It took Nick Jenkins four days to find the name. He sat checking domains on Network Solutions, looking for something short and easy to say over the phone, and landed on a word that had once been aimed at him in a school corridor. Moonpig was his nickname.
That detail says more than the usual startup tale. Jenkins did not name his company after a clever brand idea. He named it after the thing other children called him, and bet his working life on it.
That was the worst month imaginable: the dot-com bubble was bursting and online retail was a joke at dinner parties.
Before that he had spent about eight years in Moscow as a commodities trader, a job about as far from greetings cards as you can get. Where he was born and what he studied I could not verify, so I will not guess. What the record does show is a man who left a trading career for a website that put a customer's own photo on a card and posted it.
He launched in July 2000. That was the worst month imaginable: the dot-com bubble was bursting and online retail was a joke at dinner parties. He raised more money from private investors and venture capital, and then waited. It took five years to turn a profit. On a podcast episode his own words were reported as: we came close to failing several times.
What almost nobody expected was who would carry the company through. Not advertising, at first. Broadband and digital cameras spread, people discovered they could make a card with their dog on it, and customers told friends. The first profit arrived in 2005. A television campaign followed in November 2006. By 2007 Moonpig reportedly held about 90% of the UK online card market, and by summer 2009 it had sold to 2.57 million people.
In July 2011 Photobox bought it for GBP120m in cash and shares. The price of success was not only commercial. In 2015 the company disabled its API and apps after a developer's public warning; the flaw, first found in August 2013, had exposed names, addresses and partial card details for about three million users.
The business outlived it. Moonpig floated in London on 2 February 2021 at over GBP1.2bn on day one, and for the year to April 2026 reported GBP373.0m in revenue and GBP51.7m in net income.
The lesson is small and odd. The name that might have embarrassed him became the asset. Jenkins did not hide the school nickname; he built a brand on it and made strangers remember it.