A Business Card for Your Avatar

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Moo has carved out a new niche: selling business cards (or, more accurately, calling cards) to people who don't have businesses.

Since launching its service in September, 2006, Moo has shipped more than 30,000 orders to 140 countries.

Rik Panganiban -- or as he's known in Second Life, Rik Riel, ordered a set of Moo minicards to hand out at new-media meetups and conferences he attends.

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In 2006, Moross regrouped, raised $5 million in series A funding, and brought on a team (now numbering 17) to build new software around the social networks people were already using. When the company relaunched with its first partner, Flickr, in September, the rebranded minicards took off, fast becoming the unbusiness card of choice at many new-media unconferences (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/14/07, "Take Your PowerPoint and…").

At the South by Southwest conference in March, Mark Trammell, a Web standards evangelist and freelance photographer, was one of many attendees distributing the tiny, smoothly laminated minicards. His cards—each printed with a different photo, along with the address of his Flickr page—are good conversation starters, he says, but are also a useful way to exchange information without being overtly "business-y." For Trammell, a typical business-card exchange can feel like a chore: "There's something about it that says, 'Hi, I'd like to sell you a vacuum cleaner,'" he says. Moo cards "remove the stodginess" of the transaction.

Design-Driven Approach

Beyond the basic utility of the cards, Moo has also won many fans who appreciate their aesthetic qualities. The minicards' proportions, weight, and feel have won glowing reviews (the blog Boing Boing called them "visually stunning," and rhapsodized that opening the box was "like Christmas—so bright and colorful and fun") and have inspired users to create groups devoted to trading them, carriers to hold them, and community art projects to show them off. Moo has encouraged these activities, spotlighting particularly artful or creative uses of its products (e.g., as gift tags, as save-the-date cards) on the Moo Web site, as well as in an exhibit at a San Francisco "meetup" the company held for Moo customers in May.

Altogether, it's an impressive amount of fetishism for a product that, underneath the branding, really is nothing more than a bit of paper and ink. Klein credits Moross' design-driven approach, which he calls "very Jobsian" (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/27/07, "Even After Apple, Designers Dig Jobs").

Moross doesn't shrink from making such comparisons, either: Asked what he'll do when the minicards' novelty wears off, he fires back, "Novel is great. The iPod was novel. It has built-in obsolescence. But, Apple improved it, scaled it, and keeps coming back with new novelties." In addition to expanding into new products (like greeting cards, and, soon, stickers) and new partners (Facebook is one possibility) Moo will continue to innovate in a similar way: "The minicard is our Macintosh."

Miller is a reporter with BusinessWeek.com in New York.