Vistaprint 2009 Annual Report Download - page 15

purchasing from us an attractive alternative for individual consumers. We intend to add new products
and services targeted at the consumer market and we believe that the economies of scale provided by
our large print order volumes and integrated design and production facilities will enable us to profitably
grow our consumer business.
Strategic Partnerships
We have entered into a variety of strategic partnerships that facilitate access to customers that
we would not be able to reach through direct marketing channels. We focus on cultivating opportunities
with strategic importance in the small business marketplace and seek to partner with companies that
have large numbers of well established small business customer relationships. We have developed
online and offline tools that allow our strategic partners to deliver our custom products and services in
ways that complement their existing customer relationships and capabilities. We have also developed
a scalable wholesale capability to address the market of customers who choose to order customized
products and services through retail environments such as office superstores, or small print and copy
storefronts. In April 2009, we announced a multi-year strategic alliance with FedEx Office, whereby
FedEx customers will be able to design, order and print customized products either online or in any of
1,600 FedEx Office Print & Ship Centers in the United States.
Extend Technology Leadership
We believe that technological innovation and the investment we have made in our technology
development efforts have been among the principal drivers of our success to date. We have developed
extensive amounts of proprietary software and manufacturing capabilities. We hold 25 United States
patents, 4 patents in other countries and have more than 50 patent applications pending in the United
States and other countries. We believe that the quality of our technology gives us an advantage over
our competitors and we intend to continue developing our proprietary technology to maintain that
advantage. We intend to continue to invest in enhancing and refining our existing technologies,
creating new technologies, and protecting our proprietary rights. We believe that this investment in
technology development will drive further expansion of our service and product offerings, improve the
customer’s experience in designing and ordering products and services from us, and improve
efficiencies in our production of products and delivery of services.
Our Technology
We have standardized, automated and integrated the graphic design, automation and production
process, from design conceptualization to product shipment, through a number of proprietary
technologies, including:
Design and Document Creation Technologies
Our document model architecture and technology employs Internet-compatible data structures to
define, process and store product designs as a set of separately searchable, combinable and
modifiable component elements. In comparison to traditional document storage and presentation
technologies, such as bitmap or PDFs, this architecture provides significant advantages in storing,
manipulating and modifying design elements, allowing us to generate customized initial and later
matching product design options automatically in real time.
Our auto-matching design software algorithmically generates customized product designs in real-
time based on key-word searches, enabling professional-looking graphic layouts to be easily and
quickly created by customers without graphic arts training.
Form 10-K
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