Burberry and Smythson launch their first joint collection of leather notebooks and travel games, from £210 for Christmas

Key Takeaways

• Burberry and Smythson have created their first joint collection, a range of leather notebooks and travel games released in October ahead of the festive season.

• The Soho notebooks are bound in Smythson's Panama leather with weather themed phrases and illustrations, while the games include playing cards and roll-up chess and backgammon boards lined in Burberry's House Check.

• Smythson lists the notebooks at £210 and £225, the chess roll at £850 and the backgammon roll at £795, with free gold stamped initials on every piece.

• The collection is sold through both Smythson and Burberry, with the notebooks handmade at Smythson's bookbinding workshop in Hertfordshire.

Burberry and Smythson have joined forces for the first time on a collection of leather notebooks and travel games, bringing together two British heritage houses whose histories both run through travel, weather and exploration. The pieces have been timed for the Christmas gifting season, and they take Burberry's long-running preoccupations with weather, exploration and the outdoors and print them onto Smythson's Panama leather notebooks. Rather than a clothing capsule, the partnership produces a set of objects designed for the desk, the train and the hotel room.

The collection, which launched in October ahead of the festive season, is split between Soho notebooks and a group of games covering playing cards, chess and backgammon. In its own description, Smythson says the range draws "on themes of exploration and the British preoccupation with weather". The notebook covers carry illustrations and weather phrases alongside the House Check Burberry uses to line its trench coats, so the gift carries Burberry's familiar signature without turning into a scarf or a coat. Every item can also be personalised with up to three initials stamped in gold at no extra charge, which neatly turns a ready made present into something that feels a little more considered when it is unwrapped on Christmas morning.

Burberry and Smythson pair House Check linings with Panama leather Soho notebooks and roll-up chess sets

The notebooks are special editions of Smythson's Soho, which is bound in grainy Panama leather and filled with the brand's gilt-edged pale blue Featherweight paper, and each one is made by hand at Smythson's bookbinding workshop in Hertfordshire. Their covers feature playful illustrations and typically British phrases, so an archive beige version is printed with "Come rain or shine" and lined in House Check, while a forest green edition carries the line "Lovely weather for ducks" on its cover. Inside, the endpapers carry either the House Check or a tonal London map print inspired by Burberry's Winter 2026 runway collection, which links the stationery directly to the clothes Burberry showed on the catwalk earlier this year. Each notebook measures 14 by 19.6 centimetres, comes with a ribbon bookmark and a Burberry x Smythson logo on the back, and is presented in a co-branded gift box that makes the whole package ready to sit under a tree.

The games make up the second half of the range and are cut from Smythson's Panama crossgrain leather, with smooth leather interiors and secure zip pockets lined in Burberry's House Check so that pieces and cards stay in place while travelling. Playing cards arrive in leather travel cases with gilt-edged illustrated cards, while a double pack edition adds a Smythson Wafer pencil and a Featherweight paper notepad for keeping score. The chess and backgammon sets are made as roll-up boards that can be laid out at home or packed into a suitcase, extending the travel theme beyond the notebooks and into the slower hours of a holiday.

On Smythson's Burberry x Smythson collection page the Soho notebooks are priced at £210 and £225, while the chess roll costs £850 and the backgammon roll is listed at £795, placing the collection firmly in the luxury gifting bracket. Smythson describes the project as one "Championing a shared passion for craftsmanship, innovation, and timeless design", adding that the partnership "unites two heritage British brands", which explains why the range leans so heavily on materials and finishes that both companies already use in their own collections. Burberry is also selling the pieces on its own website, so shoppers can find the collection through either brand depending on whether they arrive looking for stationery or for a Burberry present. That dual route matters during the busiest shopping weeks of the year, because a Smythson customer buying a diary for a colleague and a Burberry customer browsing for a partner are likely to land on the same notebook from opposite directions.

Burberry and Smythson tie the collaboration to Burberry's 170th anniversary and Smythson's expedition diaries

The collaboration lands in a year when Burberry has been celebrating its 170th anniversary and returning repeatedly to the trench coat, the fabric behind it and the British weather that made both necessary. Thomas Burberry invented cotton gabardine in 1879, and the house is currently marking that heritage with a free trench coat exhibition at the V&A in South Kensington (highly recommend anyone to go visit it, it's super interesting!), which runs from 21 September 2026 to 3 January 2027 and includes 19 runway interpretations of the trench by Daniel Lee and Christopher Bailey from the past 25 years.

The partnership also reflects the commercial direction Burberry set when chief executive Joshua Schulman unveiled the Burberry Forward strategy in November 2024, naming "timeless British luxury" as one of its pillars alongside leading with outerwear. In those results, Schulman described Burberry as "an extraordinary luxury brand, quintessentially British, equal parts heritage and innovation", and a pairing with a London stationer founded in the nineteenth century expresses that Britishness through objects as well as clothes.

Smythson brings an equally useful back story, since Frank Smythson founded the company on New Bond Street in 1887 and it went on to create the world's first portable diary in 1908 after supplying stationery to each of Queen Victoria's residences in the 1890s.