The Financial Times opined on the obsolescence of business cards. This has been a common theme for the past quarter of a century, so whether or not it’s actually news is up for debate.
Business cards have been a surprisingly accurate marker of my career’s evolution. Before college, when I was working in laboratories to save up, business cards were strictly for management. If anyone needed to reach me, they’d receive my name and extension number scribbled on a company compliments slip.
Fast forward to my early agency days, and changing my business cards became the immediate priority after receiving a promotion letter. I vividly recall discussing new cards with our office manager, Angie, to reflect my new title: from Account Executive to Senior Account Executive. While that promotion enabled me to buy my first home, it was the tangible act of updating my business cards that truly solidified that future title for me in my memory.
Building a network was an important part of development in the early part of my career and my manager at the time would ask us each week how many business cards we’d given out as a way of quantifying that development.
Business cards had a symbolism and status that was captured famously in Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and in memorable scene of its its subsequent film adaptation.
Even today in Asian countries, business cards come loaded with cultural symbolism and a distinct etiquette of exchange. The exchange of them is handy as it allows to lay out a model of who is around a meeting table based on the card collection, facilitating easier meeting communications.
Personal organisers
In the mid-1990s, the personal organiser was a staple, its prevalence varying depending on location and budget. These organisers typically featured loose-leaf pages for schedules, an address book, and a system for storing and archiving business cards, even those of people who had moved on. However, by 2001, the media was already concerned about the impending demise of the personal organiser and its potential impact on the business card’s future.
Filofax
Filofax has the reputation for being the most British of brands. It originally started off as an importer of an American product Lefax. Lefax was a Philadelphia-based business which made organisers popular within industry including power plant engineers in the early 20th century.
At that time electricity was considered to be the enabler that the internet is now, and Lefax helped to run power plants effectively and reliably. Filofax eventually acquired Lefax in 1992. During the 1980s, the Filofax became a symbol of professionalism and aspirational upward mobility. I was given one as soon as I started work, I still have it at my parents home. It’s leather cover didn’t even develop a patina, despite the beating it took in various parts of my work life: in night clubs, chemical plants and agency life. Filofax even became part of cinematic culture in the James Belushi film Taking Care of Business also known as Filofax in many markets.
Day-Timer
In the US, there was the Day-Timer system, which came out of the requirements of US lawyers in the early 1950s and became a personal management tool for white collar workers in large corporates like Motorola – who appreciated their whole system approach. Day-Timer was as much a lifestyle, in the same way that David Allen’s Getting Things Done® (GTD®) methodology became in the mid-2000s to 2010s. Customers used to go and visit the personal organiser factory and printing works for fun. Along the way, other products such as At-A-Glance and Day Runner had appeared as substitute products. Day-Timer inspired the Franklin Planner system; a similar mix of personal organiser and personal management philosophy launched in 1984.
By the mid-1990s, Day-Timer had skeuomorphic PC programme that mirrored the real-world version of the Day-Timer. At the time this and competitor applications would allow print-outs that would fit in the real world Day-Timer organiser. Day-Timer’s move to mobile apps didn’t so well and now it exists in a paper-only form catering to people wanting to organise their personal lives and home-workers.
Rolodex
While the Filofax allowed you take to your world with you, the Rolodex allowed you to quickly thumb through contacts and find the appropriate name.
Back when I first started my first agency job, I was given my first Rolodex frame. I spent a small fortune on special Rolodex business card holders. At my peak usage of Rolodex as a repository for my business contacts, I had two frames that I used to rifle through names of clients, suppliers and other industry contacts.
Rolodex became a synonym for your personal network, you even heard of people being hired for ‘their Rolodex’. For instance, here’s a quote from film industry trade magazine Hollywood Reporter: Former British Vogue Chief Eyes September for Launch of New Print Magazine, Platform (May 8, 2025):
…to blend “the timeless depth of print with the dynamism of digital” with coverage of top creative forces, no doubt leaning into Edward Enninful’s enviable Rolodex of A-list stars, designers and creators gathered through years spent in the fashion and media space with tenures at British Vogue and as European editorial director of Vogue.
If I was thinking about moving role, the first thing I would do is take my Rolodex frames home on a Friday evening. The fan of business cards is as delicate as it is useful. It doesn’t do well being lugged around in a bag or rucksack. Each frame would go home in a dedicated supermarket shopping bag.
The Rolodex was anchored to the idea of the desk worker. The knowledge worker had a workstation that they used everyday. Hot-desking as much the computer is the enemy of the Rolodex. My Rolodex usage stopped when I moved to Hong Kong. My frames are now in boxes somewhere in my parents garage. Doomed not by their usefulness, but their lack of portability.
Personal information management
The roots of personal information management software goes back ideas in information theory, cognitive psychology and computing that gained currency after the second world war.
As the idea of personal computers gained currency in the 1970s and early 1980s, personal information software appeared to manage appointments and scheduling, to-do lists, phone numbers, and addresses. The details of business cards would be held electronically.
At this time laptops were a niche computing device. Like the Rolodex, the software stayed at the office or in the den at home. NoteCards used software to provide a hybridisation of hypertext linkages with the personal information models of the real world. NoteCards was developed and launched in 1987, prefiguring applications like DevonTHINK, Evernote and Notion by decades.
As well as providing new links to data, computers also allowed one’s contacts to become portable. It started off with luggable and portable laptop computers.
Putting this power into devices that can fit in the hand and a coat pocket supercharged this whole process.
Personal digital assistants
Personal digital assistants (PDA) filled a moment in time. Mobile computer data connections were very slow and very niche on GSM networks. Mobile carrier pricing meant that it only worked for certain niche uses, such as sports photographers sending their images though to their agency for distribution to picture desks at newspapers and magazines. While the transfer rate was painfully slow, it was still faster than burning the images on to CD and using a motorcycle courier to their picture agency.
The PDA offered the knowledge worker their address book, calendar, email and other apps in their pocket. It was kept up to date by a cradle connected to their computer. When the PDA went into the cradle information went both ways, contacts and calendars updated, emails sent, content to be read on the PDA pushed from the computer. IBM and others created basic productivity apps for the Palm PDA.
IrDA
By 1994, several proprietary infra red data transmission formats existed, none of which spoke to each other. This was pre-standardisation on USB cables. IrDA was a standard created by an industry group, looking to combat all the proprietary systems. The following year, Microsoft announced support in Windows, allowing laptops to talk with other devices and the creation of a simple personal area network.
This opened the possibility of having mice and other input devices unconstrained by connecting cables. It also allowed PDAs to beam data to each other via ‘line of sight’ connections. The reality of this was frustrating. You would often have to devices an inch from each other and hold them there for an eternity for the data to crawl across. It wasn’t until 1999 that the first devices with Bluetooth or wi-fi appeared and a couple more years for them to become ubiquitous. Unsolicited messages over Bluetooth aka bluejacking started to appear in the early 2000s.
But IrDA provided a mode of communication between devices.
versit Consortium
versit Consortium sorted another part of the puzzle. In the early 1990s the blending of computer systems with telephony networks as gaining pace. A number of companies including Apple, IBM and Siemens came together to help put together common standards to help computer systems and telephony. In 1995, they had come up with the versitcard format for address book contacts, better known now as ‘vCards’. These were digital business cards that could be exchanged by different personal information management software on phones, computers and PDAs. For a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s I would attach my vCard on emails to new contacts. I still do so, but much less often.
The following year the same thing happened with calendar events as well.
Over time, the digital business card came to dominate, via device-to-device exchanges until the rise of LinkedIn – the professional social network.
Faster data networks allowed the digital business card sharing to become more fluid.
A future renaissance for the business card?
While business cards are currently seen outdated in the west, could they enjoy a renaissance? There are key changes in behaviour that indicate trends which would support a revitalisation of business cards.
Digital detox
While information overload has been a turn that has been with us since personal computers, digital detox is a new phenomenon that first started to gain currency in 2008 according to Google Books data. Digital detox as a concept has continued to climb. It has manifested itself with people talking a break from their screens including smartphones. Digital detox has continued to gain common currency.
Creating a need for tangible contact details in the form of a business card in certain contexts.
The pivot of personal organisers
Day-Timer and Filofax didn’t disappear completely. While Day-Timer is no longer a professional ‘cult’, it now helps remote workers organise their own work day at home. They also tap into the needs of people organising their own wedding. The paper plans also gives them a memento of this event in a largely digital world.
If personal organisers continue to exist then real-world business cards would also make sense in those contexts.
Bullet-journaling
Ryder Carroll is known as the ‘father’ of the bullet journal which was a home-made organisation method which was similar to the kind of task lists I was taught to pull together in my first agency role. There were aspects of it that would be familiar to Day-Timer advocates as well.
When the world was going digital Carroll used paper to help organise himself. Carroll tapped into the fact that even computer programmers use paper including notebooks and post-it notes to manage projects and personal tasks within those projects. Carroll took his ‘system’ public via Kickstarter project in 2013.
Bullet journaling provided its users with simplicity, clarity and an increased sense of control in their life. What is of interest for this post, is the move from the virtual back into paper organisation.
Changing nature of work
Hybrid working, remote working and increasing freelance communities in industry such as advertising has affected one’s professional identity. This has huge implications for personal standing and even mental health. Human connection becomes more important via virtual groups and real-world meet-ups. Controlling one’s own identity via a business card at these meet-ups starts to make an increasing amount of sense.
The poisoning of the LinkedIn well
On the face of it LinkedIn has been a wonderful idea. Have a profile that’s part CV / portfolio which allows your social graph of professional connections to move with you through your career. Services were bolted on like advertising, job applications and corporate pages to attract commercial interest and drive revenue.
Over time, LinkedIn has increased the amount of its creator functions, driving thought leadership content that is a prime example of enshitification. 2025 saw ‘thought leaders’ publishing generative AI created posts as entirely their own work.
LinkedIn has become devalued as a digital alternative to the humble business card.
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