As France’s leading planner manufacturer, Quo Vadis pours its expertise into its production site in Nantes, where 210 employees draw on all their industrial expertise and traditional skills to design and make products that reflect us all.
Jérôme Nusse was drawn to the company’s story, and is a firm believer in the emotional power of paper. As a result, the director is sensitive to employees’ passion for the company’s values, and is adamant that each individual contributes to the future of Quo Vadis. The company aims to maintain a high level of skill in each of its areas of expertise and works to foster a sense of collective responsibility and team spirit.
In 2013, Quo Vadis was awarded the ‘Origine France Garantie‘ label for the quality of its planners. Quo Vadis is the first planner manufacturer to be granted this label aimed at certifying French-made products and promoting French expertise and industry. In 2015, the brand’s calendars, notebooks and address books were also certified.
Quo Vadis designs, manufactures and ships over 8 million planners every year. From design to marketing, the company oversees each and every step of the process internally.
The product design team works closely with designers, graphic designers, trend desks, consultancies and suppliers to come up with new products. The team pinpoints each new product’s features, shapes, colours and textures to ensure they meet customers’ needs and safety standards.
The pages are printed with rotary and offset presses that allow for up to eight colours in the planners. Produced by Clairefontaine, the premium paper used can be white or ivory (Prestige range) and weighs between 60g and 350g, all chlorine-free.
Processing takes over to transform the printed sheets into pages for the planner. The sheets are turned into notebooks using folding machines, and these notebooks are then assembled and stitched using stitching assembly machines to achieve a stitched pad. Next, the binding is carried out by machine, depending on the type of binding required: metallic spirals, plastic spirals, staples, fitted or sewn.
Moving away from the first workshop where the printing and processing take place, the second workshop is given over to cover design. This is where our employees design our removable covers in various different materials. A ‘saddle-stitched’ finish is added to some collections thanks to the lock-stitching machines and the expert techniques used by our seamstresses (stitching the rounded corners of the covers, scissor work to finish off the stitching, etc.). Finally, some covers are then personalised using a ‘cliché’, a kind of metallic stamp we use to stamp covers with a range of different patterns and designs (hot-stamping, colours, etc.).
Once the cover has been made, the last step is to attach it to the rest to complete the planner. The case-bound, integral-bound or varnished and close-trimmed covers are then incorporated directly by the processing machines. Removable covers are fitted by hand during the ‘casing’ stage. The planner is then slipped into the cover and where applicable any extra features are added (address book, booklet, etc.).