Cimpress creates Vista brand family, buys DIY design platform

VistaPrint remains a signature service within the Vista brand family
VistaPrint remains a signature service within the Vista brand family

Cimpress has announced a new over-arching parent brand – Vista – for VistaPrint and its sister businesses, and a fresh acquisition.

The group has acquired Depositphotos and its do-it-yourself design platform Crello, effective 1 October. 

Crello has been rebranded as VistaCreate. Previous buy 99designs becomes 99designs by Vista, while the collaboration with website building platform Wix announced over the summer becomes Vista x Wix. 

Vistaprint, Cimpress’s biggest single business, gains a capital P to become VistaPrint. 

Founder and chief executive Robert Keane said that the Covid-19 pandemic had forced the group to slow down the pace of its transformation plans, but it was now back on track and “gaining momentum” towards achieving its goal of becoming “the expert design and marketing partner for the world’s small businesses”.

He said that extensive customer research had shown that the word ‘print’ within VistaPrint had “tied us very tightly to print… so much so that even our most loyal customers today don’t fully grasp the scope of what we offer beyond business cards or marketing materials”.

“And that’s why today we’ve announced our move beyond a single VistaPrint brand to a broader parent-based architecture that will allow us to grow well beyond print into new markets,” he explained.

“But we’ll do that with a brand architecture which also preserves and expands the existing awareness and loyalty to VistaPrint while removing its limitations.”

Keane said VistaPrint remained as a signature service within the Vista brand family, and the group would continue to invest in printing. 

“We expect the expansion of our value to Vista overall will help accelerate that VistaPrint growth. We certainly expect VistaPrint to drive significant future increases to shareholder value,” he added.

The business has also set up a dedicated website for the new brand at vista.com.

Depositphotos is a stock content marketplace that works with more than 100,000 content creators and has more than 200m royalty-free images, videos and music clips.

Vadim Nekhai, its former CEO, remains with the business and become vice president of VistaCreate and Despositphotos.

Cimpress announced its Q1 results alongside the news.

Sales at Vista were $349.5m (£254m), compared with $329.3m last year, and $343.2m in the pre-pandemic period in 2020. Vista EBITDA was down $22.1m to $68m as advertising spend and operating expenses increased. 

Its Upload and Print business, made up of PrintBrothers and The Print Group (including Tradeprint in the UK), posted overall sales up 18% at $1982m, or up 6% compared with pre-pandemic. Combined EBITDA jumped by 40% to $30.7m.

National Pen sales were up 2% at $69.3m, but 4% lower than in 2020, and the unit made a loss of just over $8m. 

The group’s All Other Businesses division, including BuildASign, Printi and Chinese start-up YSD, posted sales of $47.9m and EBITDA of $4.9m.

Keane said the current supply chain issues had “created both challenges and opportunities for Cimpress businesses”. 

“We are not immune to rising input costs, and most of our businesses have seen material cost increases of product substrates like paper, production materials like aluminium plates, freight and shipping charges and a more competitive labour market.

“This is an area that occupies a lot of attention from our teams and we believe that our scale-based shared strategic capabilities and supplier relationships provide clear advantages for us such that in relative terms we can fare better than competitors even if in nominal terms costs are higher,” he stated. 

Keane said he remained optimistic about the future for the group’s businesses, and “their ability to drive sustainable growth as we emerge from the pandemic”.

Cimpress shares fell yesterday, from $89.80 to $84.45, and have since recovered to $86.87 (52-week high: $128.87, low: $72.14).