Where small businesses get big ideas
Vistaprint, a Cimpress company, empowers more than 17 million small business owners around the world to market themselves professionally and live their dreams.
How did we get here?
As a student at INSEAD business school in France, our founder and CEO Robert Keane saw opportunity in the difficulty that small businesses faced when they needed great-looking marketing materials in small quantities for a low price. He wanted to remove these limitations by providing marketing materials that were low-volume, flexible, high-quality, quick and affordable. Like many of our customers, Robert started his business alone, working from his apartment in Paris.
For the first few years, the company existed as a direct mail catalogue called ‘Bonne Impression’, providing business cards, brochures, newsletters and software to small businesses in France and later, the UK and Germany. November 1998 saw a momentous shift in strategy: we moved online combining online graphic design software, e-commerce ordering, and centralised printing.
In 1999, we changed our name to Vistaprint and invented two key software technologies that would change the industry: browser-based desktop publishing and workflow automation to automatically aggregate large numbers of small orders into high-quality, low-cost, high-volume production streams. These inventions allowed Vistaprint to stand out from the crowd in terms of its technological capabilities, and ability to serve the small and micro-business market. They also laid the foundations for high growth, worldwide expansion and innovation.
Where are we now?
In the last 25 years, Robert Keane has taken Vistaprint from his apartment in Paris to one of the world’s leading online providers of marketing products and services to small businesses. Our annual revenue is over $1.4bn, we have more than 6,000 team members across 29 offices and manufacturing facilities worldwide, with 22 localized websites serving markets around the world.
Over the years, Vistaprint has made significant enhancements to its product selection, quality and customer experience, evolving from a business cards provider to an all-encompassing marketing solution. We offer a wide range of customizable small business marketing products: from marketing materials to signage and digital marketing to graphic design services.
Alongside this, our customers have access to real-time ideas and assistance and a simple, straightforward experience. When we put it all together, small business owners can design and project a consistent and cohesive brand image that makes them look and feel professional in-store, online, on-site or on-the-go.
Whether it’s a local restaurant owner who wants to create an eye-catching menu, an arts and crafts maker who needs to set themselves apart with trade show displays or an entrepreneur building their online presence from scratch: we’re proud to help small businesses with all their marketing needs at any point in their journey.
Our passion for providing professional, affordable marketing solutions for small businesses is stronger than ever, and this will be the driving force of Vistaprint for years to come.
