Cimpress announces strategic partnership with Canva through Vistaprint
Cimpress-operated Vistaprint will front a new strategic partnership with online graphic design giant Canva, which will see the Australian-based company begin to print Canva work from next month. The move comes on the back of Cimpress year-end results and a strategic move by founder, chairman and CEO Robert Keane ‘to further expand its presence in more complex, elevated categories’, such as merchandise, packaging, labels, signage, logo apparel and multi-page printed products.
Keane says: “Elevated products remain early in the ‘s-curve’ of web-to-print and mass customisation market disruption and we are confident that the capabilities and customer trust we have built through our legacy products is now extensible to elevated products.”
“This new strategic partnership with Canva, through Vistaprint is a good example of that. Canva AI will integrate directly with Cimpress systems, so customers can move from a design prompt to a professionally produced, print-ready physical product without leaving Canva. This gives Cimpress a meaningful new customer on-ramp at scale, and gives Canva a trusted production partner for its Print Shop strategy, creating real growth opportunities for both companies.”
FY2025 is the first fiscal year that Cimpress has experienced an overall decrease in revenue and gross profit from business cards, which are the firm’s largest legacy product ‘typically delivering very strong gross margins’.
But the company has recently estimated that the annual total addressable market for ‘elevated products’ across Europe, North America and Australia exceeds USD$100bn. It further believes that more than 60% of that market value is still served by traditional suppliers. Keane adds: “The sort of disruption we are aiming to create could transform a fragmented traditional print and promo landscape of tens of thousands of small job-shops and distributors to a future of a limited number of larger firms who master mass customisation and web-to-print.”
The new partnership will link Canva design tools directly into the Vistaprint production and manufacturing centre in Deer Park, Victoria, as well as into 24 other locations around the globe. Canva users will also have the option on their online jobs to transition straight from a Canva design prompt into print-ready Vistaprint products, of which there are a huge number in marketing materials, signage, garments, objects, labels and packaging.
Itself of Australian origin, Canva launched in 2013 with the goal of putting great design and visual communication tools in the hands of anyone. This latest strategic partnership with Cimpress and Vistaprint appears wholly aligned with that goal, as well as being synergistic with the two other companies that Canva has recently acquired – Simtheory, an AI workspace platform, and Ortto, a marketing automation company. These acquisitions are expected to bring ‘powerful agentic AI and complete marketing automation’ to its growing platform.
