We want to make printing simpler: Nilesh Parwani

Q) From PrintBell to Vistaprint, how has been the journey so far?
When PrintBell was launched, it was the first of its kind company in online printing space. That time e-commerce didn’t happen in India. For me, it was very important to ensure that the business model works. The official launch of Vistaprint was in 2012 in India and the first couple of years, we spent on how we can get our product right, whether the customers we get are coming back to us and re-buying from us. Historically, people never bought a printing stuff without looking at the product and here, we were asking for upfront payment. Since the beginning in 2013, we have seen an amazing number of customers come back to us and spend much more with subsequent purchases.

Q) How evolved is the online printing market now?
From print perspective, this is one of the spaces where timeline doesn’t play much of a role, but the attractiveness of the alternative does. Print is an existing old industry but there is an alternative way to offer that service. With Vistaprint, our challenge is to make people aware that we exist and that we can help them eradicate some of the existing issues that they face with the current printing set-up. When you go to a normal printer to print your stuff, you cannot depend on the printer’s deadline. There is a tendency to place an extra order for keeping in mind that a few items may not meet the standard requirements. If the delivery deadline is 3-4 days, you’ll get it within that or before. Our entire endeavour is to make the printing process simpler. Till date, most of it happens offline and that is where the issues lie. Services like ours are just phenomenal convenience with the best of quality and designs. This is our pitching point.

Q) Which one has a higher traction – professional marketing items or customised gifting options?
Even we struggled with this question. Vistaprint is a $3 billion company globally. We started off with business cards, marketing materials. But just last year in Europe alone, 60% of sales in the quarter which leads up to Christmas were products that we define as home and family, such as mugs, photo-books, personal calendars, t-shirts. And these are not necessarily new customers. People like the fact that they have one-stop print vendor. Someone they can rely on for quality, for delivery, for ease of design, ease of convenience. Then it does not matter to them if it is for business needs or personal needs. The same is in India. So we are not deciding for us on where is the traction, we are letting the market decide it for itself. We have not done any product-driven campaign yet.

Q) Can customisation of designs be possible?
We have a global library and we have over 15,000 templates. There will be no point that the customer will feel that he is not getting what he wants. There are a number of ways to customise. If you have a ready file, you can upload that. You can call our customer-care who can custom design it for you as per your requirements. We are launching a service in a week from now which will allow customers to take a photograph of their business card and can send it to us. We will recreate the entire card for free of cost. If the customer likes it, he can place order for the product. This is for all products.

Q) How much does India contribute to your global business?
We have lakhs of customers who are online buyers. We don’t give segmentation on country-wise basis as we are a wholly-owned subsidiary. All I can say is we are a leader in mass customisation. India is the part of our Most of the World (MoW) portfolio. It is one of the most important markets where there is a significant investment happening with a strong growth likely in the next five years. In India, we are not looking at any acquisition at present but our focus would be organic growth.

Q) How do you plan to reach out to customers?
We are at a stage where we are very confident about our value proposition. You’ll see us doing much more marketing activities and communicate the brand promise from now. We have restricted ourselves in the online channels because that comes naturally to us. In India, there is need to market beyond what online allows you. Starting next month, that is, from August onwards, you will see us on social channels in much bigger way. We will go live with our television commercial end of next week. The agency doing it for us is Orchard Advertising, we will go live with it initially on digital platform such as Youtube. It is a brand launch and a significant amount of money will be spent on it.

Q) Will you be looking at a brick-and-mortar set up?
If we use the offline presence, it will be to communicate something to the customer which we can’t do online. It could be because people would like to touch and feel our samples, may want to pay in cash or may need more hands-on physical support of designers. We have experimented with one wholly-owned store in Pune which is there for past six months now. We are monitoring it closely and it is giving us matrix in all these three areas in the right direction. If that works out well for us, we may see partnering for other physical stores.

Q) How are you looking at raising funds?
The parent company would look into it and it is a very long-term plan. We are a public holding company, so it would not be possible to share more information on this.