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Everything is transactional in tech, says Keila Olbrich.
“If you’re not seeing an ad, it’s you; you’re the product that they’re selling,” she observes.
Olbrich is not opposed to technology; in fact, she has spent many years developing digital experiences and can tell you there is genuine value in social media and online products.
However, Olbrich’s experience from being inside the situation has altered her point of view.
“I don’t want all of my interactions to be online anymore,” she says.
The idea is now central to Lost and Bound, the business she founded to give old and forgotten books a second life by binding them into journals.
The concept started to feel real during a visit to Home Depot. While Olbrich was collecting supplies for her first pop-up sign, an employee approached and asked her what she was working on.
She described how she worked: hunting up old books, preserving pieces of their stories, and then turning them into journals so someone else could begin again.
The employee told Olrich that his father had been a bookbinder and that he wanted to buy one for his daughter, who was graduating from college. He then asked for a business card.
She didn’t have one.
A website?
Not yet.
The brief exchange gave Olbrich exactly what she had been looking for—an indication that someone else understood it.
“It made me realize (that), actually, this is a very cool idea,” she says. “And people are interested.”
The practice of writing with a pen is experiencing a revival, as people seek a break from screens and a way to keep their lives in order. A 2026 Market Reports World study states that Americans buy more than 182 million diaries and planners every year. Almost half of adult Americans use a physical diary or planner. The same study found that more people now want journals with a customized touch, with demand for custom products up 42 percent and demand for products made from green materials up 39 percent.
Olbrich, 32, grew up in Greece and attended Rochester Institute of Technology to study new media design. In 2019, she and her husband, Robert Bond, moved to Seattle; she took a job at Amazon Books and then at Goodreads, while he worked at Google.
After their daughter was born, they returned to Rochester to be closer to family.
For some time, Olbrich continued to work on design, but she soon found she wanted something she could hold in her hands.
“Writing in your notebook is a lot different than typing on your laptop,” she says. “It’s totally a different tactile experience.”
It was there that Lost and Bound began to take hold.
Olbrich scours second-hand shops, library sales, and estate sales, and also accepts donations from people getting rid of books off a shelf. She removes most of the old pages, keeps a few valuable ones, cuts out new paper by hand, and uses a simple, non-electric machine to punch the holes. She then sews everything together. She spends 45 minutes to an hour and a half on each journal, which averages $10 to $25.
The process has changed how Olbrich views her work.
“Life is messy, and not everything is always perfect,” she says. “And I’m not perfect. And I would never want my daughter to feel like she had to be perfect.”
That applies to the business side of Lost and Bound, too.
Although she produces and sells her own work, Olbrich doesn’t consider herself an entrepreneur.
“It’s OK to not, you know, be a mega-rich person cranking out these products,” she says. “It’s OK to want to make small things for a small portion of your community.”
Pop-up shops give small businesses a more economical way to test products, build awareness, and meet customers without opening a permanent store. According to Capital One Shopping Research, U.S. revenue from pop-up and temporary retail reached $15.6 billion in 2025, with around 42,500 businesses running temporary locations. Approximately 44% of these pop-ups cost less than $5,000 to set up, and 80% of the retailers who have tried a pop-up regard it as a success.
The first time Olbrich held a pop-up event was at a Coffee Party ROC, a soft clubbing event in downtown Rochester.
For her, events like this are more than an opportunity to sell journals; they offer a relatively low-risk way to put her work directly in front of people, hear their reaction, and start building a customer base before incurring the costs of a permanent retail space.
She sold around nine journals, and that only reinforced what she had already been feeling.
“I was so shocked,” Olbrich says. “It was just people walking up and saying, ‘This is really unique or cool. I want this. I’ll take this.’”
Some of the journals contain items relating to Rochester’s history. She has found old ledgers, Kodak manuals, and library books that otherwise would have been thrown away.
History repurposed for your own history is perhaps the simplest explanation of what Lost and Bound is really about.
“It’s a memory plus a product,” she says.
Rob Bell is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, photographer and editor. He also produces and hosts “Plants & Beats,” a podcast exploring mindfulness, music and culture.
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