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This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.
East London-based business-card maker Moo.com wasn't always a success. "Moo was once Pleasure Cards, a horrible business that no one liked," says founder Richard Moross in his new London headquarters. "It was a brilliantly inspired business plan, executed with a high level of skill and detail, in a way that appealed to very few people." The idea, he says, was nothing less than to reinvent the business card. "Pleasure Cards was like a fashion label. It tried to be cool. It tried to express itself first and you second." That was failure number one. "The second failure was that it was all my designs. You could write your details in [a card], but you couldn't customise it. And the third was the marketing plan. It was awful." Moross recounts how he tried to build buzz by making cards for 1,000 people he regarded as tastemakers. "Let's say it was Seth Godin. I'd make a set of cards, I'd mail them with a personal note and a pamphlet that said 'Pleasure Cards are the new coolest thing!'" Another mistake. "When you make something new, don't tell anyone why it's clever. Let them discover that themselves."
He realised that "people loved the cards, but they hated a lot of the other bits." Out of money and out of time, Moross accepted his investors' advice to try a new approach. "In my seven years in this business I never heard: 'I told you so...' I think that's phenomenal, because I did screw up." Fresh investment allowed him to refocus on the creativity of others. "As soon as we became a tailor for people's identities, things started to change." Moo.com was born. "When it came to the new brand, we were very humble. We said,
'Hello, we're just a little printing company. We love to print.'" Moo.com has been profitable since 2009, has opened in the US, and has 30 times the office space it had when it started. Still, Moross is only ever 80 percent happy. "I'll strive for something, and when I get it there's always something else. That's what makes people climb mountains, right?"
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
