Cimpress Brand Guidelines: Bonne Impression, a VistaPrint Rename & a Family of Print Brands

A one-person company in Paris.

Cimpress began as Bonne Impression, a company Robert Keane founded in 1995. The company’s own history says he started it as a one-person business from a small apartment in Paris, while he was a student at INSEAD, the business school in France, and that its business plan promised printing that was “low-volume, flexible, high quality, aesthetic, quick, colorful and affordable.” English Wikipedia describes the early business as a direct marketer of desktop-publishing software and pre-printed specialty papers, which small businesses ran through their own laser printers to make brochures, stationery and business cards.

The move online came at the end of the decade. In June 1999, the company says, it changed its name to VistaPrint and launched in France and the UK, adding the United States in 2000. It describes two pieces of software at the centre of that change: a design tool that ran in the customer’s web browser, and workflow software that gathers very large numbers of small orders into high-volume production runs. In 2003, by its own account, it opened a production facility in the Netherlands and a customer-service centre in Jamaica. English Wikipedia records its listing on Nasdaq in 2005, under the ticker VPRT.

The name Cimpress arrived in November 2014, when Vistaprint N.V. became Cimpress N.V. English Wikipedia and the company give the same reason: to separate the corporate entity from the customer-facing brands it owned. Today the company calls itself Cimpress plc and trades on Nasdaq as CMPR; English Wikipedia says it is an Irish company based in Dundalk, in County Louth. Keane is still its chief executive, as both the company’s website and a May 2026 interview in the German trade magazine beyond-print.de state.

A portfolio of print brands.

Cimpress grew by buying online printers that kept their own names. English Wikipedia lists the main steps. In November 2011 it bought Albumprinter, the Amsterdam photo-book company, which it sold again in 2017. In 2014 it bought People & Print Group of Deventer, renamed Printdeal from January 2015, and in April of that year Pixartprinting of Quarto d’Altino, near Venice. A minority stake in the Brazilian start-up Printi, taken in 2014, became a majority in 2020. National Pen, a maker of custom pens, followed in December 2016, and BuildASign of Austin, Texas, in 2018, keeping its own name and website.

The company’s list of businesses, last updated in September 2026, names more than a dozen units. The list opens with VistaPrint, which also runs 99designs. Germany has WIRmachenDRUCK and, since 2026, SAXOPRINT; Austria has druck.at; the Netherlands and Belgium have Drukwerkdeal and Printdeal. France has Easyflyer and Exaprint, and the UK has Tradeprint. National Pen trades as Pens.com, and the list adds Packstyle and Printi.

SAXOPRINT is the most recent addition. On 11 May 2026 the German photo-products group CEWE announced that it had agreed to sell its commercial online-print business to Cimpress: the SAXOPRINT production site in Dresden and the sales units viaprinto and LASERLINE, with all 544 of their staff. beyond-print.de reported on 23 July 2026 that CEWE had completed the sale at the start of that month. In the May interview, the magazine’s editor also noted that Cimpress had recently invested in Mixam and in Truyol.

Online printers and print-on-demand platforms.

Online printers and print-on-demand platforms sell something the customer designs and the company makes. Their websites are therefore built around two things: the range of printed products on offer, and the steps for turning a file or an idea into an order. Product pages are organised by category — business cards, flyers and postcards, stickers and labels, signs and banners, packaging, apparel, and fabric or home goods — and each is shown through the company’s own photographs of finished pieces.

The ordering side is described in plain, practical terms. Customers either upload a finished print file or build a design in an editor that runs in the web browser, then choose size, quantity, paper and finish from a configurator. Cimpress, for example, describes its services as running from upload-and-print to logo design, with file checks before production. Papers and finishes are named rather than pictured in the abstract: weights in grams per square metre, coated or uncoated stock, matt or gloss lamination, and options such as rounded corners or spot varnish.

Behind the storefront, the companies differ in how they make things. Some run their own print plants; CEWE described SAXOPRINT’s Dresden site as a production facility when it agreed to sell it to Cimpress in May 2026. Others, such as HelloPrint in Rotterdam, describe themselves as platforms that pass orders to a network of partner printers and carriers. Several of the brands in this guide belong to larger groups, and their corporate pages set out owners, sites and the dates of takeovers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where its products are made and how it presents itself — and attributes to the company anything that rests only on its own word.

Stay small as we get big.

Cimpress describes itself as a group run at arm’s length. Its website says it shares “a select few” strategic capabilities across its businesses and otherwise manages them “in a decentralized, autonomous manner,” a principle it sums up as “stay small as we get big.” The main shared capability it names is a mass-customisation platform: software that links a customer’s design and specifications — size, material, finishing — to production in quantities from a single piece to thousands. In the 2026 interview Keane described Cimpress not as one large company but as a company of focused specialists, with each brand serving its customers with its own identity and approach.

That shapes how the name is seen. Cimpress is a corporate name, and its own website sends customers who want to order to the individual brands’ websites. Its pages are plain corporate pages: an about page, a history set out in eras from “The Beginning” to “Staying Small as We Get Big,” a leadership page, and a list of businesses with links out to each brand. The product categories it lists run from business cards, flyers and postcards to signs, banners and flags, packaging, apparel and promotional products, and it says it also offers design services, from upload-and-print to logos, with file checks and access to professional designers.

The company says it has more than 15,000 team members. English Wikipedia says its businesses have offices and manufacturing facilities in Europe, North and South America, India, Australia, the Philippines, China and Japan, and that the company opened a US manufacturing plant in Reno, Nevada, in 2016. The company itself says it operates in more than 20 countries.

For a design guide, Cimpress shows how a holding company can stay in the background while the brands it owns face the customer. Compare Vistaprint, the brand whose name the company once carried, and Mixam, the online printer in which Cimpress has invested. For this guide we use an ink blue and a process cyan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cimpress’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.