A Page of Information About Greeting CardsIncluding all you could need to know about Moonpig, the premier supplier of customisable online greeting cards...How the business was started, who started it, where the name came from, and how the business developed over the years! |
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Moonpig.com is a business offering personalized greeting cards that is now based in London and Guernsey. The website was originally launched in July 2000, and the company has now grown and captured 90 per cent of the UK online cards market. COMPANY PROFILE FOR MOONPIG.COM:We are accustomed to hearing of companies with a name, and with a similar domain name with a .com or a .co.uk suffix. However, Moonpig.com is unusual in that that is not only the domain name for its website, but is actually the legal trading name for the company itself - not simply Moonpig! Moonpig.com : Type, Private Customers visiting the website can choose from a large selection of basic card designs and can then enter their own text to personalize those cards. In addition to cards, the website offers customizable spoof magazine covers and invitations, to which customers can also upload their own photos for printing. The launch of Moonpig.com coincided with the 1999 collapse of the Dot-com bubble so progress was difficult at first, but the founder raised investment from private investors and venture capitalists. The spread of broadband and digital cameras meant sales steadily increased, and the first profits were made in 2005 as news spread by word-of-mouth. A large TV ad campaign commenced in the UK in November 2006 to build brand awareness.
At first, the company's printing works was based in Chelsea, but it moved to Guernsey in 2006. That was to benefit from the Guernsey's VAT exemption on any UK-bound goods costing less than £18. Moonpig still maintains an office in London. The business expanded with an Australian website in 2004. In Autumn 2009, the business expanded to include a range of flowers. MOONPIG THE COMPANY:Moonpig offered a new concept in buying greeting cards. Customers can order the best selling greeting card designs they see in the high street but the website allows them to personalise captions to create a unique card. Moonpig produces all of these cards in their own hi-tech production facility in Guernsey. The cards are then sent either back to the customer, or directly to the recipient by Guernsey Post and Royal Mail. Card orders received before 2pm Mon-Fri are posted first class the same day. |
NICK JENKINS, FOUNDER OF MOONPIG.COM:According to the Managing Director of Moonpig.com, Nick Jenkins, 'Moonpig' was his nickname at school, and hence the name of the brand. Ten years ago, Nick Jenkins was just an expatriate commodities broker in Russia. Then he suspected that a warehouse owner in Siberia had stolen 10 million dollars worth of sugar. So Jenkins reported the theft to the police – and then found a death threat nailed to his front door. He took that as a sign that it was time to go. Hoe sold his share in the sugar trading business, and moved back to the UK. ‘I found it nailed to my door, packed my case and moved flat overnight.’ He was £600,000 richer and had developed a taste for adventure. He decided to start from scratch - anew business in a totally new field.
He took a year out to do an MBA course at Cranfield School of Management. This taught him to analyse ideas. It was 1999, so obviously he thought of having a crack at a dotcom business. Eventually he came up with the idea of launching an online greeting card site because he realised that “short of cash, greetings cards are the most valuable thing you can print on paper.” His basic idea was for a short-run print and publishing business. But with customers able to customise cards ordered on the website. In another original idea, Moonpig’s custom-designed options also featured spoof magazine covers that copy Hello! and OK! So, the Birmingham alumnus went from death threats in Russia to a UK empire with a turnover of almost £4.5 million. A mission to make the nation love getting their post! The founder of the intriguingly named Moonpig.com, Nick Jenkins had gained a BA Russian Language and Literature at Birmingham University: “While I was doing my Russian degree the Berlin Wall came down and Russia was no longer just an interesting language to study.” He was offered a job straight after university with Glencore, the commodities business, as a sugar trader in Moscow. But he made a “reasonable sum” as a junior employee in a buyout of the business. “It was enough to have a little bit of capital to put into a business. It meant I didn’t have to worry too much.” He has put all of his £600,000 of his own money into Moonpig so far, and the total investment is £2.5 million, which is actually relatively modest for a business that last year made annual profits of almost three times that. Mr Jenkins, now the company’s chairman, owns a third of Moonpig. His other big investor, Duncan Spence, who is a serial investor in greetings cards, came in during 2002. He owns another third. And there are a dozen other shareholders too. None is in any hurry to cash in, so there is no pressure for an IPO or a trade sale. “For the first five years it was a struggle to find investors and a struggle to keep investors on board,” Mr Jenkins says. Several similar business have started up, but most did not survive. He believes that the difficulty in building up a sufficient customer base and profile, as well as getting hold of the necessary cards, is a significant barrier to entry. “Six million cards going out every year is our advertising,” he says. “That’s why it’s quite hard to copy.” Now Nick enjoys his work. ‘It’s nice to know that because of me, every morning several thousand people open their post and laugh.’ Jenkins now runs the number one UK website for personalised greeting cards. An enormous 90 per cent of the online card market predicted sales of £4.4 million for 2007. ‘It’s fantastic to visit the house of a stranger and see a Moonpig card framed on their wall,’ Nick says. But it wasn’t always so easy for Moonpig – so called after Jenkins ’s childhood nickname. The business struggled for a long time after its launch in July 2000. ‘The dot com boom collapsed, making it very difficult to raise investment in web companies. But it’s fundamentally a good idea which makes it easier to sell.’ He ran out of money when the dotcom boom bubble burst, then had to sell a stake in his business to a supplier to persuade him do business with him. Jenkins was aware of needing to buy in skills and to establish the right partnerships in the industry. Initially he agreed an exclusive online distribution deal with major card producer Paperlink in return for a 15 per cent stake in his Moonpig business. Then he employed printing and product specialists. He took time refining his brand identity before changing the Moonpig logo. He realised it should be as unobtrusive as possible, concentrating instead on the creativity of the card. Jenkins thinks he is a much better delegator because he is not familiar with most aspects of the Moonpig business. “I’m much more willing to allow people to just get on with their jobs – mostly because they’ll almost always be able to do them better than me.” So for example, he seldom gets involved on the IT side. The Moonpig.com website is more complex than the average e-commerce site - mostly because of the customising that is available to users. Users upload their own photos to illustrate cards and can then add their own text as well. Jenkins confesses that his trust in those who work for him hasn’t always been repaid. In early 2000, a short while before the planned launch, he commissioned a web designer to create the Moonpig.com website. However, the result wasn't good enough so he had to change to a different web designer with just weeks to go. To start up, Jenkins used £130,000 of his own money, plus £125,000 from friends. He didn't think that he would need more than that. “After all, this was the dotcom boom when investors seemed happy to invest in teenage entrepreneurs with no prior experience of life, let alone the industry. At least I had a proven commercial track record.” |
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Position for week ending 12 January 2008: 4 (Shopping & Classifieds - Flowers & Gifts) Position for week ending 2 February 2008: 1 (Shopping & Classifieds - Flowers & Gifts) Positions jumped: 3 |
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THE ORIGINAL IDEA FOR MOONPIG.COM:Nick Jenkins wrote his business plan for Moonpig whilst studying for an MBA at Cranfield University. Because it was the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, new business ventures were mostly internet-based. The usual pattern for new online businesses simply used the new technology to try to sell goods available on the high street a bit cheaper. it was a strategy that was bound to fail because it was too easy for others to then come in and undercut them too. Nick suspected that he needed a concept that used the unique new qualities of the internet to differentiate itself from its bricks-and-mortar rivals. So, a business that should be easily deliverable eg through a letterbox! He excluded selling digital content because “everybody was giving the stuff away”. He had the idea of customised greetings cards, and Moonpig was conceived. “I used to buy cards myself and Tipp-Ex out and change the caption,” he admits. “People liked the fact that I had made the effort.” Ten years later, the venture is making big profits. It is a well-recognised brand, particularly amongst younger consumers. In its latest financial year, it sent out nearly six million cards in the UK. |
PERSONALISED CARDS FROM MOONPIG.COM:The London-based greetings card firm Moonpig has discovered there is great value in getting personal. Receiving a personalised Moonpig card isn't like opening a greetings card. It's more like unwrapping a well-chosen present. Your own photo staring out from the card, surrounded by text referring to you just like a spoof magazine cover, is shocking. In the words of one recent recipient, 'I was laughing until lunchtime'. It is this surprise, the realisation that the sender has spent time and effort designing the card, that has made Moonpig.com a cult website. Regular users have been known to ask founder Nick Jenkins to remove the Moonpig details from the back of the cards so that their origin is not identifiable. Common recipients include the Queen and Tony Blair! Jenkins, who is a former commodities trader, spent much of the 1980s living in Russia, now acknowledges that his company was transformed by offering the spoof magazine cover. They make up over 30% of the company's turnover. 'I'm kicking myself we didn't do it much earlier,' he says. But the timing for Moonpig was better than he admits - the spoof covers appeared just as consumer purchases of digital cameras and broadband internet connections reached critical mass, so photos could be easily taken and uploaded to the website for incorporation into personalised cards. |
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UK TV Advertisment for Moonpig.com |
Advertisements for Moonpig.com point out the feature to add personalised information to the greeting card that you buy. |
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The magazine-cover idea was inspired by a card that Jenkins was sent by a friend for his 30th birthday. It had been mocked it up in the manner of the magazine 'Country Life', calling it 'Dacha Life'. (Dachas are Russian country homes, so alluding to his stay there). However, personalised cards are the central focus for Moonpig. Jenkins can often be found in his office where all the collating occurs, flicking through piles of cards and marveling at the imagination and inventiveness of his customers. Moonpig also does a good trade in using customers' uploaded photos to produce invitations. Moonpig have also employed designers to create nearly 200 spoof magazine covers. All sorts of interests and hobbies are catered to, from Homes & Estates to Dog Monthly. Some are cheeky rip-offs - for example Vague and Oi! Conde Nast, the owner of Vogue was not amused, and Vague was removed from the website. |
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THE MOONPIG NAME:Jenkins spent time refining the visual identity of the Moonpig brand. Unusually for a business, the name came first and the company afterwards. The name is rather personal having been Nick's nickname as a child. “Moonpig” was the nickname Jenkins was given on his first day at boarding school, probably for his cherubic looks. It was also a two-syllable, memorable domain name when such surreal labels were the vogue - and it had not yet been taken by any other aspirant dot-com business. |
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THE MOONPIG LOGO:Next there was the Moonpig logo, the grinning pig in a space helmet, next to the crescent moon. In fact, this branding exercise cost just £200, but is now widely known. An early version comprised a much bigger logo, with a pig surrounded by rockets. But Jenkins simplified it believing it would be wrong for the brand to be closely identified with just humour when its cards cover everything from sympathy cards to Jewish holidays. |
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FINANCING MOONPIG:Nick Jenkins had made money from commodity trading. He invested £60,000 of his savings into this new venture, and managed to attract additional investors amongst his business contacts. |
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EARLY DAYS OF MOONPIG:During their first year, Moonpig only distributed 40,000 cards. It was not apparent why people would want a customised birthday card. No other business was selling them, and Jenkins had no further funds to market the business. “When I started out, I put the day’s cards in my pocket and cycled to the post office to post them.” TIMELINE - THE GROWTH OF MOONPIG - SOME REPORTS:Aug 1998: Whilst on an MBA course, Jenkins evaluates alternative business ideas. He invents the idea of online greetings cards after realising that "short of cash, greetings cards are the most valuable thing you can print on paper". Aug 1999: Jenkins signs up an investor in the business - greetings card publisher Paperlink. The deal gives Moonpig the rights to sell Paperlink card designs online. Jo Foley is Jenkins' first recruit as Product Manager. Jun 2000: Moonpig is launched. Aug 2004: Moonpig puts customisable spoof magazine covers on its website. It later added a facility on its website for customers to upload their own pictures to paste onto these. Dec 2004: Moonpig launches an Australian website. Oct 2005: The company also launches in the USA. Turnover for the year 2005/06 was predicted to be £1.2million - a 50% increase on the previous year. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ November 2005: Turnover estimates upgraded to reach £1.8million this year, alongside with profits of £300,000. Moonpig is one of the few original dotcom businesses to have survived the dotcom bust. Moonpig also had an enormous 80 per cent share of the online card market. Business was growing steadily but was unremarkable for the first few years of Moonpig’s existence. But over the two preceding years, broadband internet connections had become widespread. Also digital cameras had made it easy for customers to upload their own photos onto cards, and consequently company turnover had doubled. Moonpig’s selection of 200 spoof magazine covers now made up 30 per cent of its sales. And the future looked good. Moonpig had launched in Australia the previous year, and in the USa the previous month. Jenkins anticipated that the UK online greetings card market would grow to £60m within another five years. Though there would be competition, he planned to retain 30 per cent of this. As Moonpig attracts 6,000 new customers per month – mostly through word of mouth – that seems quite possible. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Oct 2005: The doubling in turnover in each of the past two years had enabled Nick Jenkins to expand the Moonpig brand overseas. The Australian website opened a year previously. US costumers were now able to join in from this month. The US launch was quite easy for Moonpig the company as it could print and send out the cards from its headquarters in London! "It's just as cheap to send a card from here as it would be from within the US", said Jenkins. Geographically, this is as far as Nick Jenkins sees the company's ambitions stretching. The culture of sending greetings cards is limited to Europe, Australia and the USA. However, a lot of business remained to be gained within these territories. Jenkins estimated that he had cornered 0.1% of the UK cards market - worth maybe £670million. However, he believed this share could be increased to 5%. They advertised on internet search engines. Also, regular users of Moonpig were sent email newsletters encouraging use of service. They also introduced a facility for customers to set up an email alert for family members' and friends' birthdays. Moonpig's small printing unit in London was a room the size of an average lounge. It contained 3 machines - usually producing about 3000 cards per day although they claimed it might handle 16,000! Should that happen though, it would have been hard work to stuff all those envelopes by hand. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ News posted on 17th November, 2006: Internet greetings card business Moonpig.com moved to Guernsey. The online company, which allows customers to design and personalise cards by adding text or uploading photos, receives up to 25,000 orders in a single day. "The Guernsey move came through one of our investors, the Sark resident Duncan Spence", said founder and managing director of Moonpig, Nick Jenkins. "He is a serial entrepreneur in the greeting card industry. We were previously in a space one fifth of the size in London and when deciding where to move to, we decided on Guernsey." "The idea was to sell a single, personalised card", said Mr Jenkins. "I used to create spoof magazine covers for friends, but I needed a way of allowing people to do it quite quickly so I put together the software and team.’ Moonpig.com employed 22 staff at the time of the move, but could have 45 in Guernsey at full capacity. It also retained a small office in Chelsea to deal with IT software and marketing. Cards are now ordered via the website and printed in Guernsey. Each is cut to size and laminated and printed with an individual barcode and then automatically cross-referenced and sent to to the customer. General manager Eloise Reeves said she had been impressed with the quality of local Guernsey workers. "I thought recruitment might be a problem, but it’s been fine", she said. "The hours we work are quite flexible. We employ some mothers, while others are fresh out of school." The company then had 8,000 designs available to customers, covering 50 different occasions. It had a database of around 150,000 customers and Moonpig said growth was 75% per year. Moonpig.com was the latest in a number of Internet mail order businesses to have moved to Guernsey. A VAT exemption on UK-bound goods costing less than £18 being one of the great incentives of being based in the Channel Islands! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2009 - MOONPIG UPDATE:Now, Moonpig.com has its own factory in Guernsey. Cards are posted from there, and lorries suitable for Guernsey's narrow lanes, collect them. Companies House records show that in the 2008-09 financial year, sales of £20.9 million yielded profits of £6.7 million. This is a very healthy profit margin for a retail business. The business now has no debt, and almost no stock because cards are drawn up only after Moonpig customers have paid their money and placed their order. The company markets itself with daytime TV advertising and on street hoardings. However, most of the marketing is viral as all Moonpig cards have their website address on the back. A lot of new business comes from recipients who then place their own orders. The idea is simple, and well suited to the internet. Customers log on to the Moonpig website and choose from a fantastic range of more than 10,000 designs, which are growing at about 2,000 a year. Many are licensed from other cardmakers, whilst some are drawn up at the Moonpig’s Chelsea studios. These are in a converted paper factory in South London (Southwark), an area popular for design studios. Surfers can change the captions on the card to suit their interests. Or too suit the personalities of the recipients. They can also upload their own pictures if they want. There are designs about golf, music, whisky, cricket and cars. “We can always find something relevant to that person.” Nick Jenkins’ business card features a popular spoof on 'The Dangers of the Internet': “Nick only logged on to check his e-mail. 4 hours later, he had bought a C-reg Vauxhall Astra and married a 17-year-old Texan.” Nick says: “With a greeting card, it’s all about showing how much you’ve thought about them. It’s showing someone you really know them. There’s a big ‘wow!’ factor. The cards ... don’t get thrown away — they get stuck on fridge doors or framed.” The cost of just £2.99 plus postage, is competitive with with High Street retailers. Moonpig customers can establish a prepaid account and receive extra credit. And the company will then deliver even a bouquet of flowers with the card, courtesy of a neighbouring Guernsey business in the flower-packing business. There are now about two million active Moonpig customers. Since last year, an Australian associate business - Australia being the closest to Britain in terms of culture and humour. |
MOONPIG STATISTICS:Brand recognition for Moonpig in the UK : 60% Customers as of summer 2009 : 2.57 million Largest number of orders dispatched in single day: 99,000 (February 9, 2009) THE FUTURE OF MOONPIG:Further expansion overseas might be difficult. The cultural difference with other countries such as the United States means that many UK designs would never work. And in many European countries the habit of sending greetings cards is little known. |
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© 2009 Moonpigg