becoming (the) curious
becoming (the) curious
I’ve always been interested in how people end up where they are, what they thought they would be doing, the details of what happened, who they met along the way and which decisions ended up changing things.
Maybe this curiosity comes from my personal journey and how my own experience showed me that often it’s a whole lot of luck and opportunities that just come your way, and that being open to those opportunities and trusting the process is essentially what pushed my own growth and, eventually, the start of “the curious”.
To quickly sum up how I’ve ended up where I am now and what led me to create the curious, let me give you an overview:
In school, I was never really any good at most subjects, I was an average student at best. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I always chose the most general areas to focus on, which in my case meant specialising in project management and later studying corporate communications. Sounds dry, also kind of is, but what I liked about it was that you could potentially apply this knowledge to a wide range of areas because essentially everything needs some form of project management or communication. In my mind, this made sense because I was building a skill set that kept me flexible.
And this it did indeed. I worked in retail as a visual merchandiser during my studies and later moved on to paper republic, where I initially started working in customer support. Quite quickly, my work there developed into a position in the marketing team after I graduated, and I was able to try a lot of my ideas in what was, back then, quite a small company. There was a lot of trust and ownership given to us very quickly, which meant I was thrown into a lot of things without necessarily knowing exactly what I was doing beforehand.
Looking back, this was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me and, almost five years later, I now lead the marketing team of 20 people at paper republic. The biggest learnings from these five years have probably been about the fact that I am surprisingly comfortable not knowing everything beforehand, figuring things out as I go and trusting that eventually I will get there.
Where the idea started
Last summer, I was having lunch with Jérôme the founder and CEO of paper republic. He asked me how I was doing and whether I was still happy in my job. I said yes, because I love the work, the people and the opportunities that come with it. Then he asked me something along the lines of:
“Where do you see paper republic going? Is there anything you would really like to do?”
We’d had conversations like this before because Jérôme is a very easy person to daydream with, and over the years we had often talked about paper republic becoming more than a company that produces notebooks. We always agreed that we wanted to communicate beyond the product itself and focus more on what our notebooks could inspire in people, on the importance of personal expression and on how our leather journals could be a tool to support that.
He told me to think about it and, during this phase, I kept coming back to something I had always been interested in: people’s journeys.
There is the version we usually hear, where someone started here, did this, then this happened and now they are where they are (see my journey above), and once you know the ending, everything somehow sounds like it was supposed to happen. But I wanted to know about the other version, the mistakes, the doubts, the things that didn’t work, the people who helped, the lucky timing, the decisions that seemed insignificant at the time and those moments when someone genuinely had no idea what to do next.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this kind of story was already sitting right in front of me because it is also how paper republic itself started. Before any of this existed, Jérôme was working as a business consultant and eventually decided to quit because he was unhappy and wanted to create something that felt more meaningful to him. He started thinking about the things he genuinely cared about, and one of those was writing, but he had never really found a notebook that felt quite right for him, so he decided to make one himself.
He didn’t know anything about paper or leather at the time, and there wasn’t some perfectly thought-through plan for how to build a notebook company. He researched, learned along the way, met the right people and at some point, just started. I think there is something quite fitting about the fact that years later, while thinking about what paper republic could become next, I found myself coming back to exactly that kind of story: someone not necessarily knowing where an idea will lead but being curious enough to follow it anyway.
Okay, but how do you create a platform like “the curious”?
The idea was one thing, but creating the curious was another because I had never created a platform like this before, I had never hosted a podcast before, and I had never worked on a project of this scale.
I had no idea whether I would be good at it, I didn’t know how to host a podcast and then there was also the question of whether anyone would actually care enough to listen, read or engage with any of it.
Jérôme believed in the project and paper republic agreed to finance it. There was a lot of space and freedom, which was and is amazing, but it can also be slightly terrifying because at some point you have to decide what you want.
We changed our minds a lot. There were meetings where I left thinking, yes, that’s it, only to look at it again two days later and think, no, that’s not it. There were ideas we were completely convinced about that disappeared again, while things we initially thought were quite small became much more important, we added things, removed them, questioned the whole thing and then somehow came back to the original idea again.
And then I realised I couldn’t do this alone
This should have probably been obvious much earlier, but for a while I was trying to build the curious alongside my main responsibility of leading the marketing team at paper republic, and building what is essentially another little brand takes a lot of time. There are guests to find, emails to write, research, scheduling, recordings, written pieces, events, production, creative meetings and a surprising amount of admin, and then somehow, on top of all of that, you also need the headspace to actually have ideas.
At some point, it became clear that this wasn’t going to work with me trying to hold everything together myself, so Jérôme pushed me to start looking for a project manager, and then Laura came along.
She turned out to be exactly the person the project needed. She is good at things I’m not good at, she questions things I wouldn’t necessarily question and she has taken ownership of huge parts of the project, and now she’s also stepping quite far outside her own comfort zone, doing something that wasn’t planned and is hosting the podcast with me.
So, where are we now?
A year later, the curious is finally becoming something other people can see. We’ve recorded most of the conversations, we’re still working on written pieces, we’re onboarding paper republic team members where we need some support, and there is finally a visual identity that feels like us after quite a few versions that didn’t.
We’ve done a lot, but it also feels like we’ve barely started, and I have no idea which conversations people will connect with, whether something we think is important now will still be part of the curious a year from now, who we’ll meet because of it or where this whole thing will eventually lead.
I think it would be a little strange if a project about people’s very unplanned and imperfect journeys had arrived with a perfectly planned journey of its own, so this is where we are. We made something, we’re putting it out there, and now we get to see what happens.
I’m very curious to find out what happens next. Also, a bit scared, but I am glad to finally share it now.
- Claire
