Day-Timer

The Day-Timer product began with Morris Perkin, an attorney for the Allentown, Pennsylvania, law firm of Perkin, Twining & Christie.[1] The basic idea of what Perkin called Lawyer's Day is that it provided two loose-leaf pages that combined five different types of record keeping into one place: a record of what time was spent with which client on what work, an appointment book for meetings and events, a reminder or "tickler" of things that needed to be done each day, a daily/weekly/monthly plan of work to be done, and a permanent record of work activities.[2][1][3] Initially Perkin made Lawyer's Day just for himself, but colleagues in the firm saw its advantages and wanted it for themselves.[3]

Starting in 1951,[1] Perkin offered the Lawyer's Day product for mail order from an address in Allentown.[2] He used an Allentown printer for that but things did not work out.[3] Subsequently, it was published by Fallon Press in New York,[1] but that collaboration also failed to prosper.[3]

Then in 1956, Dorney Printing was given the job of producing the product.[1] Located in East Texas, Pennsylvania within Lower Macungie Township,[4] Dorney Printing had been around since at least 1940.[5] It was being run by the three Dorney brothers, in partnership with their mother, in a business that the brothers had once labored on in a converted chicken coop with their late father.[6] The family operation was known for printing calendars for local churches,[7] as well as local advertising products, school yearbooks, and the like.[6]

Another product called Accountant's Day was formed for that occupation.[1] By 1959, the product had been given the generic name "Day-Timer" and was reported to have met a positive notices nationwide in the financial, advertising, and architectural worlds.[8] This acceptance by professionals continued into the 1960s, and by 1963 Perkin's company was known as Day-Timers, Inc.[1] The product was offered in various sizes ranging from full letter-paper size down to small pocket-sized versions.[1] A subsidiary Day-Timers Canada, Ltd. was created and did well as well.[1]

Initially the Day-Timers product was a "filler" job for the family, but once it took off, it became the bulk of what they were printing.[3] They expanded into a full-sized production facility in East Texas.[9] The collaboration between Perkin and the Dorneys was going well and Perkin decided to buy Dorney Printing and make it a subsidiary.[3] Perkin was president of Day-Timers, Inc. and brother Robert Dorney, who had coordinated the printing work with Perkin, was vice president and general manager.[3] By the end of the 1960s, Day-Timers, Inc. had some 300,000 customers and 125 employees.[3] Most sales were coming via direct mail.[7]

In 1972, the company was acquired by Beatrice Foods, which kept a hands-off approach.[10] Perkin died in 1976,[11] after which Robert Dorney became president of Day-Timer.[10] Then in 1998, American Brands acquired Day-Timer and made it part of what would become ACCO Brands.[7]

Day-Timer planner on a desk

Day-Timer makes a variety of desk diaries, organizers, and pocket calendars.[10] The main Day-Timer product has a page for each day, with spaces for annotating various kinds of activities; there is also a pull-out calendar which can provide a view of the year as a whole.[12] In addition the product has calendar inserts which can be changed on a regular basis.[12] Day-Timer also offers a container for storage of prior years' books.[12]

By 1986, Day-Timer had some $100 million in sales and about 3 million customers, mostly executives and professionals.[10] Day-Timer was especially ubiquitous among its original base, lawyers, with the company estimating that a fifth of all practicing lawyers in America used one.[10] There were around 800 full-time employees at the East Texas facility and the product did well even in downturned economic times as there was always a demand for tools that could provide greater managerial efficiency.[10]

By the 1980s there was a large market for paper datebooks, and a number of companies were making them.[12] The Day-Timer product was especially popular among ambitious professionals.[4] Filofax was perhaps Day-Timer's biggest competitor.[12][10]

Datebooks and personal organizers tended to inspire loyalty to that particular brand; as one story in The Morning Call newspaper began, "Some people cannot live without their Day-Timer Day Planners."[4] A factory store at the East Texas facility became a popular destination for Day-Timer customers.[4] One enthusiastic Day-Timer customer was quoted as saying, "Only compulsives can do this system. But there are a lot of us out there."[12] Public figures who enthusiastically used Day-Timers included Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Hope, and Lorne Greene.[10]

Preparation for a SCO Group presentation about the ill-fated DT4 mobile app, 2007

Initially, Day-Timer's paper products co-existed with the advent of personal computers. The popularity of Day-Timer was of the level that early PC personal information manager (PIM) applications such as Borland Sidekick could print out appointment pages in Day-Timer format, for physical insertion into a Day-Timer book.[13] Early on there was a collaboration with Lotus 1-2-3 that did not work out.[10]

In the mid-late-1990s, the company did have a successful PC product in the PIM space, called Day-Timer Organizer.[14] Following the acquisition of Chronologic Corporation and their program Install Recall, the reworked and rebranded Day-Timer Organizer for Windows was released in 1994.[15] As one review of the new product said, it kept a "zealous dedication to the hard-copy Day-Timer metaphor."[15] Day-Timer Organizer went through several versions and was well-received, twice winning Editor's Choice awards from PC Magazine.[14] Later versions, such Day-Timer Organizer 2000, still kept their resemblance to the Day-Timer paper product.[14] The Day-Timer Organizer product competed with Lotus Organizer.[14]

With the advent of smartphones, the appeal of a mobile software representation of Day-Timer seemed apparent. An agreement was reached with The SCO Group to build a mobile app named DT4 for the BlackBerry and other devices and work on it was well underway,[16] but that collaboration fell through. In 2009, Day-Timer did introduce a calendaring app for the iPhone.[17] The year 2012 saw the introduction of a replacement app, called Plan2Go, with Android phones supported as a platform in addition to the iPhone.[18]

But by 2014 that app had been discontinued and the company was offering no software application of any kind,[19] marketing itself as a purely paper solution. This is a stance it has continued into the 2020s.[20]

Building that formerly housed Day-Timer Canada, in St. Catharines, Ontario

Paper-based personal organizers continued to lose market share to digital versions and electronic devices.[17][9] Additionally, Day-Timer struggled during the Great Recession, and in 2009 reduced employees' pay in lieu of conducting layoffs.[9]

During 2012, ACCO Brands merged with MeadWestvaco, which also had other personal organizer products such as At-A-Glance and Day Runner; to eliminate redundancies, corporate heads decided to shut down Day-Timers' historical Lehigh Valley headquarters, with the loss of 300 jobs there, and shift Day-Timer product operations to corporate facilities in New York, Ohio, and Illinois.[9] This was another blow to this part of the Lehigh Valley, which had previously seen factory closings from the likes of Mack Trucks and Ingersoll Rand.[9]

Nonetheless, there is still a market for those who prefer and use the paper form for personal organizers and calendars,[17] for whom Day-Timer has continued to make products.

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