Page 48 - Print 21 magazine Jul-Aug 2021

Business
Partnering
with Canva
Global partnership lead Aaron Day talks to Print21 editor Wayne Robinson about the Canva online design juggernaut, and how it can benefit print businesses.
With revenues soaring, a valuation of $20bn, a customer base of 55 million
– including 85 per cent of the Top 500 Fortune
Companies in the USA, online design platform Canva has come a long
way in the nine years since it was founded.
And it seems print businesses in Australia and New Zealand could be real beneficiaries of Canva according to Aaron Day, global partnership lead at Canva, who gave me the details via tele call from his base in California.
Printers and technology is an evolving story. Almost all print businesses now have a website, and many have teamed that up with a web-to-print platform. These range from the simple ones where clients can key in a new name for their uploaded business card templates as new staff join, to more complex ones.
For online design in Australia
and New Zealand, Vistaprint has
led the way with its own proprietary design tool that allows its customers, typically micro-businesses and
the general public, to create their own designs from many preloaded templates. This has given Vistaprint an advantage in that market over commercial and franchise printers.
Now, however, Canva is entering the market, seeking partnerships with print businesses that will essentially enable those print businesses to have the Canva online design tool sitting on their own websites, and giving their customers and potential customers access to thousands of design templates for virtually every kind of print, plus digital assets such as photo images and graphics.
It will be free for printers and for their customers, with the printer sending Canva a clip of the cost of the final printed job. Canva believes
48 Print21 JULY/AUGUST 2021
Right
Opportunity: Canva founders
(l-r) Cameron Adams, Cliff Obrecht
and Melanie Perkins
this will drive new work to printers, enable printers to get closer to their customers, and cut waste thanks to its preflighting capability.
The person charged with connecting Canva with print businesses, Aaron Day, is no 20-year- old tech-talking geek. He is in fact a man with deep roots in commercial print. He was CEO of the $400m-a- year eight-plant Trend Print business in North America for many years,
and prior to that he was director of advanced technology at Creo Scitex for ten years – no doubt he knows print.
A regular visitor to these shores prior to Covid, Day understands the ANZ print industry. Two big deals have already happened here, with
the Snap Print franchise group, and with retail giant Kmart for its photo products business Kmart Create. However, Day says it’s not the giants that Canva is looking to. He says a typical print business with a turnover
of $2m to $5m is the ideal partner for Canva, and two well known Australian print businesses are currently in the process of becoming Canva’s first independent partners.
“Print businesses have to work
to manage costs, internal as well
as external, including managing files and managing design,” Day says. “What we are saying to print businesses is embed Canva in
your platform, and your design
cost is effectively outsourced to
the customer, and as Canva also preflights all files, there is a large saving on file management costs, which as all printers know can really rack up when all kinds of files are coming in from all kinds of people.
“The real benefit though for printers is in giving their customers access to thousands of design templates for every kind of printed product, with millions of assets to choose from.”