Trendy card company that is ALREADY celebrating Father’s Day
THE offices of PhotoBox, in an old factory near the Thames, are excruciatingly trendy. So hip, in fact, that there is nothing so mundane as a receptionist to greet visitors, who are instead left to navigate their own way through the locked doors and work out the code to get into the lifts.
Gaining access is like an initiative test designed to deter nonhipsters, so it is perhaps no surprise that the average age of an employee at the online cards and gift company is just 28.
The rest of us might still be in that no-man’s land just after New Year – the time of year when some shops provoke outrage by putting Easter eggs on the shelves even though the tinsel has hardly been cleared away.
But at PhotoBox, which owns Moonpig.com – known to all for its earworm jingle – it is already Father’s Day, which in the real world doesn’t happen until the third Sunday in June.
In Moonpig-land, however, ideas for personalised greeting cards and gifts for fathers and grandfathers are already well under way.
PhotoBox’s selling point is personalisation: customers are able not only to design their own cards, but also other items such as cushions, glossy books displaying pictures of significant life events, mugs and canvases. Stan Laurent, the chief executive, says that the company is likely to have had a record Christmas when the final figures come in.
‘It is an emotional product. That is what gets me excited,’ says Laurent, who looks like a slightly older hipster himself with his opennecked shirt and large-framed spectacles.
‘What we are good at is transforming digital assets – like photographs – into something physical.’
PHoToBox took over Moonpig for £120m in 2011 and continues to make acquisitions, including a Spanish photobook-seller and a German online photo-printer, PosterXXL. Revenues last year were £275m.
The company recently shelved plans for a stock market float which could have given it a price tag of up to £500m because of volatile markets. Instead, in october, it agreed a sale to private equity firms Exponent and Electra for around £400m.
‘We are not closing the door forever on a float,’ says Laurent. ‘We have done two fairly big acquisitions in the past 12 months, we want to integrate them and stay private while we do it.’
one of the attractions for the new venture capitalist investors is PhotoBox’s market-leading position in the UK, France, Spain and Germany, with 57pc of group revenue generated outside this country. It is also switched onto customers’ preference to buy on their mobile phones: more than half of Moonpig transactions are through a mobile device.
Laurent, who is French – ‘as my wife says, no one is perfect’ – graduated from the ESCP Europe Business School then did his military service in the French navy, including a stint on nuclear submarines in 1989 when he was 21 years old. ‘I chose that out of curiosity, I guess.
‘It is quite horrible, but also fascinating, to be confined with 130 people for almost three months. It is a bit of an endurance exercise. It is very intense, very anxious. But really interesting,’ he says.
His next move was to Berlin, where the Wall had just fallen, and where he got a job with the Treuhand – the agency in charge of privatising East German companies.
‘It was crazy circumstances with a whole economy that had collapsed,’ he says.
After completing an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1995, Laurent returned to Europe to launch one of the first consumer internet access businesses as director for strategy, finance and operations at AOL France.
He joined PhotoBox in 2006, drawn in through his friend, Fergal Mullen, a co-founder and partner at Highland Capital Partners.
‘He crashed my wedding anniversary and spent the whole evening talking about a business he had invested in,’ he says.
Perhaps not surprisingly for a Paris-born entrepreneur who has worked in Germany, and married a British woman, Clare, and who eventually became a leading light of the UK internet economy, Laurent is not an advocate of the UK leaving Europe.
‘We have 57pc of turnover from outside the UK. A Brexit would be challenging because nobody really knows what that means. For us the idea you would have a border back between say France and the UK is hard to understand.’
He is not afraid, he says, that Facebook and other social media could spell the end for traditional birthday and Christmas cards.
‘The cards market in the UK is £1.4bn. It has not changed through texting, Facebook or Twitter, and the reason is that it is more personal.’
Instead, he believes the internet empowers customers, particularly those who leave gifts to the last minute.
‘A lot of people do last-minute gift buying, because they know they can do it on their mobile phone. At Moonpig, we are still selling on the morning of Valentine’s Day, for example.’
‘It is great for when you have that “oh B***er moment” on the way back from work when you realise it is someone’s birthday tomorrow. It is last minute, but it can still be thoughtful.’