Case study: Canva, an Australian giant in design🚀

You’ve likely turned to Canva for creating a cool presentation or a sleek poster, but did you know that this global design giant began as a humble startup right here in Australia little over 11 years ago? 

Canva’s story began in a very unassuming place - Melanie Perkins’ mum’s living room. In 2013, Melanie, along with her partner Cliff Obrecht, developed their first project, Fusion Books, from this cosy spot.

Fast forward to today, Canva is now a design powerhouse with more than 4,000 employees around the globe with a mission to make design easy and accessible for everyone, no matter their experience or budget. 

The Founders

Melanie Perkins: Cofounder and CEO. Melanie’s lightbulb moment came about from her frustration with outdated design tools that were clunky and difficult to use whilst she was teaching design programs part-time in 2008. 

Cliff Obrecht: Cofounder and COO. Cliff, who was Melanie’s boyfriend (now husband) at the time, first became her business partner for Fusion Books. They both balanced full-time studies and part-time jobs while working on their first project, which set the stage for Canva. 

Cameron Adams: Cofounder and CPO. Cameron joined the team in 2012, bringing his expertise from Google to help shape Canva into the design tool we know today. 

Canva’s Growing Team 

From a small team in 2012, Canva is growing faster than ever with over 4,000 employees worldwide today. Canva has just opened up new offices in Melbourne, Austin and even its first European campus in London, welcoming 1,128 new team members in 2023! 

Canva’s User Base 

In 2023 alone, over 300,000 people signed up to join Canva. The platform now serves more than 170 million monthly users across 190 countries. To put this into perspective, on how much Canva has grown in the last couple years, they first reached 60 million users from 2013 to September 2021. In just the past year, they’ve added another 60 million new users!

Design Stats

By the end of 2023, Canva users had created over 20 billion designs on the platform. In 2023 alone, 6 billion new designs were created. To break it down, that’s 1 million designs every hour or 280 designs every second!

This suggests a huge problem has been solved globally for millions of people who otherwise may have lacked the ability to express themselves in the form of beautiful designs.

The Problem 

The idea for Canva was sparked when Melanie Perkins found that the existing design tools were super clunky and hard to use while she was teaching design programs part-time at university in 2008. 

“I wanted to make design software simple, online and collaborative.” -Melanie Perkins

First Solution - Fusion Books 

With little experience in business, marketing and software development, Melanie and Cliff started Fusion Books: a tool that simplified the process of creating school yearbooks. They saw how teachers struggled with creating yearbooks and wanted to make the process easier and quicker. Despite facing lots of challenges due to their limited experience and budget, they persevered and found a software development partner, InDepth, to bring their vision to life. 

Canva’s Evolution 

While running Fusion Books, Perkins and Obrecht had the idea to create an online tool to simplify the design process for a broader audience. They teamed up with Cameron Adams and launched Canva in 2012. Canva started as a basic design tool but evolved into a platform for a wide range of visual content including presentations, social media graphics, posters, and lots more!

Canva in Education

Canva is now empowering more than 60 million students and teachers worldwide, providing them with the visual tools needed for the modern workplace through Canva for education.

In addition to primary and high school students, they have expanded their reach to university students by partnering with the University of California (UC). 

Lessons They've Learnt & What You Can Take Away 

The journey for Canva has been a series of highs and lows; a combination of building and evolving their culture, staying true to their core values, investing in an amazing community and eventually securing investors that believed in their mission.  

Melanie Perkins is big on not giving up. Especially when customers had entrusted them with creating and delivering their school yearbooks! Letting those customers down was simply not an option. This perseverance, resilience and customer orientation was key in the early days, where the focus was on delivering value and earning the trust of their community. 

Perkins shares that the most important thing is to create a product that solves a problem for a lot of people. 

Reflecting on the Canva journey, she notes that while the basic product was coming together, the team was committed to not launching until they knew it would be an amazing experience for the users.

Another lesson from Canva is the importance of starting in a niche before expanding. By initially focusing on Fusion Books and education customers, they were able to get a good understanding of their customer’s problem and develop a solution that effectively addressed their needs. 

One of Perkins’ favourite songs, Panama, echoes “I like things that seem impossible”, reminding us that persistence is crucial to push through in tough times. 

Canva’s startup story is a testament to this - showing that with the right mix of determination, customer focus and strategic growth, even the smallest, most unthinkable startups can transform into industry leaders.