670 Richard Moross: Founder & CEO of MOO
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I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Care of Golden Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders,

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Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. Today, I am so excited to have my next guest, Richard Morass, who is the founder and CEO of an incredible company called Moo. And I was sharing with him that I remember back in the early days, uh,

I think shortly after they started in 2006 that I ordered some business cards from them. And I thought it was the coolest company, premium print and design company. That's re-imagining how individuals and businesses present themselves. It's a company that is, uh,

Actually, Richard is based out of the UK, and he's been able to expand worldwide, which is, for a physical goods company, pretty incredible. So he's really taking on the mission to challenge the trillion-dollar global printing industry with bold ideas and brilliant design and cutting-edge tech.

I can't wait to get into all the details of how he started this company and how he's grown it to over 160 countries. So without further ado, Richard, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Very excited. So let's take it back. What was the itch you were trying to scratch when you started Moo? Like what pain point were you obsessed with solving?

Yeah, I think you always need an itch to scratch, no matter how late you are into the journey. I think in the beginning, I graduated from university and I had two kind of formative jobs. I spent two years working in a tech startup immediately after I graduated. And I spent two years working in a design company. And Moo is the sort of love child of those two worlds.

In the tech company, it was all about democratizing access to things and breaking down boundaries and being kind of a global business and being for everyone. And at the time in the design company, they were all about, you know,

Beautiful things and expensive things and charging a lot for services. They were both great companies, amazing experiences. But it was kind of much more about democratizing design, giving more people access to design, using technology to make design less foreboding, less expensive and more accessible for people. So it kind of came out of those two experiences, a combination of those two experiences that I had.

So this was your first startup, actually creating something. First and last. Your first and last. I'm so curious. Did you actually say, I'm going to go start a company, or did you think this was an idea that you wanted to see happen? This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card is a no-fee credit card that gives you daily cash back every day. That's 3% back at Apple and 2% back on every purchase made with Apple Card using Apple Pay.

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Well, yeah, I have to admit, and I haven't visited this in public before, so it's not an exclusive, but the first idea was very different. And you're right. I wasn't really thinking about starting a company. I was thinking about starting an idea. And the original idea was not Moo. The original idea was called Pleasure Cards. So I'm just waiting for your facial expression reaction. Exactly. I was going to say something, but we'll leave it at that.

But I must explain what it was so that you have it. So Pleasure Cards was basically a business card for your social life. It was for young people who wanted to give out their number or email address or, you know, put pictures on cards and a much more of a social product, a consumer product.

But naturally, it was doomed because of its terrible name and all sorts of other reasons we can explore. But yeah, that was the original idea. Very interesting. So I will say, I mean, there was definitely, I'm thinking in the early 2000s, there was a whole conversation around print is dead. No one is going to, not only in the industry that you chose to create a company in, but books. And I mean, everybody was saying it's all gone, right? It must have taken a lot of courage.

to go against that thinking to say, I don't necessarily agree and I'm going to go try. Can you talk to me about that time and the white space that you felt? I think there was definitely a time and there still is a time. Digital technologies are amazing. They're all pervasive and they are transformative and changing the world that we live in and the way that we live in that world.

But I think that increases the demand for physical things. I think, you know, the pandemic increased our appetite for physical interaction and seeing people and created more value in those physical touch points. So, I mean, now I can say that now with hindsight, but I think back in 2006, 2007, we were trying to be the physical printer for social networks. You know, we were coming up at a time where

That world was exploding. But people still live in the real world. You know, they still have friends in the real world and they want to make friends in the real world. So having, you know, a product or products that I think the original tagline or something was like, we love the web, but you can't put it in your pocket.

And you can kind of put it in your pocket with your phone, but, you know, it's making those things tangible, making them real and making them a bit fun as well, I guess, back in the day. So the early days, how long was it before you actually switched to Moo then? Probably too long. So Pleasure Cars was a short-lived exercise, which I look back on fondly now, but it was very, very difficult. And it was hard coming up with the idea, being very passionate about it, and then it just...

failing to get off the ground, failing to generate any real traction, any real revenue.

So I think it was about 18 months from raising some money, leaving my job, to realizing this is not going to work. People aren't buying this. People don't want it. And it was time to pivot. It was time to find something else to pursue. And I guess the pivot was how do we take the things that are good, printing, we can do that really well. You know, we've got some design creds here. We've got some ways to work with the web and work with these companies on the web and

And it, you know, Moo was the kind of the thing that was born afterwards and, and, um, threw away all the bad stuff and focused on the good stuff. And it's been a rollercoaster since then. So where did the name come from? Well, it wasn't pleasure cards. So it instantly had, uh, an advantage over the old name. I'll tell you the truth. There was a, uh, like a mood board or a brainstorming whiteboard with a bunch of different names on it, a bunch of different options. Um,

And I liked Moo because it was kind of onomatopoeic. It didn't mean anything rude or weird. And it was friendly and it had two lucky O's like Facebook and Google and Yahoo. So I thought two lucky O's, that'll be me fine. And it was owned by a guy called David Blattner who lived in Seattle who wasn't really using it commercially. And I got in contact with David and there was a possibility of buying the domain name.

And I can tell you the whole story about how we did that, which was a fascinating other sort of tangent in the story. But the idea that we could get it, the idea it was short and memorable, people would talk about it. It was kind of weird. So I liked it.

So interesting. So the early days you launched, how many SKUs, what was really the focus? And then when did you go from that initial set to branch out into what you do today? Sure. So we started with one product. We had this skinny little business card, which was a hangover from the pleasure cards days.

And we partnered with lots of different companies. Our first partner was a company called Flickr, which was a photo sharing site, very popular at the time. And we were basically just helping people who were members of Flickr print their photos on cards and hand them out to a lot of photographers and so on, bought us. So we had traction there. We then launched stickers and note cards and greetings cards and all sorts of other things in that first year. I think we launched about 10 products in the first 12 months. But the real step change came when we stopped...

We were inventing a lot of weird products, formats that people had never seen before or used before. They were gimmicky. They were kind of interesting and different, but no one was looking for them. No one was shopping, oh, I need this weird gimmicky shaped card that no one knew they wanted. But when we launched business cards, the company went crazy.

Just grew 100% almost overnight and kept growing. So it was finding a rich vein of opportunity in a space where there was already demand, there was already people buying, and we had a product that was really differentiated. We had very high quality materials. We had beautiful designs. We had a great service. So we were able to get to that product market fit.

very, very quickly in that particular space. And that's still our biggest selling product, even today, even in the world of Zoom and other technologies, people are still meeting in person. And this works remarkably well. I say this, my cards work very, very well. You don't need a Wi-Fi connection. You don't need a phone. You can just give your details to someone. That's so true. So, and then at what point did you move beyond that?

I think we just kept on rolling out new products. At our heart, we do three things. We design products. We love designing products. We're absolutely obsessed with making new products and finding great products to sell. So that's always going to be part of our DNA. We do all the manufacturing. So we print our own things. We send them to customers. We're vertically integrated. And also, we own all of our own technology. So we're serving customers, direct to customer, and we're

fulfilling orders and doing all the software. So we're a product centric business. We love doing it. So, you know, we never want to stop doing it. We want to keep doing that. It's our real passion is making great products.

So everyone has a humbling moment, especially in the early days. But I feel like it's a timeline. Maybe it's the highs and the lows, right? And that's entrepreneurship for sure. Do you remember a super humbling moment in those first few years where you were just like, I don't know if we're going to get through this?

I've had several. I mean, I think you need them because it's a bit like the pain you feel when you go to the gym. It's building muscle. It's building strength and resilience. And I think creativity loves the constraints and the challenges that, you know, get thrown at you. So I maybe would have otherwise have told stories about pivots and things that...

led to positive things. But the pandemic was really the hardest thing we've ever had to go through. We were doing something in the region of $15 million a month every month, bang, bang, bang, growing, growing, growing. And then we went down to something like $3 million overnight.

We had March, and we're about to anniversary those months five years ago today. And when people stopped going to conferences, stopped getting on planes, stopped going to meetings, all of our products are designed for in-person interaction. So we had a rapid halt. We had to rethink the business. We had to reimagine the business, redesign the business, refactor all of our cost structure and get through. So, I mean, that was the most difficult of all difficult situations that we've had.

And did you feel like it picked up during, at what point during the pandemic, I guess? Yeah, it took about six months until we saw some green shoots. So, I mean, we had set up in our kind of dashboards

Things like the Google transport data to see if people were traveling by train, if people were taking taxis and going places, we would see a correlation between places being unlocked, being opened up and lockdowns being reduced and sales going up. You'd see...

leading and lagging indicators that were all around, you know, kind of public transport data and stuff like that. So about six months until we took a breath and then we built the business back up to almost the sort of same size over the next two or three years. So it's been an incredible, incredible journey. But the first few days were just unbelievable, unbelievable learnings.

Was it always your dream once Moo started really kicking into gear that it would be a global company as it is? I think we were lucky. I had a lot of really good people around me. And I think one of the principles that we took very early on into all of our decision making was be completely global, you know, geographically agnostic. You know, we didn't think about, oh, we're a British company, should we just sell in the UK? No.

We were partnering with Flickr there in the US. Let's be a global company. Let's have prices in lots of different currencies. Let's have a flat rate shipping anywhere in the world. Let's not make the geographic boundaries an issue for anyone. We'll figure that out later. And that served us very well. So we went, you know, despite being a UK based business initially, we're very US centric today.

Um, we had about 40% of our revenue coming in from the U S I think in the end of the first year or the end of the second year. And we built on that in the U S is now about 83% of our, of our business. So we've definitely continued to invest and think about, um, uh, how we grow internationally, but particularly the U S has been very strong for us.

So the majority of your business, as you just mentioned, is in the U.S. I bet you see a lot of interesting data points, though. Everything from different countries maybe have different...

opinions about what should be on the business card and what shouldn't be on the business card. Is there anything that has come out to you as kind of glaring in some way or very notable? Sure, there are huge cultural differences professionally in all different countries. There are specific cultural differences between

around business cards, particularly in Asia and some well-understood cultural norms around how cards are exchanged and received and so on. I think in the early days, we were giving a lot of cards away for free. So we saw a lot of people put very weird things on cards, which we were not allowed to print at times. But that all made for an interesting experience for us as business owners to have to figure out what you would and wouldn't print.

And we do on occasion decline printing things when I think our customers want to make something that doesn't necessarily align with our values. But no, I mean, for the most part, being a US-centric business, it's a very business-friendly culture. People like to do business. Whatever we're making, we make a lot of different products. Whether we're making cards or whether we're making a water bottle or a notebook or whatever.

or flyers, whatever it might be, Americans are just, they tend to buy in greater numbers. So the Europeans are, you know, they're buying a few little cars. Americans are like, I'm going to really make a go of this. I'm buying 200 cars or 400 cars. You know, they may just be starting out. It's an amazingly entrepreneurial country. 400,000 new businesses started every month in the US. So we're well-placed to serve them with their...

however many cards they need and getting to them very, very quickly as well, which is something that the US folks do love is fast service.

I have my own group of people that I can look for trends with. So I have one on the low-end millennial and three Gen Zers. And I'll tell you, I mean, they're more obsessed with business cards than I've ever seen Gen Xer or millennial be. So I think...

You are probably seeing a lot of trends, especially with this Gen Z audience coming up. Is there anything that sort of has highlighted to you as being something that is unique? Not something that I've seen directly, but it's something I'm going to go and look for now that you mentioned it, because I think it's fascinating. I mean, we used to look at things like titles, business titles. We noticed...

through various recessions that, you know, titles like consultant tend to go up and advisor and founder, you know, the, you know, economic conditions can drive change, massive changes in professions. So it's quite fascinating to think about how

what people actually end up putting on their cards can tell you, what that can tell you about where the market's going, what's happening. So I don't have that data to hand. I wish I did now. But no, we used to look at it quite a lot. We've done some research and we've published some of that stuff in the past, which I'm sure is still online. But yeah, there's definitely movement in titles. A lot of AI written on people's titles now, I'm sure. But I'll have to go find some data on it to look at it.

So you mentioned AI. I'm so curious. So how does AI fit into digital tech within your company? Yeah, I think it's an essential component in moderation for a business like Moo. We pride ourselves on the service that we deliver. I'm not saying for a second that AI can't support with that, but we're available on the phone. We're

our agents are, uh, able to use tools in the same way that you might use Excel to, you know, format some numbers. We use AI to help us maybe format and structure, uh, inbound information so that we can organize it in response to people. But we think that a human centric experience, much the same way as we believe in meeting people in person, we believe that being available as humans to talk to other humans, if they need to talk to us is very important. So we use it as a tool. It's not a, I don't think we have any kind of, um,

significant leverage of AI in our business today.

So if you had to launch Moo again in 2025, is there anything that you'd do differently as you think back on the days? Maybe there was something that you thought for sure is going to be a huge home run and you wasted just too much time focusing on... Yeah, well, I can tell you one story. We did at one point think that...

You know, Moo had strengths in design. It had strengths in its customer relationships. We had e-commerce. We had lots of things. And I think we got stuck on the idea that maybe we were going to do websites or help people with logos and do other, you know, supplemental services, adjacent services to the business that we're in.

And we've probably flirted with that area a bit too much. I'm not saying that area isn't interesting or doesn't have potential, but I think you can, particularly when you're growing and you're a scale-up business, you can be distracted by opportunities left and right. And actually, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, right? Focus on your core business, making that better and better.

And we were by no means at that point asymptosing and we didn't need to find growth from other areas other than our core business. So that was a distraction and probably a waste of time in some regard. But again, learning and it helps you. You're reminded of that when you're looking at opportunities, when people are calling you to try and do things. And yeah, it was a distraction.

So you've shipped to over a million customers, well over a million, I would guess, way over a million. You've grown a team over the last 20 years. You've been a CEO of this company for almost 20 years at this point. Obviously, culture is super important for you. What are the one or two non-negotiables as you think about

sort of the journey of building the company, what you've seen, where you really feel like that's something that you actually, you have to have within the company or you need to fix it or something. You know that that's a problem. Yeah, no, no, it's...

It's one of those things where you know it when you see it when you're a small company. You're feeling out your values and your culture early on. And I'd be super interested to talk to people who were at Mood 10 years ago or 15 years ago to see whether they felt the culture was the same, what was the same about it. But I think your values, they're not your values if you don't hold people accountable for betraying them or acting against them or not living them.

So we have a, you know, our performance management process is based on your performance and your, you know, your values and how they align with what we do and what we believe. So I think that's just critically important in any company, no matter how big it is. It's probably something I wish we'd done earlier at Atmu. We probably only crystallized it.

you know, what we believed and how we wanted to do things probably about six or seven years in. But we were growing very quickly at the time and we were still, you know, little whippersnappers, you know, little upstarts and hadn't kind of grown up enough to build those things out. But yeah, culture and values, super important.

So when you look at building a brand, uh, and you've built an incredible brand today, you're also, you sit on some boards, uh,

I always say that the board work that I do as well, it really helps me to kind of not just provide perspective, but also see maybe what I've missed, right? Outside of my own company. I think it's incredibly important for learning for any CEO. What's the biggest mistake you see execs making when you think...

when they think about scaling a brand and if you have to kind of dial it back for them, knowing what you do? Yeah, it's simple. Well, let me just explain for some context the experience I've had outside of my MOO and maybe why I did it. I think when I was about 30, I'm 47 now, but when I was about 30 and I was running this company, it was growing very quickly, right?

And I really felt I didn't know what I was doing. You know, I had raised money and I'd been very lucky and I had a great team, but I felt like I lacked really any experience in the world that I was, you know, you said I'd been a CEO for 20 years. You know, I have, but the job has been literally a different job every year. So how do you grow yourself? How do you expand your own learning when the day job is,

you're in the same environment. So I did a few things back then. The first thing was I found a mentor, which was an amazing experience for me. I did that for many, many years. I joined the Young Presidents Organization. It's a U.S. organization with roots in the U.S., but with a global reach. And I joined a public company board as a director, as a non-exec director. And I did that for about 10 years. So I think...

For me, the experience of being in public companies and being at other boards is you get this fantastic 10,000-foot view. You're able to see the matrix. You can see what's going on and you can help advise the people running those businesses or present your opinion and your perspective to other members of the board, to the executive team. I think one of the real skills of being an executive and a non-executive is the ability to zoom in and zoom out and zoom in and zoom out. And I think that

When you're a non-exec working with an exec, helping them zoom out and see things from your point of view. And sometimes in bigger companies, they get very far away. I noticed it with myself. You're very far away from the product. You're very far away from the customer. And sometimes as a non-exec, you have to help

an advisor or in any capacity like that, where you're working with senior leadership is help them zoom in or give them permission or help them to find a way to zoom in on a problem on a customer. You know, have they used the product recently? Have they had that experience? Have they looked, have they gone and experienced what a competitor does? Because you can get lost in the Excel spreadsheets and the PowerPoint and the team meetings and all other things. And

It's a thing we have to keep reminding ourselves. It's like going back to the gym. You can be very successful, but you've got to work that muscle and remember where you came from. Remember where the product came from. Remember the actual customers that buy it. So I suppose those are the sort of things that I look to do.

Yeah, definitely. And I think it's focusing on the consumer, but also focusing on the team too, right? So you can see little data points along the way, but things like culture, things like it's not just about top line growth, but if you don't have the top line growth...

then you start to kind of wonder what else is missing in the company that maybe you're not seeing as well. But yeah, I think it's so interesting. I'm part of YPO that you mentioned as well. And what I've been able to gauge from my experience being part of that too is that it doesn't matter if...

you're in the same industry or not, there's a lot of key similarities that you go through that is really fun to have that other experiences to help you think about things for sure. So when you think about Moo and kind of the future, what are you just obsessing about right now that you're so excited about about your company? Well, it's more what I'm worried about than what I'm excited about. And

But that sort of excites me. You know, the challenges are interesting. The problems to solve are stimulating. So, you know,

How do you grow and scale a business that has to have factories and develop its own software and make its own product? That's an ongoing thing and it gets more complicated as it gets bigger. So I'm excited about that. I'm sort of excited about finding our place in this new digital world. You talked earlier about the changes in technology.

People thought no one would ever buy a book again. And yet, you know, books are still an incredibly important, physical books are still an incredibly important part of my life anyway, and of the lives of lots of people. Things like vinyl are coming back. I think that's a fascinating phenomenon when you can, you know, download any song in the world ever, you know, at the touch of a button. This routine of people who still want to go to a record store and buy something that's

difficult to play and you have to be in a certain location. I think it's amazing. So I'm fascinated with building products that will help brands reconnect with their customers or their employees, figuring out new ways to do that in a super scalable international way, beautiful design, high quality products. I suppose the thing that's most difficult about what I'm doing and maybe most exciting is how do you do that in a really sustainable way? You know, if you're going to make a lot of these products,

How are you going to make them in a way that they can be disposed of responsibly? Are they going to last a long time? So, you know, one of the foundations of our product strategy is this belief in sustainable impressions. How do you help companies make these long-lasting impressions with their customers or their employees? Or how do you make a product out of a material that can be recycled or thrown away and composted? So those are meaty, new, interesting challenges, which we've obviously thought about for a long time, but it's such an important tenet now of our strategy that we're

and we're having to tackle it in a number of different places. But it's an exciting thing. And I'm sort of jazzed about trying to figure it all out again. I always call the entrepreneurship journey the puzzle, right? And I think that that's the exciting part. But you don't have the picture on the front, right? So nobody gave it to you and you're just continuing to build on it. And it is fun.

But some days it's super challenging and hard. And I think you have to be willing to sort of take on that puzzle every day, which clearly you are. So Richard, thank you so much for an insightful interview. Everybody needs to go on and order from Moo. We'll have all the info in the show notes. But thank you for sharing

sharing your wisdom with us and thanks everyone for listening too so incredible incredible design beyond business cards uh as richard mentioned they uh do all kinds of custom printing and design projects so uh definitely check it out so thank you richard and the company again is called mu

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