When Evernote launched Evernote Market last fall, it left a lot of people scratching their heads. What was a company, built around software that’s meant to streamline our lives, doing shilling Evernote-branded socks? Twelve months and $12 million in sales later, we have our answer. “I don’t think anyone outside of our walls expected [that],” says Jeff Zwerner, Evernote’s vice president of Design. “But I certainly had my targets.” Evernote has succeeded in turning freeloading users into paying customers through Evernote Market. It’s been a successful extension of the brand, so successful that the company is continuing to roll out new bespoke lines of office-related goods.
Its newest line of products, the Pfeiffer Collection, is a set of wooden containers and computer stands meant for the desktop workspace. Evernote tapped Eric Pfeiffer, an Oakland designer best known for his bent-wood products, to design the line of goods with input from Zwerner and his team on what the products should be. There’s catch-all containers for the knick knacks you have around your desk, a slotted dish for displaying your tablet and, most recently, a series of bent-wood computer stands inspired by Eames’ wooden chairs.
The connection to the Evernote brand might not be obvious, but Zwerner says the physical products fall right in line with what the company is trying to build overall. “This is an ideal product line to get us moving from the digital to analog and back and forth,” he says. “The same things were trying to do with the UI and UX of Evernote the app, we’re trying to do with your physical space.” It’s about finding ways to keep people focused on their work rather than the clutter that’s around them. With the app, Evernote has begun to strip out features and streamline how you take notes. With the market, it’s about identifying those key products that will add to the experience of working at a desktop---things like the warmth and comfort wood provides---without adding to the disorder of our harried work lives.
“In the moment when you want to write a note, the only thing you need is the tools to write the note; you don’t need all the clutter and all the things around that digital environment,” says Zwerner. “If you translate that to the physical space we’re doing the same thing. It’s about, how do you create something that's not only textural and attractive and adds something to the workspace, but does it in a small enough footprint and helps you organize your things so you can focus on the work?”
