Stabilo’s Highlighter Is Ready for Its Lifestyle Era
The stationery drawer has apparently been holding a cultural platform this entire time.
The story
WWD reports that Schwan-Stabilo is developing a more lifestyle-oriented identity for Stabilo, with Mika as guest creative director and collaborations involving Swarovski and Kiko Milano. The plans include a decorated Boss highlighter and lip markers inspired by its familiar shape.
Source: wwd.com
Our reading
The highlighter has spent years making other things look important. It is only fair that it should eventually demand some importance of its own.
A useful object presents a difficult marketing problem: people know what it does. A lifestyle identity solves this by opening a much larger question about what owning it says about you. Underlining a sentence is finite. Expressing yourself can support a whole programme of launches.
A pop star, a cosmetics brand and decorative sparkle give the humble desk object an unusually busy social life. It is being asked to carry design, culture and a more ambitious commercial future, while the customer may still only want to mark the useful paragraph.
That is an impressive workload for something usually employed to identify the one paragraph you might need for an exam.
At least the product is qualified for the repositioning. Nobody understands making an ordinary line stand out quite like a highlighter.