Moonpig gobbled by PhotoBox
Dotcom veteran emblobbed by fellow remote-printer biz
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Online greeting card maker Moonpig.com is merging with photo printer PhotoBox.
The deal values Moonpig at £120m. Its shareholders will see their stakes rolled over to the new group holding. Equity will be raised from existing shareholders and private investment from Insight Ventures, Quilvest Ventures and Greenspring Associates.
PhotoBox dealt with 1 million individual prints a day in 2010. It sent out 100,000 canvas prints and 1 million photobooks. It turned over £72m.
Moonpig turned over £38m for the year ended April 2011. It sent out 38 million cards on behalf of almost three million punters. The company believes the UK card market is worth about £1bn, and only four per cent of this is currently fulfilled online.
Senior executives from both companies stay on board – Stan Laurent is group president and CEO, Iain Martin is Moonpig's MD and its founder Nick Jenkins will be special advisor to the group's board.
The company was founded in 2000 and the brand taken from Jenkins' nickname at school. ®
COMMENTS
Impersonalized Cards
It always amuses me that moonpig advertize their cards as "personalized". IMHO there's little more impersonal than a machine printed card that's never touched by a human hand until the recipient opens the envelope.
What does a Moonpig card say to me? It says you couldn't be arsed to go to the shop and choose a card. It says you couldn't be arsed to walk to a postbox. It says you couldn't be arsed to move away from your computer. It says, in short, that you can't be arsed.
Seems to have died already.....
The recent Moonpig ad seem very subdued and almost upmarket, particularly when compared to the "Funky Pigeon" ads.
Far from encouraging me to buy a greetings card, the ads make me want to go out and blast as many of the flying rats out of the sky as possible.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
