Vistaprint 2013 Annual Report Download - page 6

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PART I
Item 1. Business
Overview
We are a leading online provider of coordinated portfolios of customized marketing products and services
to micro businesses worldwide. We offer a broad spectrum of brand identity and promotional products, marketing
services and digital solutions. While we focus primarily on micro business marketing products and services,
consumers also purchase many of our products, such as invitations and announcements, greeting cards, photo
books and calendars.
We offer value to our customers through innovative technology, a broad selection of customized products
and services, low pricing and personalized customer service. While we offer a broad selection of designs and
formats, we seek to reduce manufacturing complexity and costs by using limited characteristics that can be
reconfigured and combined. This reduces our costs versus comparable marketing of products and services
produced using traditional methods. This approach has allowed us to successfully penetrate the large, fragmented
and geographically dispersed micro business and home and family markets.
We have standardized, automated and integrated the design and production process, from design
conceptualization to product shipment and service delivery. Customers can use our proprietary design software to
easily create and order full-color, personalized, professional-looking marketing physical and digital products and
services, without any prior design training or experience. Customers have access to extensive graphic designs,
design templates, photographs and illustrations as well as logo design services and content suggestions. We are
also able to automatically match and adapt graphic content from one product format to another, which allows us to
generate and display complementary products and services as part of the ordering process.
Our proprietary Internet-based order processing systems receive and store tens of thousands of individual
orders on a daily basis and, using complex algorithms, organize these orders for efficient production and delivery to
our customers. Through our production technologies and highly automated manufacturing facilities, we are able to
significantly reduce the costs and inefficiencies associated with traditional production and can provide customized
finished products in as little as two days from design to delivery. During the fiscal year ended June 30, 2013, our
customers placed approximately 29.1 million orders.
Market and Industry Background
The Marketplace for Micro Business Marketing Products and Services
We focus on providing marketing products and services for the micro business market, generally
businesses or organizations with fewer than 10 employees and usually 2 or fewer. We believe that there are
approximately 60 million businesses with fewer than 10 employees in the United States, Canada, and the European
Union and that these micro businesses undergo frequent changes with many forming and dissolving each year,
creating a large market for business identity products and services in addition to marketing products and services.
We also believe that, in response to the growth of the Internet and the emergence of digital production
technologies, micro businesses are shifting from traditional suppliers of customized marketing products and media
toward online alternatives.
In the past, a business seeking customized marketing products and services could either hire a designer to
develop and coordinate the production of marketing materials or produce printed materials themselves using
desktop software and an inkjet or laser printer. A designer can produce a professionally coordinated portfolio of
marketing products and services, but this is a significantly more costly and time-consuming alternative, whereas a
traditional self-service model typically produces less sophisticated and lower quality output. We believe that neither
alternative satisfies the needs of micro businesses, which typically lack the resources or skills to generate
satisfactory results using either approach. As a result, we believe the micro business market has been underserved
historically.
Online commerce provides significant advantages and opportunities to micro business customers seeking
customized marketing products and services at affordable prices. These customers do not typically need the large
Form 10-K