Vistaprint 2009 Annual Report Download - page 11

Online commerce combined with digital production technologies provides significant advantages
and opportunities to consumers seeking high quality personalized announcements, greeting cards,
calendars, stationery and personalized gifts at affordable prices.
The Vistaprint Solution
We have developed a direct-to-customer solution using proprietary Internet-based software
technologies to standardize, automate and integrate the design and production process, from concept
through finished product shipment and service delivery. Our software can match and adapt graphic
elements from one product format to another, which allows us to offer a coordinated portfolio of
products and services. Automation and integration allow us to provide high quality, custom design
products and services at affordable prices for the small business or consumer.
Advanced Proprietary Technology
We rely on our advanced proprietary technology to market to, attract and retain our customers,
enable customers to create graphic designs and place orders on our websites, and aggregate and
simultaneously produce multiple orders from all over the world. Our design creation technologies
enable customers, by themselves or together with the assistance of our design support staff, to design
and create high quality marketing materials from their home or office. Our pre-production and
production technologies efficiently process and aggregate customer orders, prepare orders for high-
quality production and manage production, addressing and shipment of these orders. We use our
marketing technologies to test changes to our websites and new product offers in order to enhance our
offerings and customer value proposition. In addition, we automatically generate and display additional
products incorporating the customer’s initial design, facilitating the cross-sale of related products and
services.
High-Volume, Standardized and Scalable Processes
Our high-volume, standardized, scalable design and production processes are driven by
sophisticated proprietary software. Our Internet-based architecture makes our applications scalable
and offers our customers fast system responsiveness when they are editing their designs.
Advanced Print Technologies
Our pre-press and print production technologies for aggregating print jobs are designed to readily
scale as the number of print orders received per day increases. As more individual print jobs are
received, similar jobs can be aggregated and moved to the printing system more efficiently, thereby
optimizing the use of the printing equipment and increasing overall system throughput. Our proprietary
workflow and production management software allows us to deliver final products to customers in as
few as three days. We believe that our strategy of seeking to automate and systematize our service
and product production systems enables us to reach and serve small-scale customers more effectively
than our competitors.
Low Cost, High Quality Production
With the improvements we have made in automating the design and production process, we can
produce and ship an order the same day we send it to production, which results in minimal inventory
levels and reduced working capital requirements. We can also produce complementary custom
products in a timely fashion, allowing us to produce and deliver multi-part orders quickly and efficiently.
This allows us to produce high-quality, low-priced products at high margins even though our average
order values are low by traditional standards.
Form 10-K
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