Louisville-Based CafePress Bought By Snapfish

Louisville-based CafePress, an online seller of T-shirts and personalized items, has been bought by Snapfish LLC, a personalized photo service based in San Francisco.

According to a news release, Snapfish will purchase all outstanding shares of CafePress. A report from Louisville Business First says with 17.1 million shares outstanding, the total purchase price would be about $25.3 million.

CafePress founder and CEO Fred Durham called the news a "critical turning point in our pursuit to return CafePress to its market leading position" in the industry.

"We are excited about the opportunity to accelerate growth by leveraging our content portfolio across Snapfish’s distribution channels,” said Durham, in the release. “We take great pride in being the pioneer of offering personalized and custom merchandise to consumers and believe this transaction provides an opportunity to further our leading position as well as return value to our stockholders.”

Louisville Business First reports that CafePress experienced financial hardship over the past several years, as well as issues with search-engine changes that the company said increased the cost of shipping and technology upgrades.
The company laid off 12 employees in January, and in February, Durham slashed his own salary to help cut costs at his ailing company. But in March, CafePress announced another 7 percent reduction in its staff, including laying off two executives. All of the cuts combined led to $7 million saved in annual fixed costs.
In the release, Snapfish said the acquisition "would create a combined platform of photo and non-photo-based products that would produce hundreds of thousands of personalized products for consumers globally."

“We are looking forward to welcoming CafePress and its employees into the Snapfish organization and working with them during the next phases of each company’s evolution,” said Jasbir Patel, CEO of Snapfish.