Erik: What criteria did you use when considering an international expansion?
Richard: When we first launched, we launched with Flickr, they are our first partner, and
Flickr had -- Flickr is an amazing business, amazing customers, and they had, you know,
an audience of tens of millions, I guess, by that point, all around the world.
So when we plugged into them, we plugged into their customer base, we were everywhere.
So Moo has always been a global business in the sense of the customers we serve and where
they are, and we've, you know, shipped product to nearly 200 countries, and it's about a
hundred on a monthly basis.
And the vast majority of our sales are non-UK.
We're a UK, registered UK-headquartered business.
So we kind of instantly were an international kind of property, but we were always shipping
from London.
And as the kind of business grew and developed, and we learned more about, you know, where
the highest valued customers were or where the repeat customers were, the US was really
proving to be the fastest area or region of growth for us.
When it was kind of proven out that the US was the fastest growing area of our business,
and then we realized, you know, we're shipping a lot of product to California from London.
You know, that's 6,000 miles.
That's not gonna scale, and, you know, the customers are gonna get annoyed with us because
A, that's not particularly good for the environment, B, it takes a long time, and there's a lot
of extra cost built into that, that long distance of shipping.
So when we saw an opportunity to, you know, put a foot down in the US and to build our
operations here, we jumped all over it.
Our VP of Operations, a guy Brian Murphy who had previously worked for Kodak.
Who was a photographer in Oakland.
He moved over to the UK for three years to help grow operations from a standing start.
He really grabbed it with both hands and pushed us into that, which was a brilliant -- a brilliant
move, and credit is really due to him to forcing that through.
So he came back to the US.
He set up the office here for us and the operations, et cetera.
We're now about 20 people in the US, so, you know, I don't know what that is, kind of like
a quarter of the business or so, 20%.
And it has been an amazing move.
I mean the US continues to be the fastest-growing area of our business.
We have many, many, many customers here.
And I think the repeat customers and high-value customers are shopping with us because we
do things locally.
I mean they may not know that we do them locally but the service is represented of a local
service.
We have customer service representatives in the US that are sensitive to American issues
that might differ from European issues on print sizes, or the type of service that they
want, or pricing, or those things, but also we're manufacturing locally, it's just quicker,
and all those other things as a result as well.
But it's not easy running an international business.
You know, you need good people and Brian was the perfect guy for the job, really, and I
think, Steve Jobs talks about, you know, you can't join the dots up, looking forward you
can't guess how it's all gonna turn out, but when you look backwards, it makes perfect
sense, you know?
Of course.
You know, we did this then we did that.
And looking at someone like Brian in our business, you know, we brought him over from the UK,
he helped build our UK operations out, and then he came back to the US and helped, you
know, set up our US business, and it's like how would we have done without someone like
Brian.
It would have been, you know, it would have been impossible.
And we wouldn't be in the position that we are now.
So I guess we're lucky that we had, you know, good people, and that we had done that deal
with Flickr that helped us, you know, to establish our US presence from the customer perspective,
and then we, you know, introduced the physical operations here, probably about two years
after we initially launched.