Integrating the Brands

The acquisition of TinyPrints and Wedding Paper Divas, coincided with the launch of Treat, Shutterfly’s birthday card brand. This was immediately followed by the acquisition of BorrowedLens, the premier photo equipment rental service, MyPublisher, Photoccino, and a mobile e-commerce platform. The final two acquisitions were ThisLife, a popular personal photo management service, and Kodak’s entire on-line photo library—the acquisition of these last two, combined with Shutterfly’s library of digital photos, gave Shutterfly the world’s largest digital photo library with over 1,000,000,000,000 images.

The first challenge was to bring together the various stakeholders from these acquisitions to align them around a common vision for the Shutterfly brand. The expression of the brand as manifested in the user experience required the development of transition timeline for when and how each brand would be evolved to blend together into a single website.

Careful consideration was given to each Brand’s capabilities, both in regards to the position of their brand, as well as their user experience and technologies. Leading the cross-functional team we took a customer centric approach to evaluating and positioning the various assets in the definition of single framework. A phased multi-year program was created to allow each brand to move at its own appropriate pace—some brands, were immediately absorbed under Shutterfly, while others, based on their market position and customer value, were allowed to retain their own presence.

While brand appeared to be autonomous, they were in fact all running on the same platform, with a single e-commerce and account management system and using the same universal creation tool—skinned with the appropriate design libraries for each brand.

Universal Creation Tool

From an operational perspective the cornerstone of SFLY 3.0 was to develop a universal creation tool. Previously Shutterfly alone had 23 different creations tools, with specific tools created for each new product type, there were two for greeting cards, and a different one for mugs, prints, ornaments, etc.

The legacy photobook tool used Flash and in addition to being slow, error prone and difficult to update, Flash was also no longer supported by Adobe.

The new universal creation tool could be used with any product in the Shutterfly catalog. Product type determined which toolbars are displayed, for example Photobooks have a storyboard feature, while Wall Art has framing options, and cards allow the customer to select various die-cuts for the edges or metallic inks, etc.

The Universal Creation Tool also opened the door to new lines of business, specifically around Home Decor. Given the tools flexibility, the merchandizing team was free to experiment with new products such as home accents, kitchen items, etc. Wall Art alone generated $6m the first quarter it was introduced. Recently Shutterfly’s acquisition of Spoonflower allows customers to customize original textile and wallpaper designs.

New Products

The legacy card creation tool was tied to the physical card—ie. flat, folded, square edge, rounded edge, etc. If a customer changed from a card with square corners to one with rounded corners, they would need to start their project from scratch. This led to high abandonment rates and it also inhibited the effectiveness of merchandizing to introduce options.

With the new creation tool customers could switch card types at any point. This change alone drove a 4.5% increase in completion rates.

Mobile

The user experience for SFLY 3.0 was tailored for the specific devices, while 55+% of visits where through a mobile device, the majority of these were browsing and saving ideas, or completing a purchase driven by the availability of a new promotion or discount. Not surprising another core driver behind the mobile numbers were photo uploads—a quarter of the photos uploaded to Shutterfly were from a phone. And while customers expect interoperability they are also realistic.

Given the different complexities and and time required to creating say a photo book verses a birthday card or simply applying a discount code to an item in a shopping cart, careful consideration was given to ensuring customers’ success. While the user’s data, photos, projects, etc. are universally available across all devices, it was clear based on exhaustive user research that while they were intrigued by the challenge of designing a photo book on a phone, they would never want to try. Users could also purchase (or repurchase) previously created projects from any device. Again based on detailed customer research customer would often wait to make a purchase until Shutterfly offered specific discounts or promotions.

Laptop

• Creation of full-blown photo books is unique to desktop

• Largest monitor

• Keyboard for extended typing

• Mouse for fine adjustment

• Heavy-lifting tasks – long books, organizing, data entry, etc.

• Mom’s “quiet time”