I love digging into IPO filings, in part because they shed light on the inner workings of private companies that typically haven’t shared their numbers before. I was especially interested to take a gander at the recent S-1 filing of CafePress.
Why the curiosity about the San Mateo, California print-on-demand powerhouse? You may recall that CafePress — which just filed to raise $80 million — purchased Seattle-based Imagekind three years ago.
At the time, Imagekind didn’t disclose the purchase price. But the CafePress filing indicates that it paid $8.4 million in cash and stock for the company.
Imagekind continues to operate its online art marketplace as a subsidiary of CafePress. But there’s not much left of the business in Seattle.
Imagekind CEO Kevin Saliba has moved on to a new startup company in the area, and the business is now operated from Raleigh, North Carolina. That happens to be the home base of Canvas On Demand, which CafePress gobbled up for $10.1 million last summer.
CafePress employs 423 people, but none of the company’s facilities are located in Washington state. At the time of the acquisition, Imagekind, which had raised $2.6 million from Curious Office Partners, German book publisher Holtzbrinck, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Crosslink Capital, employed 26 people in Seattle.
Unlike some of the recent IPO filings from Seattle companies (such as Zillow.com and Impinj), CafePress posted more than $100 million in revenue last year. ($127 million to be exact). It recorded a small net loss last quarter, but was profitable on an annual basis in 2009 and 2010.
