving. The ASA has enforced the rule before, including in 2015 against Honda. “We considered the emphasis on a chase, and the speed inherent to that, and the driving maneuvers featured would be dangerous and irresponsible if emulated in real life on a public highway,” the ruling says. “Because we considered the driving depicted in the ads condoned unsafe driving, that appeared likely to breach the legal requirements of the Highway Code, we concluded the ads were irresponsible.” The ad no longer appears on the Twix UK YouTube page, though third-party accounts uploaded it for the curious, and truth be told, it’s a whole lot more interesting now that it’s banned. For a candy brand that caters to the young and young at heart, making a humorous commercial that’s too dangerous for TV might just be a badge of honor.
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E-Commerce
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