Posted on 02/13/2011 9:39:23 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
ENTREPRENEUR Jerry Kennelly is investing close to €20 million of his own money in a online e-commerce design and print venture which he hopes will have a million customers this time next year.
Headquartered in Killorglin, Co Kerry, Tweak.com went live yesterday and sole shareholder Kennelly describes it as "the most significant global e-commerce application ever created by an Irish enterprise".
He won’t divulge how much he has invested in the venture which he has conceived and brought to market other than saying: "We are into double digit millions."
Industry sources suggest that the scale of the global operation which needed some 50,000 hours of programming time alone, has cost close to €20m to date.
The enterprise is geared to cater for the very largest businesses to the very smallest and Mr Kennelly believes that savings of 80% on design and print costs can be achieved.
Mr Kennelly sold his company Stockbyte to Getty Images in 2006 for €135m and this is his first major venture since that disposal. Tweak is initially targeting the 50m English speaking entrepreneurs who run small and medium enterprises in Europe and North America. Other language versions are close to being launch ready.
Mr Kennelly is very proud of the work done by his team and there are patents pending on the technology they have created.
"There are some really big nuts that we have cracked from the point of technology. I wondered why no one had done this before, now I know why," he said.
"The concept is an Irish one, the creative is Irish and Killorglin has been a superb location and has a track record of being home many global businesses. There is great scope to create more jobs here as the company starts to trade and gains traction," he said.
Tweak.com provides an easy to use free application to design advertising and print material using a library of 400,000 pieces of individual design — incorporating copy and photographs designed about the exact needs of 300 business types.
Customers can download the finished product as a pdf, use a desktop printer, or give to their local printer, or simply order the printed material from tweak.com
Cafe Press Executive?
bump for later...
Interesting thought, not sure if the guy got anything near the value he was attempting to extract with his investment, nor how it was 50,000 hours of programming.
Honestly, most of the ad copy I looked at would be more at home in some offbeat Office design template CD.
Being from Ireland maybe he does not know the US urban definition of the term “tweak”. I wonder if the domain name was freely available.
Meth? I’ve never heard that definition until you mentioned it and I had to look it up :p
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