noble. note

I started noble. crafters with Sohan Kobiri and Tomás Rivero. Tomás leads the industrial design from Buenos Aires. I work on the design, manufacturing, brand and operations.

The cover is top grain vegetable tanned leather over a machined 7075 aluminium frame. Inside the back cover sits a ring of eighteen magnets that matches MagSafe on the back of an iPhone. Behind them is a 0.05 mm sheet of magnetic steel that makes the magnets hold harder. A microfiber layer covers the steel so the pages rest on a flat surface.

The pen extends and clips into the spine. The spine holds it harder than the pen’s own catch, so when you pull the pen with one hand, it slides open first and then comes out.

One problem: the first frames were machined from 6061 aluminium, and they wore down. A stainless steel ball presses into the frame to hold the pen. Steel is much harder than 6061 aluminium, so the ball wore a groove into the frame each time the pen moved. We switched to 7075 aluminium, an aluminium and zinc alloy with nearly twice the strength at about the same weight. It takes longer to machine, but it does not wear.

Two Kickstarter campaigns paid for the tooling. The first raised $27,029 from 263 backers in 2023. The second raised $61,289 from 646 backers in 2025.