A morning briefing
for stationery
Build note · Gemini · 100 brands · 09:00 daily
In short§1
I built a curator that scans a hundred stationery brands around the world and sends me a single notification at 09:00 every morning. It was built with Gemini. No ads, no spam, and I set the filter myself.
Why stationery§2
When your life is bound up with technology, staring at screens and thinking about how algorithms behave eventually pushes you toward physical, tactile things. For me that escape has always been good stationery: fountain pens and notebooks with a particular paper texture. Lamy’s German engineering, Sailor’s Japanese craftsmanship, Italian resin work.
But keeping up with the limited runs, new inks, and industry news that hundreds of brands put out every day is a job in itself.
Turning the automation on a hobby§3
Setting up cloud inventory syncs or designing complicated workflows in n8n is part of what I build day to day. This time I used the same muscles for something entirely personal.
The goal was simple: at exactly 09:00 each morning, a briefing summarising the last twenty-four hours across the most respected stationery brands should land on my device.
From three brands to a hundred§4
We started by listing the obvious ones — Kaweco, Rhodia, Moleskine. But as the conversation with the assistant went deeper we decided to widen the scope, and mapped out a hundred-brand picture of the industry: from Japan’s niche paper mills to century-old European fountain pen workshops.
The instruction was straightforward: don’t track a handful of brands, scan and summarise what the respected stationery makers worldwide are releasing.
What arrives in the morning§5
One notification now brings me things like:
- Diamine’s new-year ink calendar
- The Unkai edition of the Platinum 3776
- Leuchtturm1917’s seventies retro colour palette
- Titanium pocket pens from independent boutique makers
The difference from a conventional email newsletter: it does not spam, it carries no advertising, and it only gives me a filtered summary of brands that clear the quality bar I set.
What stayed with me§6
At the end of the day, focusing on a physical object that excites you — the flow of ink at the tip of a fountain pen — is genuinely restful.
You can turn AI into a personal radar for your most elegant hobbies, not just a tool for writing code or running projects. That is one of the more enjoyable ways to use the technology.