“We didn’t have any grand ideas of disrupting any system,” says Adam London, co-founder of Public Supply. “Working for ourselves, seeing if we could do it—that was the goal.”
We’re sitting outside a coffee shop on rainy, gray day in the Brooklyn neighborhood DUMBO, right down the street from London’s office. Public Supply makes high-quality notebooks, but it also does something unexpected: donating 25 percent of its profits to arts programs in public schools.
“We got together and had a few different ideas,” London says. “We were looking at charitable causes and products, one of the biggest causes we noticed was that education, especially arts education, wasn’t being funded.”
London’s background is in non-profit work, so he knows a thing or two about helping those in need. He decided that DonorsChoose, a Kickstarter-type program designed to help teachers, was the kind of organization that he wanted to partner with Public Supply.
He said they decided to give such a substantial portion of the company’s profits to charity so that other potential donors would notice.
“We wanted people see what we were giving and have a reaction,” he says.
The best way to impress people, of course, is to put out a great product. London’s eyes light up when we start to talk about Public Supply’s notebooks. The first size the company produced was five-by-eight inches, so that it could fit in your pocket. He wanted the paper to be thick enough that so you could write with a felt-tip pen and not have it bleed through.
“It’s really sturdy, to the point where you can’t lay it flat,” he points out. “We’ve designed two other notebooks that do lay flat, but the five by eight is something that you can throw in your bag and not worry about. It’s really taut, you have to manipulate it to open it up.”
Since Public Supply is a company that focuses on how it can improve our lives, a partnership with WeWork made all the sense in the world. WeWork’s Jeremiah Britton designed a limited-edition version of the notebook. As with all lf the company’s notebooks, a quarter of the sales go to charity. What’s more, you can even use the number on the back of each notebook to see what school you helped fund.
Another way to get your hands on one of the notebooks is through a contest on Instagram. Take a photo of a workspace that inspires you and post it along with the hashtag #WeWorkMakesLines and you have a chance to win one of 20 through June 15.