Minted, design community and e-commerce site for stationery and cards, has raised $5.5 million in Series B funding led Benchmark Capital, with IDG Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Marissa Mayer and Jeremy Stoppelman participating.
Minted is a global community of independent graphic designers and an e-commerce site that prints and sells the best of their designs in the form of paper goods such as holiday cards, wedding invitations, notebooks, and calendars. The community curates Minted’s assortment by voting to tell the company what to sell.
The best designs are printed and sold, with percentage of the retail price going to the designer. Designers also receive helpful design critiques from the Minted community. The site features holiday cards, wedding invitations, save the dates, birth announcements, business cards, and other personal stationery.
There are other sites that offer design-quality stationery and cards, such as Tiny Prints, but Minted has built a model around crowd-sourcing designs from graphic designers. The company also holds contests, such as the Art Print Challenge, to help give designers more exposure. With this challenge, the winner will sell his or her prints on flash sales site One Kings Lane.
Minted’s price points are actually very wallet friendly, and come in less than competitors in the stationery space. And CEO and founder Mariam Naficy says revenue has been growing several hundred precent per year since 2008.
“Minted immediately grabbed our attention as a business that could scale – they combine two powerful forces, the creative power of an online design community and the aesthetic needs of mass affluent females,” said Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark Capital.
The new funding will be used towards recruiting efforts and to support growth opportunities, starting with new product lines.