Appeal of electronic organiser leaves Filofax looking thin

It would not be the first time the death of the Filofax has been predicted. With the demise of the Yuppie, the classic Eighties organiser did look in peril.

But it clawed its way back, transforming its market from City types with mobiles to women who found its ring-bound pages handy for organising their social and domestic lives.

When the Filofax Group yesterday warned that its first-half profits would not be as good as those in the same period last year, share prices dropped immediately.

But Robin Field, the chief executive who has masterminded an increase in sales to 2 million a year compared with 200,000 at the height of the Yuppie boom, was confident that the note of caution said nothing about the Filofax itself.

The main reason for the profits warning was a one-off reduction in demand from the company's main British customer, understood to be WH Smith, after a stock-taking exercise, he said.

The Filofax itself was still "relevant to people's needs", he added. Neither was there any image problem. "Some of the most image-conscious people still use them. In Germany, for example, where people are very conscious of image and having the right sort of goods, our sales are still growing extremely fast."

The company expected sales to be up 10 per cent on last year, Mr Field said. "But that is not as much up as we would like and not as fast as we've been used to growing in the past five years."

Nonetheless, there is a battle in the marketplace for the right to organise people's lives, with the electronic personal organiser increasingly attracting the attention of the busy executive.

A spokeswoman for Psion, the market leader which on average makes 25,000 personal organisers a month, said: "People who want the latest technology go for Psion and we know from the feel of the market that it is mostly males, aged from 25 to 60."

The devices appeal to women too, however. Tricia Topping, who has a public relations company and meets other professional women through the City Women's Network, said she would die without hers.

"More and more people will be switching over to electronic organisers," she said. "You have to go to the gym to get somebody with muscles to carry your Filofax. They've had their day."

But Peter York, a commentator on style, retains an affection for the leather-bound ring-file organiser and feels predictions of its demise are exaggerated. "Filofax has shown very respectable profits over the last two years," he said.

He thought it was journalists who were dismissing "symbols of the Eighties", not the rest of the population. "In the real world, there are lots of things that the Eighties gave people that they're quite keen to go on having - like the Filofax."

People might not be flashing the Filofax as a status symbol at clubs such as the Groucho any more. "But you certainly wouldn't want to show off a Psion," he said. "You just use it."

Filofax crash, page 16