Why I make this

I'm Roel. I grew up outdoors and I never stopped. I've been making things out of stone paper since 2019, and KIVI is the notebook I was missing myself.

Roel writing in a notebook, sitting on a rock at the edge of a lake with pine forest behind him.
By the water, with the notebook I've used myself for years. Still a MOYU, and exactly the place the idea for KIVI came from.

It started with a wet note

I'm outside a lot, and paper is the worst material you can take with you there. One shower, one leaking bottle, one morning of dew and your notes are gone. Stone paper doesn't have that problem. It just never came in the format you actually carry out the door.

And the note you make outside is precisely the one you can't make again. A bird you see once. A track that's gone tomorrow. A reading that's only true at that moment.

Photographed over Roel's shoulder as he writes in a lined notebook outdoors in the woods.
The position that matters: on your knees, outside, with the pen you're already carrying.

Less bad is not good enough

In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough describes the book of the future: no tree, no paper, but a material that is endlessly recyclable. He printed his own book on synthetic paper to prove it could be done. That was 2002.

Less bad is not good enough. Not polluting more efficiently, but designing differently.

That's why I work with stone paper and not FSC wood. FSC is felling more tidily. Stone paper is not felling.

Why a separate brand

A notebook for outdoors has to do something a notebook for the office doesn't. MOYU is built for the desk. KIVI is built to get wet and to live at the bottom of a backpack. Different job, different notebook, separate company.

MOYU

Since 2019. Stone paper notebooks for offices. B Corp certified.

moyu-notebooks.com
Stonepacker

Reusable shipping boxes made from stone paper. Through the BOXO network, one box comes back up to 25 times.

stonepacker.com

Where I want this to go

The paper industry has run on trees, water and bleach for a hundred years. Stone paper doesn't turn that around in one go. But every category that switches makes the next one easier: first notebooks, then shipping boxes, now notebooks for outdoors.

What I won't dodge

You could say: you started because single-use paper is a problem, and now you make paper you write on once. That's a fair question. The problem was never writing something down once. The problem is that we fell trees and use water for something we throw away a day later. A field notebook doesn't get thrown away. It's the only paper in my house I genuinely keep.

And I stay honest about the material. Stone paper is tree-free and no water goes into forming the sheet, but it contains roughly twenty percent plastic. So it isn't biodegradable and it shouldn't be left behind in nature. We say so plainly, even when it would sell better not to.

What goes back

One percent of our revenue goes to nature. Revenue, not profit, because profit is a number you can massage and revenue isn't.

That's the 1% for the Planet standard, and we'll join as soon as the shop is running and we have a year of revenue to show. Then a third party checks that we actually do it, and where it goes. Until then there's no certification mark here, because we haven't earned one yet. For now it's our own promise, and you can hold us to it.

Roelroel@moyu.rocks