[Penultimate is currently on sale for Back-To-School. Get it here.]

Hey kids,

Gather round the glowing iPad and set a spell. I want to tell you about a land before time, and a time before the internet. It was the 1980s. The man who would grow up to make iPods was probably wearing a Walkman when trying to get kids to play Oregon Trail on his Apple IIe computers. And we wrote notes the old-fashioned way: on thin sheets of blended trees.

But we also needed to organize those papers, and a company called Mead came to the rescue with the do-all, impress-everybody school supply that absolutely everyone wanted: The Trapper Keeper. It was a pad of paper. A binder. A set of folders. They were held together by indestructible vinyl plastic with an awesome velcro latch, and had cool pictures, like racecars, on them. 

But though every school year began in velcroed, organized glory, the wheels would come off the proverbial racecar by the holidays. The vinyl was actually not indestructible, the folders would tear at the holes, and the binder rings were made of cheap plastic and never really closed. Trapper Keepers were ever-cool, but the school year ended with the things serving mainly as a clever juvenile punchline.*

It’s amazing how far 20 years gets us. You can use your iPad to do everything the Trapper Keeper did, and a whole universe more, and it takes up less space, won’t fall apart, and probably weighs less. 

We’re proud to have Penultimate doing some of the great work Trapper Keepers did, for students around the globe, while being more reliable.  Our pages never rip out from over use, you get as many as you want in one place, and you can create your own papers or share them with your classmates.

Penultimate is currently on sale in honor of the start of the school year. For one buck American (or the equivalent in your currency!), Penultimate can take its place inside of your virtual velcro folder. And stay tuned for some even greater updates.

Best wishes for a great year!

Ben

* “What do you do when you see a girl you like?”