Good news
if it means the annoying ad jingle dies
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 …
I hope the merger doesn't mean they will close their office in Australia, i have a lot of family over there and so Moonpig is handy as they only charge local Australia postage charges as they have an office in Sydney that they dispatch from and i have about £30 of prepaid credit with them left :/
I'm pretty sure it's only been about 3-4 years since they started bombarding our telly boxes with those annoying ads, what were they doing before that?
Still, impressive sales. Though 38 million cards from 3 million punters, means either most of their business is repeat custom, or there are some seriously addicted moonpiggers out there!
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.
You can buy one of the completely standard cards from Moonpig (or other similar online card site) if you want - but I'd argue that's not really that much different from buying a mass produced card from a normal shop - the personalisation comes from if you can be bothered to customise one of the design templates they already have to make a unique card.
If you can't be bothered, I agree you might as well go to a card shop, scribble in a pre-printed card and pretend you were bothered by actually being arsed to walk to a postbox.
If you can be bothered, a customised card for a grandparent's birthday or christmas, with multiple pictures of their grandchildren / them and their grandchildren, with appropriate message actually from the kids says you were "arsed". (IMHO)
Card which contains a personalised singing chip module preprogrammed with a 30 second .WAV and adaptive filtering on the recording so that a cheap printed mask patterned speaker can emulate a more expensive moving coil one?
Animated cards using those new 0402 flat LEDs embedded in the cardboard with conductive silver ink as the interconnects, flat nanocarbon supercapacitor and wifi based wireless power would also be pretty neat stuff (tm).
AC/DC