is a column that revisits once-popular companies and brands that have seemingly disappeared.
Before the bullet journal, the pricey Japanese planner Hobonichi Techo, and the pocket-sized, collector-friendly Field Notes, many of todayâs self-defined superorganizers had a Trapper Keeper.
You might remember the three-ring, color-coded, Velcroed school binder, whose ubiquity in the 1980s and â90s makes it a byword for nostalgia. For a whole generation, it was our first information organization system, a childâs garden of productivity.
The Trapper Keeper was itself well planned, the work of market research by a Harvard MBA working at the paper industry titan Mead. It quickly filled the vacuum heâd identified, and its name became synonymous with its category; the company told