the paper republic manifest 

paper & beauty

We believe in authenticity, beauty and style. Our notebooks and journals look good, feel wonderful and smell amazing. We want them to be your lifetime companion, your confidant, and your trusted friend.   
  
Treasure your memories on our natural, extra-smooth Swedish writing paper. Feed your imagination with our fragrant leather, tanned with plants, herbs and wood, from family-run Italian tanneries. Explore the world with a travel companion that gets better with age and is made to last a lifetime.  
  
Our world may be slowly moving away from 3000 years of paper-based history, but we believe that paper has a tremendous future: as an expression of culture, art, beauty, uniqueness and tangible reality, be it as a book, a notebook or a newspaper.  
  
We trust and believe in paper. Join our republic!   

our commitment 

respect & authenticity  

We believe that a business has to be based on values to create value – for its customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers and for society as a whole.  

At paper republic, we are committed to respect & authenticity. We aim to respect our environment by creating products that are made to last and are crafted from sustainable and natural materials. We respect our customers, suppliers and team members and treat them as partners of our republic.   

We want to craft authentic products: goods with a story and soul. We want to know and be transparent about the origin and composition of the materials we use. This is our mission: to do all things well.

the making

we do the hard work

We design, craft, prepare, personalise and ship all our products upon order from our base in Vienna. We believe in the good of doing things ourselves – and when we cannot we  work with the best and nicest people around.  

By producing as much as possible in-house and avoiding middlemen, from production to sales, we are able to pass on more value to you and keep a very close eye on the quality of the goods we produce.   

We source our raw materials directly from family-run businesses that we know personally and with whom we share a common way of doings things. Most of them are either in Austria or reasonably close by, in Italy, Germany, Sweden or France.   

leather & paper

it's all about the senses

paper republic stands for stunning vegetable-tanned, full-grain soft cow leather. We buy our leather directly from family-run tanneries in the heart of Tuscany (Italy) which use absolutely no chrome in the tanning process - only natural, non-chemical extracts. This ancestral tanning is a slow and artisanal process: it takes on average two months to tan and dye a cow hide. The vegetable-tanning means that the colour and texture of our leather have a natural look and develop a unique patina over time.


The writing paper we use in our notebooks is made in one of the best, if not the best, European paper mill in Sweden. It is acid-free, wood-free FSC-certified 80gsm natural paper with a nice cream colour and a soft touch.

the story

A personal message from Jérôme Bacquias, Founder of paper republic   

I created paper republic ten years ago, and to be honest, I’m not sure if at that time I had a very clear idea of what I was doing. I had just quit my job and was about to become a father. I had no experience whatsoever with paper or leather. Everyone was creating apps and I was betting on paper. Companies were outsourcing to China and I was committed to producing in Europe. The only thing I knew is that I wanted my freedom back: the freedom do things that I thought were right, to be accountable for my successes and failures, and to find a meaning in what I was doing.  

paper republic is the result of this attempt: “paper” because writing and reading are at the core of our culture, “republic” because  res publica  is in its first meaning, in latin, the common good, that very thing which brings us together and that we share. 

This is what I would like to convey to you when you join us on this journey: a certain sense of freedom, culture and common good that is the very core of paper republic’s promise.  

Welcome to our republic! 

Jérôme Bacquias  
Founder & Managing Director 

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