Filofax Lockwood – the replacement for the Malden?

I went to ogle the navy blue Compact Zipped Malden at my local Filofax stockist today, and also to find out which models are going on sale on Friday morning. They only had one navy zipped compact Malden left. These binders  are sold out in all the other stockists carrying them in Sweden. The sales associate told me they do not know if or when there will be more. Lately he has been mentioning a bit of confusion at top level in Sweden and no clear signals of what is coming and what isn’t.  Always a bad sign….

We then got onto chatting about zipped Cubans, and he showed me a brown personal zipped Lockwood. My first comment was – oooh, it feels just like a Malden. His reply? ‘Yes it is the replacement for the Malden’. I asked him again and he repeated it. Now that may just be rumour but having had a good look at it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

It is a very nice leather – a lot like the Malden. They only had two – zipped brown in personal and A5, but it was very like the Ochre Malden in colour. The leather was similar but would not scratch easily like many of the Ochres do. The binder did not have it embossed on the inside cover, but this is buffalo leather. It had the most glorious leather smell and it was lovely to the touch.

I also asked him how well the Maldens have sold and he said they have not sold as badly as in other European countries but that sales have suffered due to them not having enough basic colours and too many fashion colours. He could be right – a brown, red, and black in A5 size would have sold really well. As would brown, black and red in personal size – instead of not having them to start with and/or discontinuing them. Wouldn’t A5s in black and in red look gorgeous?

I was allowed to take some photos in the shop. You can see that the grain of the leather is similar to the Maldens. Colour-wise it is like the lighter photographs. The interior photographed too dark, but because I was doing it in the shop I didn’t want to take too long and abuse the liberty I had been given.