27% Margins: Lessons From the Paper Notebook Business

For a brief time in the mid-2010s the well-known notebook brand Moleskine was listed as a publicly traded company on the Milanese stock exchange. In their 2015 financial statements, they reported a whopping ~27% operating profit margin.

To put that in perspective, during the same year, Coca-Cola reported just ~16.5%.

More than that, their revenue had grown ~30% YoY, and some of their direct retail business (consisting of several dozen Moleskine shops around the world) had grown ~76%.