The company is planning an aggressive multi-channel sales and marketing campaign to coincide with the opening of the new facility. Local printers may find it difficult to compete on price with Vista if its charges remain at levels currently available through its US website, with people there able to order 2000 matt cards for US$50 plus mailing, $75 for gloss. However Australian residents have now appear to have been blocked from using the US website.

Vistaprint claims Australians already use the company ‘in significant numbers’. It claims its turnover here rose by 50 per cent last year ‘from an already substantial level’. Buyers of Vistaprint business cards have been ordering from a local website, with the cards printed and mailed from Holland via a cheap remailing service in Sweden.

The new 6,800sqm facility currently being fitted out in Deer Park, 17km west of Melbourne by Vistaprint will include a B1 highly specified offset press for running ganged jobs, a digital printer and a textile printer.

The Melbourne facility will be the third large scale hub for Vistaprint, after its print shops in the US and Holland, and will serve the entire Asia Pacific region. The company is also currently looking for a Sydney office for its marketing activities.

Vistaprint operates a business model that targets SMEs, offering super-cheap business cards and the like, with web-to-print software and factory automation reducing human input into the job to a bare minimum, so enabling VistaPrint to maximise efficiencies, the mantra being that ‘if someone touches something you are losing money’.

Its products range from business cards, brochures and postcards to invitations, note pads and thank you notes. Vistaprint also provides online services and solutions, such as email marketing, websites and postcard marketing.

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