Business Cards That Blur the Social Lines

Moo founder and CEO Richard Moross.

Image: Facebook

Moo founder Richard Moross puts himself to sleep at night by counting ideas he can bring to market. While still a strategic planner for the design firm Imagination, he was fading into a night's sleep, tallying off creative concepts, when he struck on one that stuck: reinventing the business card.

His reimagined business-card concept was announced last week, with the integration of Moo's product line with the Facebook Timeline, a partnership between the two companies that has produced what you might call a social-networking business card.

“It’s clear that consumer habits of sharing business and personal information are evolving, and the lines between online social networking and offline business networking are not just blurring, but vanishing,” said Moross.

These customized business cards based on Timeline images give the entrepreneur the ability to pair the right images with different social situations. To promote the new cards, Moo is giving away up to 5,000 orders of 50 cards per day, until it gives away 200,000 orders, which is expected to take approximately 40 days. For its part, Facebook is providing access to users on its site. Click on the "about" section on Facebook Timeline, and then the business-card section within the contact info section to find the free business-card offer.

The new Timeline cards align with Moross’ focus on redesigning the business card. He calls technology, design, and paper “The Holy Trinity,” and believes that while much of technology is aimed at killing the $100 billion global print industry, the best way to maximize the impact of a business card is in the print medium.

“I stand up for the print industry, but with a forward-thinking approach to its growth," he says. "Other people go for ‘faster’ and ‘cheaper’ as positives, but I'm more interested in ‘better’ and ‘different.’”

Launched in 2006 with a $5.5 million series A funding round, Moo is best known for the "half the size of regular business cards" business cards and cards using QR codes to further blur the line between online and offline networking, but with the Facebook Timeline integration, the company's branding may soon see an adjustment.

Moo printed 50 million business cards in 2011 and currently employs 85 full-time employees in Rhode Island and London. It is a profitable company with revenue in the eight-figure range and compound annual growth exceeding 100 percent since in launched. The company expects to sell 100 million cards in 2012.