Jody Ford, Photobox - NOAH17 Berlin

Good afternoon everyone, thanks for the opportunity to talk to you about Photo Box Group. We need to take the slides back a little bit and I think we've ended up right at the end, but you may know Photo Box Group for a number of different things: maybe photo books, wall art, or sending a personalized card. Let me get the slides to where we need to be. Just close your eyes for a second and we'll get to the right place. So I'm basically stuff you do with photos, and that's right. Our customers love creating products with photos. We handle over half a billion photos on every year, but we see ourselves as much more than a photo company. We're about creating connections between people, about helping them express their emotions, their relationships, and those connections. What we offer is a wonderfully digital service to the creators, but ultimately it's a physical product for the end-user, and we call that making moments real.

Let's talk a little bit about the group. We are Europe's leading personalization consumer personalization business. We're these four brands: in the UK or in France, Photo Box is the market leader; in Spain, you have Hoffman, the market leader here in Germany; Poster XXL is the challenger brand, and then in the UK, the greeting cards leader is Moonpig. I'm going to talk more about that in a minute. From a revenue point of view, you can see 288 million in revenue, generating 46 million in EBIT. We are present in 14 different countries, and we create over 20 million moments for customers every year. In 2015, we went from being VC owned to being private equity owned through Exponent and Elektra. We're doing some really exciting things to reimagine the customer experience for photo businesses.

But today I wanted to talk to you about Moonpig, the greeting cards business. But I'm conscious I'm doing that here in Germany, and so to explain the greeting cards business, I first need to bring to life a very British problem for you. That is the love of Brits to send greeting cards. We send greeting cards for almost every possible occasion you can imagine. We send a lot for different people's birthdays, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, weddings, bar mitzvahs, passing a driving test. You name it, we will send a greeting card to celebrate that moment and build that connection. In fact, the average head of household sends 33 greeting cards per year, and each one of those needs to be on time and of course great value, but at the same point thoughtful for the recipient, and if possible hilarious. So that's the problem that we're looking at, and actually that's a 1.7 billion pound greeting card opportunity just in the UK.

So how does Moonpig cater for that? To give you the consumer perspective: it's my niece's birthday tomorrow. I know that she loves Peppa Pig. It's 6:00 in the evening, I haven't sent a card. I go on to Moonpig, I find a card that I think she's going to love, I'm able to quickly personalize that with a picture of herself. During checkout, I'm able to find a gift, a Peppa Pig gift to put with the card, and it lands tomorrow morning, and I'm a rock star uncle because I just delivered the best card she's going to get. And that's why we've been able to scale the Moonpig business. We did over 12 million moments on Moonpig in the UK last year, and we've been growing in double digits for a number of years. So that's the consumer perspective.

Let me now talk about it from a business perspective. What are the foundations of success of Moonpig? So clearly, being able to produce cards from the comfort of your own home or at the school gate is very powerful. Being able to do that till 7 p.m. in the evening after the last post has gone for everyone else. Sending cards from a creativity point of view: we have thousands of different brands, we have an amazing in-house design team that designs for every occasion in very progressive ways, and then we have relationships with over 70 different partners and licensees who don't just offer Peppa Pig and Darth Vader, but Disney Princesses and Spider-Man and a whole range of different superheroes. So for the brands that the recipients will love, we have those designs. And then finally, this ability to upload a photo and make it personalized is a unique selling point versus the high street where that's clearly not possible. So that's how we got to where we are.

What are we doing now to propel that growth? So in terms of B2B? Actually, we're much more than a card company. Over a third of our revenues now relates to flowers and gifts. We're top three flower provider at the peak moments during the year. We have a great range of gifts that can be personalized like mugs and t-shirts, and we're expanding them. But we also offer a wide range of Prosecco and gins, chocolate and cheese, hampers, beauty products, health products, and we've just launched a jewelry range. So for any occasion, there's the perfect gift to go with it. From a creativity point of view, we're beginning to really get started here and play with the opportunity. We recently launched prisoner style filters a few weeks back which allow customers to actually add their own point of view to the photo that they upload and add their creativity. In a few weeks time, we'll launch handwriting which allows customers to actually answer the number one question: 'Can I put my own handwriting on the inside of the card?' And it turns out people quite like to doodle inside their greeting cards, so we can offer that as well. And then finally, from a personalization point of view, there's massive opportunity here with applying a data science team to what we think is a really rich environment. We have over 18 million notifications saved from customers who are telling us they want to be reminded about an important event in their life. It's a way to lock them into the business. But then we have other data about their relationship with the recipient, we have an understanding of the types of card they buy, and then separately we have a huge amount of data about what's trending on the site. We get data in hours; the rest of the card industry gets it at the end of the season in months. As we put that data together, we'll be able to do things like this: where it's my brother's birthday, I get reminded it's my brother's birthday, knowing a little bit about me and the relationship, it offers up the card that we believe will be the right card for me to send to my brother and a gift that you can attach. Meaning more time for me to be thinking about that hilarious message rather than trying to find the right card to send to my brother. So all of these things are fundamentally about disrupting an industry, the greeting card industry that has been around for decades, and ultimately they make Moonpig the very best place to make someone's day.

Brilliant. Let me conclude with this final slide. It just pulls back a little bit. So only 5% of the card market in the UK is online, so there's massive opportunity to roll this model forward. We get excited about how moments are now being celebrated on social media. The more moments that are celebrated by a wider group means when people want to make those moments real, they will come to Moonpig. Our job is to make it irresistible and simple to send them online through Moonpig. And then finally, it turns out it's not just a British problem of sending greeting cards. The US is a massive market for greeting cards, as is Australia and a number of other markets throughout the globe. So whilst we're laser focused on the UK right now at scale, we believe we can take this brand and this model to other markets. Thank you very much for listening.