Vistaprint 2014 Annual Report Download - page 13

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enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements with our employees, consultants and business partners,
and control access to, and distribution of, our proprietary information.
We currently hold 210 issued patents worldwide, and we continue to file new patent applications around the
world. Subject to our continued payment of required patent maintenance fees, our currently issued patents will
expire between December 2017 and April 2032. We hold trademark registrations for the Vistaprint trademark in 38
jurisdictions, including registrations in our major markets in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. We also hold
trademarks for other brands through which we do business in jurisdictions worldwide.
Our Competitive Advantage: Mass Customization
We define "mass customization" as producing, with the reliability, quality and affordability of mass
production, small individual orders where each and every one embodies the personal relevance inherent to
customized physical products.
Our high-volume, standardized, scalable mass customization processes are driven by sophisticated
proprietary software. Our technologies are designed to readily scale as the number of orders received per day
increases. In particular, the more individual jobs we receive in a time period, the more efficiently aggregations, or
gangs, of similar jobs can be assembled and moved to the printing system, thereby maximizing the efficient use of
the production capacity and increasing overall system throughput. We believe that our strategy of seeking to
automate and systematize our service and production systems enables us to reach and serve small-scale
customers more effectively than our competitors.
With the improvements we have made in automating the design and production process and with the global
scale of our production facilities, located in Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, and India, we can produce and
ship an order the same day we receive it, which results in minimal inventory levels and reduced working capital
requirements. In most of our manufacturing facilities, technology facilitates the production of complementary
customized products in a highly synchronized manner, allowing us to produce and deliver multi-part orders quickly
and efficiently.
As orders are received, we automatically route production jobs to the type and location of the production
system that is most appropriate and cost efficient for the type of product ordered. Our proprietary software and
sophisticated automation solutions combined with software from our suppliers allow us to integrate and automate
the manufacturing process from pre-production through fulfillment. Requiring as little as 13 seconds of pre-press,
printing, cutting and boxing labor for a typical order of 250 business cards, versus an hour or more for traditional
printers, our manufacturing processes enable us to print high quality customized orders using a fraction of the labor
of typical traditional printers. Our quality assurance systems are designed to ensure that we consistently deliver
quality products on time through a variety of principles of world-class manufacturing, such as Lean and Kaizen™.
Supply Chain Management
We are focused on achieving the lowest total cost in our strategic sourcing efforts by concentrating on
quality, logistics, technology and cost. Our efforts include the procurement of high quality materials and equipment
that meet our strict specifications at a low total cost across a growing number of manufacturing locations.
Additionally, we work to develop and implement logistics, warehousing, and outbound shipping strategies to provide
a balance of low-cost material availability while limiting our inventory exposure. We believe investing in a strategic
supply chain management capability that is tightly integrated with our other manufacturing teams helps us benefit
from our large scale and improve efficiency and reduce costs.
Our Competitive Advantage: Direct Marketing Expertise
We have developed expertise in direct marketing to target new customers across various channels and to
drive more traffic to our websites, as well as to retain existing customers. Our marketing employees execute
focused marketing strategies to each region but leverage our global organization in terms of expertise, knowledge
sharing, and marketing best practices.
To acquire new customers, we employ sophisticated direct marketing approaches leveraging digital media
and technologies as well as traditional media such as press releases, direct mail, broadcast, trade shows and trade
magazines, offline advertising, and word of mouth by our customers. We have developed tools and techniques for
Form 10-K