Print Solutions Magazine

Last year Jeff Coveney and his wife, Rachel, founded Boston Movie Tours, which provides several walking tours to famous movie sites in the city. In 2005 they hired a designer who did a fantastic job of choosing a color scheme, creating a logo and building a web site (www.bostonmovietours.net). But the brand building required a lot of time and money. By the time Jeff Coveney was ready to print the products any small business requires, such as direct mail postcards and business cards, the designer was costing too much. He needed another solution. He found VistaPrint.

VistaPrint offers automated design and printing services to some 12,000 small business and consumer customers daily. In addition to its U.S. operations based in Lexington, Mass., VistaPrint owns a 68,000- square-foot plant in Windsor, Ontario, a 54,000-square-foot plant in Venlo, The Netherlands, and has locations in Bermuda and Jamaica, West Indies. The company, which employs more than 500 people globally, operates 16 localized VistaPrint web sites that serve customers in more than 120 countries. Of course, Coveney didn’t know all of this when he stumbled upon VistaPrint’s web site via Google™. He just needed quality, inexpensive business cards and direct mail postcards. But VistaPrint’s proprietary, standardized, automated graphic design and print process enabled Coveney to order high-quality printed products in small orders at a reasonable price.

Initially Coveney wasn’t too sure if VistaPrint was going to provide what he needed. “It was a new process for me,” he says. VistaPrint offers customers three ways to design and order printed products. Customers can:

• design their printed products using VistaPrint’s online tools, which include thousands of templates, a bank of more than 70,000 images, and the ability to upload original photos or logos

• design their printed product using their own desktop publishing program and then upload the design to VistaPrint

• call the company’s Design Services department toll free for a professionally designed product, often at no extra charge. (Complex projects are subject to design fees.)

At first Coveney attempted to design his own direct mail postcard. He searched templates, uploaded his logo and then decided the process wasn’t worth his time. So he called VistaPrint’s Design Services department. “I said ‘Here’s my logo, my color scheme and here’s what I want.’” In less than two weeks he had 2,000 professionally designed 8 1/2 x 5 1/2-inch postcards printed on 80# card stock. VistaPrint’s graphic designer was able to incorporate Coveney’s existing logo and color scheme, which was 4-color front and back. The entire project cost him about $350.

Coveney says the main benefit of using VistaPrint’s automated design and printing services was the cost savings. “It was too easy to save that much money,” he says. But not only was the postcard inexpensive, it was successful.

Recently Coveney attended a tour operator conference in Detroit. A couple of weeks before the conference, he mailed a postcard to everyone on the conference’s mailing list, and followed up the mailing with an email. When introducing his tour to various conference attendees, many people already knew who he was and the type of tour he offered based on the postcard he sent. “That was the goal,” Coveney says.

Coveney is VistaPrint’s ideal customer. “We focus on the small business,” says Janet Holian, VistaPrint’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. VistaPrint’s business model is based on the printing needs of small business owners and individual consumers. “The printing market often serves really big business,” Holian says. Unlike the traditional printing market, Holian says VistaPrint discovered a new market that needs the same quality printing, but in smaller quantities at a smaller price. VistaPrint’s technologies and large-scale operations allow them to do just that. While some printing professionals might view VistaPrint’s inexpensive pricing as a threat to business, Holian says VistaPrint also can be viewed as a company that’s helping the printing industry grow by successfully targeting a market that previously couldn’t afford traditional printers.

Because of VistaPrint’s competitive pricing and fast turnaround, the company serves many repeat customers. Coveney is one of them. In addition to the direct mail postcards, which he sends out in quantities of about 100 at a time, Coveney also ordered 4-color business cards, which included his logo and contact information. He also plans to order more direct mail pieces from VistaPrint next year.

Compared to many printing companies that offer self-service online ordering, Coveney says, VistaPrint allows users to take their designs to the next level because customers are able to work with a professional graphic designer for little to no extra money. “If you have a good idea of what you want, it’s a great solution for a small business.”

Tips

1. Janet Holian, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of online print provider VistaPrint, Lexington, Mass., says you must generate order volume to justify the technology and marketing dollars that must be spent to support a system similar to VistaPrint’s. Smaller printing professionals should, therefore, take it slow. Begin by offering something simple, such as free business cards online, to pull customers in.

2. Don’t rely on the customer to design a professional product. Jeff Coveney, co-founder and president of Boston-based Boston Movie Tours, attempted to design his own direct mail postcard but despite the templates and bank of images, decided it wasn’t worth his time. Because he was able to work hand-in-hand with a professional graphic designer in VistaPrint’s Design Services department, Coveney stuck with VistaPrint instead of looking elsewhere.

3. VistaPrint’s largest department is design, followed by manufacturing, marketing and engineering. “We have 50 engineers continually working on technology,” Holian says. Whether your e-commerce system uses proprietary technology or not, hire someone who knows the system intimately. This person can train fellow employees, solve problems and be the point person when the technology evolves.