Moleskine City Notebook Hong Kong & Beijing Versions Launched!
After a week of setting up the Travel Photo Cafe promotion in various stores (which I will cover later), I must say a BIG THANK YOU to Moleskine, its distributor and colleagues who helped to pull this off smoothly. Finally, the long awaited Hong Kong and Beijing City Notebook versions are launched, the first 2 Asian cities for many to come. Moleskine enthusiastically rushed to release these two notebooks in order to catch the Beijing Olympic event, which generated a lot of excitement among the locals.
I first received the prototypes of these notebooks a month ago, the feeling was totally different from the time I received Paris/London/New York versions. I immediately flipped through the maps of my own beloved city with excitement despite the fact that I had some negative comments about City Notebooks in general. The Beijing version is quite special, there is an Olympic Game Area insert at the back pocket, which contains 6 pages of maps, 2 pages of street index and 2 pages containing a calendar month which you can mark your own schedule for the game. This is definitely a collectable as they won't include this insert forever :)
The release of these notebooks is just in time to join our Travel Photo Cafe fair held in 4 stores. In collaboration with a local group called DayTauChung (literally translates to "neighborhood worm"), a mini theme called "Digging Up Local Favors" was created. Several Hong Kong notebooks were customized to show some lesser known but highly interesting spots with pictures and routes. We will even hold a small session on 5th July 08 in Times Square to mingle with customers sharing travel tips.
An interesting incident happened during this launch. A customer walked into our Times Square store on 24th June 08 expecting to find the new City Notebooks but couldn't find it. He asked one of the sales floor staffs but she said it wouldn't be available until the Travel Photo Cafe promotion setup, which was 3 days later. While he walked away disappointed he found the notebooks he wanted displayed somewhere with amazing price. HK$108 as supposed to the advertised HK$188! So he grabbed it immediately, just as he pulled out his wallet to pay for it, the staff ran to tell him the correct price. Disappointed and unhappy about the whole incident, he paid for it anyway and went back to send a complaint email to Moleskine and to our office.
In a very short time, Moleskine responded by forwarding this complaint to our distributor, when we received the same complaint from our end, our store manager got in touch with this customer, apologized and arranged a credit to his membership card for other purchases. Turned out the sales floor staff who'd just gotten back from lunch break when the newly arrived stock was shown somewhere she didn't realize. Comparing to my previous customer service work over 10 years ago, the whole incident from start to resolution happened real fast, almost instantaneous and globally coordinated, isn't it amazing? This also shows how Moleskine is in constant alert for customer complaint/satisfaction and I'm very happy with their dedication in this respect.
One more interesting thing about this incident is that the customer was just like me flipping through the maps excited, but he immediately found two spelling mistakes in the Hong Kong City Notebook. On page 12, "Bo Ma Shan" was incorrectly printed as "Bo Ma Chan", while on page 11 "Choi Sai Woo Park" was printed as "Coi Sai Woo Park". I guess Moleskine has already noticed this.
More photos of the Hong Kong & Beijing City Notebook launch and press coverage in this flickr set.
Hint of new Moleskine product: I overheard somewhere that there will be something related to filing from Moleskine. Yes it is still a rumor.
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