From walking away from an all-consuming career; to building a multi-million dollar global brand fueled by self-discovery. We sat down with the founder and head creative behind Friend Notebooks, Alanah Purtell, on their fourth anniversary to talk about finding purpose, the power of a perfect tactile experience, and why sometimes, the most innovative concept is a return to analog.
Origin Story
Friend Notebooks didn't start out because of a gap in the market; but a disconnect in identity for brand founder Alanah Purtell. A seasoned communications creative, the pressure of her professional life felt all-consuming.
“My career was everything to me, I had let it define me,” Alanah recalls. But during the 2020 global crisis—while alone in a foreign country with a newborn and a husband deployed with the US Marines—the purpose of her work started to slip away.
"There was so many things going on in my life that should have been my priority, and yet all my energy was poured into anxiety over insignificant work nonsense. I felt disillusioned, like I couldn't even remember who I really was underneath all of it any more. So I quit with no plan, just the notion that my life shouldn’t look like that."
Her antidote was a radical, mindful embrace of hobbies: gardening, cooking, reading. Those instincts as a creative continued to demand an outlet. So she began designing little notebooks—personal systems to log her strawberry harvests or her favorite coffee roasts. It was a search for peace.
"I’d never felt so in sync with myself before," she explains. "I felt so comfortable and secure in who I was and what I wanted for the first time in a while."
The business, she admits, started almost accidentally: a single Etsy listing for her gardening notebook, six sales overnight, and the realization that she wasn't the only one craving unassuming, analogue joy.
Getting Friend off the ground
Building an e-commerce brand with zero capital is rarely seamless, but the Friend Notebooks journey was built on unexpected foundations.
"That first year was very low pressure. I was still just tinkering," Alanah says. The strategy was self-funding and market-testing in real-time. "I would get an order, use that revenue to make and ship it, then use that to make two more, and so on."
This organic, responsive growth became the core business lesson she preaches today: "Don’t overthink the plan before you've even started... Find a way to test your idea at your lowest-risk entry point and establish a market fit. You can overthink everything once there's enough data to actually think over."
This intentional approach paid off. After a few early challenges—including Etsy constantly freezing her account due to the sheer volume of orders—the brand migrated to its own online store. Today, four years later, they’ve shipped over one million notebooks to every corner of the world.
Setting The Brand Apart
In a digital world, why does a tactile notebook still feel revolutionary? For Alanah, it's been about making the analog experience utterly specific.
"Notebooks are inherently unoriginal. That’s the appeal of it really—a return to something you know, something analog," she says. "But I couldn't find what I wanted out there: minimalist, beautiful, tactile. Notebooks that offered some kind of useful companionship when you were enjoying a new hobby."
As head creative, her guiding principle is to be a function-first designer. This commitment is what makes a 'Friend' notebook instantly recognizable and coveted.
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Niche Formats: The brand specializes in hard-to-find formats for special interests—from coffee tasting logs to creative writing tools—formats that other stationery houses overlook as they lack "mass-appeal".
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Tactile Design: Deliberate choices coalesce in a design signature for the brand, everything from paper tone and binding techniques rejecting the "horrible bright white paper" of corporate stationery, leaning into more calming, jewel-toned palettes.
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Neurodivergent Intent: This is perhaps the most unique element. Alanah’s journey has naturally led to a range of notebooks underpinned by neurodivergent-friendly design. Every detail—from the notebook construciton to the planning formats—is crafted with a rare level of intent to support the many different ways a brain synthesizes information.
The natural evolution into a stackable system—refillable plant-based folio's designed to house their notebooks—cemented the brand's place as a purveyor of purposeful, thoughtful analog systems.
What comes next?
After achieving the milestone of shipping one million notebooks, the next step for Friend Notebooks isn't about aggressive expansion, but sustainable balance.
Logistically, the team is working on establishing a UK base to ease the burden and cost of shipping from their current studio in Far North Queensland, Australia, to their large international audience.
But the core vision remains tied to the founder's initial "why": prioritizing personal peace.
"Keeping balance between the business aspects and the space I make in my life for my kids and my own interests remains my number one driver," Alanah concludes. "So I try not to get too far ahead of myself with grand plans, and pace the brand with however my life is flowing at any given time."
The enduring success of Friend Notebooks is a powerful modern parable: by choosing joy over external expectations, by designing systems that truly support mindful enthusiasm, the founder didn't just find herself—she created a global community of analog companions dedicated to documenting their deepest delights.
