Moo.com, strippers and 70% margins

At a recent London dinner for geeks there was a sharp intake of breath and a flurry of questioning hands raised when Richard Moross, ceo of web 2.0 darlings MOO.com, revealed his company made a 70% margin on its mini-cards.

But as Moross was rightly keen to point out, MOO has had a fully functioning business model from the off, turning over hard cash since the moment it took its first order.  So it makes sense that despite being a poster child for web 2.0 chic and a culture where free is the new expensive, it’s also a company that is proud to be associated with one of the world’s oldest professions – printing.

For those that haven’t yet discovered MOO, it’s best known for printing cards for work or personal use with designs or imagery you upload to its site in a format that is about a third the height of a traditional business card.

They were originally conceived as ‘pleasure cards’ – a name that sounds extraordinarily louche or worse like something strippers or members of a profession even older than printing might dish out.

Fortunately they settled on MOO as a name and a brand took shape.   The design ethic, the tone of voice, the hidden Easter-egg like messages on packaging, the adoption of blogs and social networks, and the sense of a family of customers all resemble the Innocent Drinks ethos. In many ways the two companies are very similar. Both possess a knowing subversion of the traditional ‘business voice’.

At the recent Fuel conference, when asked about branding, Moross said:

You don’t need to get someone in to manage your brand, if your brand is what you are.

And MOO and its customers are very much part of the second web revolution. A revolution where the personal brand is more important than branding and a human voice deafens corporate slogans.

Despite all this and despite the shrewd partnerships with Flickr and other social networks to get access to a ready-made audience, my abiding impression is that the guys at MOO are not Web 2.0 geeks, they’re print geeks.

Get Moross onto the subject of choice of paper, the printing technologies they’ve perfected and the inks they choose and you see real passion shining through.  Then look at the cards themselves. Even though printed digitally, there’s none of the cracking often associated with the medium.

And I say this, not because I’ve any reason to plug MOO – I don’t use their cards and don’t plan to – but because put simply their product looks great and stands out.  And that’s what matters most – a simple lesson.

That and the fact that web 2.0 allows businesses to go back to the future, to a time when business was more intimate and products had pride.

Alex is the founder and editor of SmallBizPod, the UK's first podcast dedicated to small business, start-ups and entrepreneurship. Alex writes about topical small business issues, entrepreneurs and anything else that catches his eye here on the small business blog. http://www.smallbizpod.co.uk