99designs announced today it has been recognised as the 2015 Victorian Exporter of the Year at an awards ceremony hosted by Her Excellency the Honourable Linda Dessau AM, Governor of Victoria. Bestowed upon Victoria’s most successful and innovative exporters, the award honors 99designs’ growth from a startup in the fertile region of Victoria, Australia into a global company that now has four offices across four continents.
“Melbourne, Victoria is a great place to build a team and take on the world. We are able to attract talent from all over Australia and the world to Melbourne, as it’s a great place to work and live,” said Patrick Llewellyn, President and CEO of 99designs. “We love being a part of its thriving tech ecosystem, and this recognition from the Governor of Victoria is a nice acknowledgement of all the hard work of our teams not only here, but around the world.”
Long known as a hub of innovation within the online space, Melbourne was the birthplace for many great early brands in the online space, including Realestate.com.au and Seek.com.au, in the early days and later CultureAmp, Flippa and RedBubble. Today, global players such as Etsy, Eventbrite, Stripe and Xero are choosing Melbourne as a home base for the Australian market. Melbourne has also begun to see the growth in startup incubators and local VCs like Inspire9 and local VCs like SquarePeg Capital helping to fuel early stage startups.
Founded in Melbourne by Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz in 2008, 99designs pioneered the idea of a design contest, where multiple designers compete to deliver the perfect design, rather than being limited to the creativity of a single designer.
After gaining traction in the US and raising a $35M Series A in 2011 from Accel Partners (backers of Facebook and Dropbox), 99designs expanded internationally and now has local sites offering our service in 21 countries, 8 languages and 16 currencies. In March 2015, the company raised a Series B round from Japan-based, Recruit Strategic Investors to spearhead our entry into the Japanese market.
Since 2008, 99designs has helped more than 420,000 businesses access quality design at affordable prices and paid out US$125 million to its community of 1,000,000 talented designers in 192 countries.
In the past year, 99designs has doubled new customer growth rates in the US (~55% of sales) and tripled new customer growth rates in priority markets such as the UK and Germany. 99designs has been a global company from its inception, and its international focus is reflected in the fact that 93 percent of sales are derived outside of Australia, and 60 percent of customers are from the US.
About 99designs 99designs, the world’s largest logo design and graphic design marketplace, has helped more than 350,000 businesses access quality design at an affordable price and paid out more than $125 million to designers across the world. 99designs pioneered crowd-sourced design contests, where businesses receive a wide variety of design concepts and choose their favorite, and expanded to provide services for customers to work one-on-one with individual designers, purchase design templates from the ready-made logo store, or get small design projects done within an hour through Tasks. With more than one million designers from 192 countries around the world, 99designs’ suite of services helps businesses succeed through great design created by a robust community of talented graphic designers. Headquartered in Oakland, Calif., 99designs has operations in Australia, Germany and Brazil.