Moonpig

Moonpig.com is a business based in London and Guernsey which sells personalised greeting cards. The website was launched in July 2000, and in 2007 the company was responsible for 90 percent of the online greeting card market in the United Kingdom, with nearly six million cards shipped.^[1][2]

Company profile

According to founder Nick Jenkins, "Moonpig" was his nickname at school in Newport, Shropshire, hence the name of the brand.^[3]

Visitors to the website can choose from a large selection of basic card designs and enter their own text to personalise them. In addition to cards, the company offers customisable spoof magazine covers and invitations, for which customers can upload their own photos for printing.

The original launch of Moonpig.com in 2000 coincided with the collapse of the dot-com bubble, which made progress difficult at first, but Jenkins raised further investment from private investors and venture capital, and the advent of broadband and digital cameras together with news spreading by word-of-mouth meant sales steadily increased, with the first profits being made in 2005.^[4] A television advertising campaign began in the United Kingdom in November 2006, and in February 2008 Moonpig.com received more internet traffic than other flower and gift companies in the UK.^[5] By Summer 2009, the company had sold cards to 2.57 million customers and its profit record was seen by The Times as "a typical curve for a successful start-up — a big, £1 million loss establishing it in its first year, negligible losses edging into negligible earnings over the next six years, and thereafter a seven-figure profit".^[6]

The company was initially based in Chelsea, but is now based in Southwark,^[7] with their cards being printed in Guernsey. The business expanded into the Australian market in 2004 and, in late 2009, the business expanded its offering to include a range of flowers and custom mug designs. In spring 2010, Moonpig launched in the United States.

In July 2011, Moonpig was bought by PhotoBox.^[8]

Security

In August 2013, a private developer discovered a vulnerability in the Moonpig API that made it possible for outsiders to retrieve the personal information of all three million of its users (names, birthdays, postal addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of credit card numbers, and credit card expiry dates), and informed Moonpig. Moonpig did nothing about it until the developer publicly announced the problem in January 2015,^[9] whereupon Moonpig disabled the API and its mobile apps pending an investigation.^[10] Moonpig issued a statement saying that "all password and payment information is and has always been safe".^[11]

References