Business Lifestyle & Culture

Nostalgia (and sales) at a stationery store

By Ocean Hiller

Luke Georgiades’ handwriting is messy, the equivalent of a 5-year-old’s scribbles, he said. But the woman he met the previous night loves letters and journaling. So, drawn to the cat-themed logo of stationery store Niconeco Zakkaya, he stepped inside to write her a message on a postcard—his scrawl aside.

“There’s nothing like walking into a store, holding this, seeing the texture and really being able to look closely at the design and the art and just feel it,” said Georgiades, 26, who was browsing inside the East 10th Street store while visiting New York from London.

In an age of hastily texted thank-yous, condolences and congratulations, stationery allows people to pour their hearts out on the page.

Siming Vautin opened Niconeco Zakkaya’s brick-and-mortar shop in 2019 after selling on Etsy for four years. Moby Watermill, 29, is the manager. “I had worked in a small store before, so I was kind of looking for somewhere that felt like home,” said Watermill, who was born in Germany and moved to New York in 2020. 

Lotus-scented incense wafts through the air, and Japanese Breakfast’s “Everybody Wants to Love You” plays amidst customers’ hushed deliberations over what to buy. One shelf features rows of decorative washi tape with intricate designs of nature and animals. The opposite wall of the store has glass jars of dual-tipped marker-pens, plus a notepad for customers to test out the utensils in their favorite colors. 

When she closes the store at 7 p.m., Watermill collects the used sheets of paper from the pen-testing area and takes them home for scrapbooking. Some people write their phone numbers, which she finds funny: “They’re like, ‘I’m single, and I like stationery.’” She has also admired poems, calligraphy and even an illustration of a bamboo forest.

Niconeco Zakkaya offers goods customers can’t get anywhere else, Watermill says. Vautin, the founder, has relationships with artists in Japan, Taiwan, China and Germany who create stationery just for the shop. It used to sell Eko Mizuno’s hand-painted, miniature wooden houses, one of which rests by the cash register. 

That Thursday afternoon was the first time Asami Green, 60, and Marina Green, 25, had come to Niconeco Zakkaya, but the mother and daughter bond avidly over stationery. Asami Green began journaling as a teen and has since kept every volume; Marina Green recently bought a Paper Republic leather notebook and thought of her.

Asami Green was born in Japan and moved to the United States in 1976. While leafing through her collection of notebooks at home, she has noticed “the transformation of my writing from all Japanese to a mixture of English and Japanese, and then now it’s all English.”

In addition to her daily journaling, Watermill writes cards to her family back in Germany and letters to her future self. “[With] these physical pieces, you feel like more of you exists in the world,” she said.