Online printer Moo opens on the high street

Online business card printer Moo.com has moved onto the high street with the launch of a shop in London’s Shoreditch.

Visitors to the store, at Boxpark, can touch and feel their cards, comparing paper stocks, as well as designing them there, customizing them with embossing if required. The shop also enables customers to create-online and collect in-store.


Richard Moross, chief executive and founder of Moo, said it was the touch and feel factor that had prompted the retailer onto the high street. “Personal branding and beautiful design is so important to our customers that we wanted them to be able to actually touch and experience it. The Moo Shop is the perfect way for them to interact with our products and experience first-hand what they online.”

He said the move was part of Moo’s “constant” innovation. At a retailer always “looking for new ways to excite our customers,” he said, “this mix of online and offline is the perfect combination.”

The store will also add value with events for small businesses, creative professionals, entrepreneurs and freelancers featuring a range of speakers on subjects from design to funding.

The first such session, to be streamed live to Moo’s community, will be with Emma Jones of Enterprise Nation on March 6. “It’s an honour to be invited to speak at Moo’s first ever retail experience,” said Jones. “The concept of the Moo shop and its commitment to creating a fun, interactive environment is totally in keeping with the Moo philosophy and wholeheartedly supported by Enterprise Nation.”

A list of upcoming events can be found on the Moo.com site. The business card printer was founded in 2006 in 2009 expanded to the US. It printed 90m business cards last year, in a market that it says is growing by 20% a year.

Our view: We’re very taken by this story of Moo.com moving onto the high street. It’s a nice illustration of how we expect the future of retailing to progress. While etailers such as N Brown Group’s Simply Be business have opened targeted shops to sell physical products, it’s not such a logical leap for Moo.com, which prints its products to order. Nonetheless shop has proved the logical next move for Moo – because, says its found, it offers the touch and feel factor, as well as enabling a click and collect service.

We expect the future of retail to be about shops as well as online. But those shops will be ones that are highly-targeted, aimed at a demographic whose interest was first measured online, and offer plenty of added value services. The high street is not dying, but it is changing as the way we shop changes as well. And that means retailers must rethink the role of the shop in their business.