Vistaprint acquires Crello and Depositphotos. The rebranding of Vistaprint as Vista enables it to compete with Canva and other online creative design companies.
Vistaprint has established a reputation for providing marketing and printing services to consumers, sole traders, and small businesses. Now, it is making two acquisitions to better serve SMBs. The company will acquire Crello, an online graphic designer editor, and Despositphotos' parent company for $85 million.
Vistaprint will rebrand as Vistaprint and launch VistaCreate, a new Crello-powered service.
These moves are part of a larger $250 million investment Vista, which is located in Ireland and is part-traded Cimpress, has made to revive and update its brand and platform. This also included the purchase of 99designs, which was a marketplace for designers and their work a year ago. The partnership was also established with Wix, allowing for tighter integrations between the company's services and Wix's website building services.
The goal is not to abandon print but to enhance it.
In an interview this week, Florian Baumgartner (EVP and president, international) stated that our north star is to be a partner in digital printing and design for SMBs. Vista doesn't disclose the number of customers it currently has, but it does say that it has millions.
Although Crello was founded in 2017, it appeared to have been a small, bootstrapped business. However, the company has grown significantly since then. It also has millions of clients, with more specifically, 3 million added this year. The company's users create over 1 million projects every month.
Depositphotos doesn't disclose the number of its users, but it claims that it has 220 million royalty-free images and graphics created by around 100,000 contributors. The company is located in New York, and has raised just $6 million from investors such as TMT Investments (London).
Vista's big elephant in the room is Canva, which has a value of $40 billion. Vista has the capital and the firepower to create new products on a better platform that addresses the needs of modern business. Its latest frontier is video.
However, this does not mean that incumbents cannot create new opportunities for themselves by consolidating different design services onto their own platforms.
