Vistaprint

Recently, a partner company we are working with at SR tried to compare us to Vistaprint in a slide deck talking about an upcoming project.  They got the comparison completely wrong. In fact, there is no comparison to made between our two companies, whatsoever. When I worked at Mimeo, people were always trying to compare us to VistaPrint, too-- also two companies that could not be more different.  The only thing the three of us have in common is that we do manufacture print, and we all do business via the Internet.  It's like comparing Yahoo, Google and AOL... there are certainly dummies out there who think those three companies are roughly the same.  But those who are students of the Internet know they could not be less similar.

I am a big fan of what Vistaprint has done. Even without the aforementioned ignorant comparisons, this is a company that is really misunderstood inside and outside the industry.  Here is an answer I just wrote for Quora. Since many of my friends and colleagues don't "do Quora" (yet), I thought I'd push it over here as well. It's about one of the differentiating factors that Vistaprint possesses.  Though actually, both SR and Mimeo have great power in this area, albeit serving different markets and using different techniques and technologies.

Is there anything unique about Vistaprint's actual printing process that enables it to print more efficiently than others?

There are several things that make them unique.  

The printed products they produce are constrained in shape, size, material and graphic layout.  They offer these discrete products only via the web.  Most printers, in contrast, attempt to print virtually any shape and size. 

The reason they can do this, unlike other printers is because they have a laser-like focus on their target market.  They test when they add new products, and they know people will buy them. So they can invest in the automation to produce those products.

Their equipment is deployed and used in a standardized way across their manufacturing footprint, and they've automated processes to the point where all the "manual" tasks are cleverly prescribed and performed by the minimum number of humans. For example, when producing business cards, the person who loads paper onto the press is also the person pulls the trigger on the imaging of the next set of printing plates for the press.

The automation results in few touches.  They run multiple customers jobs together, and then cut and sort them, and send them down conveyor belts to a logistics area where they will await other order items, or simply address them and send them to the trucks waiting to send them on their way to the customer. Practically no one in the printing industry has this level of automation across jobs.  Only elite printing companies have this kind of automation for single jobs, for single customers.

They also have some patents.

So, in summary, the answer is a resounding yes.