Evernote Announces A Market For Physical Products, Including Post-Its … And Socks?

Evernote, the popular note-taking app with 75 million users, today unveiled the latest chapter in its bid to become the go-to place for people to store all their memories — a decisive move into physical merchandise.

It’s entering a partnership with 3M and its Post-it note brand to develop a special line of notepads and a camera to take notes, record them, and then seamlessly transfer them into Evernote’s platform. That news was actually leaked last night, but today Evernote went one step further, announcing that these products and more will now be sold through a special online shop, called Evernote Market.

The announcement is being made on-stage at Evernote’s EC3 conference in San Francisco. CEO Phil Libin said that it might seem “weird” for the company to get into physical products, but he noted that the company teamed up with Moleskine last year to create a special notebook with features to make it easier to digitize notes in Moleskine’s pretty leather notebooks.

“Paperless is not the goal — great experience is not the goal.” Libin said, later adding, “We want to eliminate the stupid uses of paper, but we want to extend the great uses.”

Other products that will be new to the market in addition to the Post-it products are devices from ScanSnap and Adonit.

Scan Snap’s Evernote Edition, the company says, is the result of a collaboration with ScanSnap “to marry hardware speed and precision with Evernote’s organization and sync features.” It says it will be the most advanced scanner-to-service integration on the market.

Meanwhile, the Jot Script Evernote Edition Stylus from Adonit is “the first and only fine point stylus on the market, and optimized to work with Penultimate, Evernote’s award winning handwriting application.”

And Evernote is also unveiling a line of lifestyle products that don’t really have a strong tech angle but are customized with company branding. Those include the Evernote Rucksack and Evernote Flat Pack from Côte&Ciel. And there are socks! It’s a real soup-to-nuts approach.

Think of what Evernote is doing as the enterprise-y version of the same strategy that has been embodied by consumer brands like Disney and Rovio’s Angry Birds. Or even the same concept of vertical integration embodied by companies like Apple. The idea is that physical products not only extend the brand of the bigger company. But it will also give users more ways of tapping into Evernote and making it more used, and useful.

Judging by the fact that Rovio itself projects to make more revenue from merchandising than it does from its actual games — and Apple, of course, makes vastly more profit from its hardware than it does its services — this could end up being a smart move for Evernote. To date, the company’s biggest revenue streams come from people who pay for its premium apps. This gives the company a more diversified monetization strategy longer term.