Vistaprint has, for many years, been an example of the success that focus and automation can bring to a printing business. Its parent company, Cimpress, is taking that success to new levels with two major strategic pushes to spur continued growth into the future. His strategies and views are quite interesting.

WTT: Robert, I thought your recent acquisition of WIRmachenDRUCK was quite interesting. There are certainly many web-to-print service provider options out there. Why this one?

RK: We’ve actually done several acquisitions in the last 18 months, but the two largest were WIRmachenDRUCK in Germany and Exaprint in France. Between the two, they have well over $100 million in revenues, virtually all outsourced to a network of more than 150 production partners. We like that because these two teams have competed and won in the extremely competitive European web-to-print market by building a networked model that aligns with our own vision for the future. As we announced 18 months ago, we are building a software platform that will support an ecosystem linking back-end supply chain operations at many production providers together with many different, resellers and other customer-facing partners. Some of the back end and front end will be owned by Cimpress, but a large percentage won’t be.