Moses Sukali: How I started making notebooks during Covid

My name is Moses Sukali. I am the co-founder of Notebooks Kenya. Imagine waking up, feeling inspired and excited to begin your day with intention. Picture having a place to plot your dreams and space to plan your goals. Imagine having a day-to-day system to keep track of the person you are becoming.

Well, that is exactly what Notebooks Kenya aspires to provide you with. Notebooks Kenya is a business focused on producing Notebooks, journals and planners aimed to organize your day and make you more productive.

The idea of the business came when Covid-19 struck and most people were forced to work from home. This presented an opportunity to explore entrepreneurship based on a personal passion for journaling and stationery. There was a gap in the market for planner notebooks, so together with my partner, we started creating guided notebooks to act as tools that can help people win at work and succeed in life.

When we write down our thoughts, it usually decreases the intensity of the emotion and helps us articulate what we’re feeling and why we’re feeling that way. There’s plenty of research that shows how writing down your to-do list and schedule for the day makes you feel more engaged in the task at hand. But also, once the year is complete, a physical planner notebook becomes an artifact, a time capsule, if you will, of all those momentous happenings from that calendar year.

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Based on this, we have introduced to the market competitive and ground-breaking products in the past year including:

• Life Planner – the perfect personal care and development notebook
• Productivity Planner – best diary and meeting notes notebook for career persons.
• Study Planner – the winning study organization notebook with tips for success
• Sermon Notes – a guided notebook to record, reflect and remember each week’s church sermon message.
• Ruled Notebooks – freestyle journals

Our notebooks are locally made and most of the parts are made from recycled materials sourced from within. When we started, most of the products were sold within Nairobi; then we discovered the Jumia e-commerce platform. That was the biggest reward our startup could get. Jumia opened our products to a countrywide market by easing our logistics. They also played a fundamental role in creating product awareness through their marketing campaigns at very affordable rates. Thanks to Jumia we have constantly increasing customer orders from all over the country daily.

Notebooks Kenya plans are to intensify local manufacturing by investing in a production facility which in turn will provide opportunities to more young people. We are open to partnerships on the expansion to ensure our customers get the best quality at affordable rates.