Where Are They Now
How the Trapper Keeper Took the ’80s by Storm — Then Suddenly Disappeared
The untold story of the Velcro binder that taught an entire generation how to organize
Where Are They Now is a column that revisits once-popular companies and brands that have seemingly disappeared.
Before the bullet journal, the pricey Japanese planner Hobonichi Techo, and the pocket-sized, collector-friendly Field Notes, many of today’s self-defined superorganizers had a Trapper Keeper.
You might remember the three-ring, color-coded, Velcroed school binder, whose ubiquity in the 1980s and ’90s makes it a byword for nostalgia. For a whole generation, it was our first information organization system, a child’s garden of productivity.
The Trapper Keeper was itself well planned, the work of market research by a Harvard MBA working at the paper industry titan Mead. It quickly filled the vacuum he’d identified, and its name became synonymous with its category; the company told The Oregonian in 1989 that half of students in grades six through 12 had one. But eventually, school authorities decided the Trapper Keeper was too big. Not too dominant — just, like, too physically large. And at the same time, shelf space in big-box stores and…
