Why I Spend $25 on Leuchtturm1917 Notebooks and $1 on Paper Clips

My View: Premium Where It Shows, Cheap Where It Doesn't

I manage supply purchasing for a 200-person company—roughly $60,000 a year across 40-plus vendors. And after four years in this seat, I have a strong opinion: premium where the work shows, commodity everywhere else.

That's why I'll approve a $25 Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebook without blinking, but grab a $2 binder and a $1.50 box of paper clips without shame. My finance team initially thought it was inconsistent. It's not. It's a boundary—and knowing where to draw it is most of the job.

When I first took over purchasing in 2020, I assumed the exact opposite: cheapest everything. That theory survived precisely one client presentation. Our senior consultant's spiral notebook fell apart mid-meeting, pages sliding across the conference table like a card shuffle. Nobody said anything, but you could feel the room's confidence in us dip a little.

Then I swung too far the other way. I bought premium leather-look binders at $8.50 each for every department. Six months later, most were still in the supply closet. Nobody used them, nobody noticed them, and I'd spent $800 to make a storage shelf look expensive.

Both extremes taught me the same lesson: quality has to match the use case, or it's just waste.

Why I Don't Flinch at the Leuchtturm1917 Medium A5 Notebook Price

Let's talk numbers. The Leuchtturm1917 Medium A5 hardcover classic runs in the low-to-mid $20s at the retailers I've checked. I've paid $22.50 a unit recently; I've seen it closer to $28 depending on where you look. Don't hold me to exact prices—they shift with discounts and stock—but the ballpark is real.

And you know what? It's worth it. For a specific reason.

Our project managers and consultants live in these notebooks. Every day, for a year or more. Here's what that money buys:

• Page numbers. Sounds trivial until someone is trying to reference "page 34" while a client watches.
• A table of contents. Five minutes of setup that saves hours of searching.
• A thread-bound spine. Daily bag-carrying for ten months and it still lies flat.
• Hardcover durability. These things take a beating and still look professional.

I ran the comparison when I joined. We used to buy $1.50 spiral notebooks in bulk. They shed pages within months, got replaced twice a year, and made competent people look disorganized. The leuchtturm1917 hardcover notebook classic line isn't a status symbol. It's equipment for people whose job lives on paper.

The total-cost math is what sold finance: a $25 notebook that lasts a full year and holds up in front of clients beats a $1.50 notebook that falls apart by Tuesday.

Binders and Paper Clips: Where I Learned to Buy Cheap

The flip side took me longer to learn.

Three years ago, I decided our supply shelves should look "cohesive." Premium binders, matching everything. I picked an $8.50-per-unit binder, ordered 90 of them, and felt very strategic.

The upside was a boardroom-ready cabinet. The risk was spending money nobody asked me to spend. I kept asking myself: does a binder actually impress anyone? If a client is swayed by binder leather, they probably shouldn't be making the decisions. The answer was no—a conclusion accounting gently helped me reach when they saw the invoice.

Now I buy standard binders in the $2-3 range and don't think twice. A binder's job is to hold paper, not to network.

Paper clips are the same story. There's a whole "designer desk accessories" category now—matte copper clips in a heavy tin, seven bucks for a box of twenty. My team goes through paper clips at an alarming rate. The $1.50 box of 100 plain steel clips does the job identically. No client has ever complimented our clip finishes. I'm confident they never will.

The Counterintuitive Reason I Trust a Niche Notebook Brand

Here's the argument that surprised me most: a supplier who knows their limits is more useful than one who promises everything.

A couple of years ago, I asked a specialty stationery vendor whether they could expand into branded binders and desk accessories. Their rep was blunt: "That's not our strength. Get that from a general supplier—here's who does it well."

That honesty earned them my business for everything else. Same logic applies to the notebook we buy. Leuchtturm1917 makes notebooks, planners, sketchbooks, and pens. They don't pretend to be an everything-stationery megastore. Their focus is why the classic A5 has 249 numbered pages, a contents page, and a spine I've seen survive daily abuse for a year.

Think about it: the moment a brand tries to be all things, it dilutes the thing it was great at. "One-stop shop" sounds convenient. In practice, it usually means "mediocre at forty things." That's true for suppliers, and it's true for the items we buy from them.

The Day I Googled "How to Make an Envelope Out of Printer Paper"

This story sums up the whole philosophy.

Last quarter, we had a time-sensitive mailing with a hard end-of-day deadline. Ten minutes before the courier run, we realized nobody had stocked #10 envelopes. The nearest office store was out.

My junior admin searched for "how to make an envelope out of printer paper." Six minutes and one sheet of standard 8.5" x 11" copy paper later, she had a folded, taped, address-ready envelope.

And here's the best part: it's perfectly valid for USPS. The rules for First-Class Mail letters: minimum 3.5" by 5", maximum 6.125" by 11.5", under 0.25" thick. Our homemade version cleared those specs easily. At the rates on usps.com effective January 2025, it mailed for $0.73—exactly the same as a store-bought envelope.

Was it elegant? Not remotely. But it did the job, on deadline, for zero dollars. Knowing when "good enough" is the professional call—and when it isn't—is the entire skill. A $25 Leuchtturm1917 for a client-facing consultant. A printer-paper envelope for a courier run. Both are the right tool.

But Wait—Isn't That Inconsistent?

I get the pushback. "You'll spend $25 on a notebook and $2 on a binder? That doesn't look like a coherent procurement strategy."

To be fair, it doesn't look coherent if you only stare at line items. But coherence comes from use case, not price tag.

The notebook sits in client meetings, stores months of institutional knowledge, and gets opened daily by people whose performance depends on it. The binder holds archived forms nobody's touched since last spring. The paper clip connects three pages of a routing slip for two days. Different jobs, different stakes. Applying one standard to all of them is how companies waste thousands.

Same logic applies to vendors. A supplier who says "this isn't our strength—here's who does it better" earns my trust for everything else they handle. A brand that stays in its lane tells me they're serious about quality. I don't want my notebook company shipping me laser printers. I want them obsessing over paper weight and binding thread.

Granted, this approach takes more thinking than a blanket corporate policy. It means evaluating each category on its own. That's the job. It's why procurement is a skill and not just a shopping list.

Bottom Line: Know the Boundary

After four years and a few hundred orders, here's where I land:

Premium belongs where quality changes the outcome. Commodity belongs everywhere else.

I'm not saying every company should buy Leuchtturm1917 notebooks. I'm saying you should know which item in your supply closet actually matters, and spend accordingly.

For us, that's the A5 hardcover for the people who live in it, $2 binders for the archive shelf, $1.50 paper clips for the routing tray, and occasionally a folded sheet of printer paper when the deadline doesn't care about your vendor's lead time.

That's not inconsistency. That's knowing the difference between a tool and a trinket.