Jerry Kennelly’s first business sold for $135m. Now one of Ireland’s most successful entrepreneurs is back with a new venture which aims to give small business owners the marketing materials they need to compete with the big boys.
You’ve probably seen some of Jerry Kennelly’s work, but you just don’t realize it.
For years, publications, companies and websites have been using his collection of stock photos to illustrate articles. For example, have you ever read an article about farming, which was accompanied by a random photograph of a tractor or a smiling woman tending to her vegetables? When people needed a generic royalty-free photograph, they often turned to Stockbyte, the company he founded in 1996.
“We actually helped create that market,” he says, “We were one of the first three companies in the world to actually invent that market, where images are sold on a software-like basis. By the end of it, we had 85,000 images. We were the largest supplier to Getty Images and had a 10% share in the global royalty-free stock photo market.”
Getty, the world leaders in stock photography, bought out Stockbyte in 1996 for a whopping $135m, but not until after a bidding war with Bill Gates and others. Not bad for a company based in Tralee, Co Kerry, and founded by a man who previously worked as a freelance photojournalist.
Now, Jerry Kennelly is back with a new project - a website that aims to revolutionize the way small and medium businesses market themselves.
“I found it frustrating that small and medium enterprises couldn’t get access to design. The process doesn’t particularly suit them,” he said. “You go to an agency, brief them on what you want and they come back a couple of weeks later with some ideas. There’s lot of tic-tacking back and forward, with copy and pictures and corrections and so on. It’s a really expensive process and time-wise it’s also expensive for the entrepreneur. It excludes a lot of people from accessing really quality design. That’s the problem we set out to address when we sat down three years ago to set this up.”
The result is Tweak.com – a website where business owners can access hundreds of thousands of design options themselves, and tailor them to their own needs. Importantly, they can do so at a fraction of the cost – Kennelly says savings are in the order of 80%. Whether it’s a flyer, a brochure or a newspaper ad, the website offers branding of a standard comparable to larger companies with huge budgets.
“Print is a very powerful medium still, but it’s been difficult to access. This way, small businesses can do it at home in the evenings, when they are doing their taxes or whatever else. They can do things for months ahead, without paying anything upfront.” Kennelly believes his new website can help small and medium businesses compete in today’s world.
“The small and medium business owners are having a tough time right now,” he says, “One of the problems they have, because of the globalized world, the small coffee shop is competing against Starbucks. And Starbucks obviously has huge economies of scale. They do their branding and design once, and it’s applied across thousands of stores. The small business owner doesn’t have that opportunity. And this levels the playing field for them to a great extent. It gives them a chance to look their best. That first impression is so important for people. We all make instant decisions about, is this something that’s worthwhile or not? And is it something that is professional, is it something I trust, is it a brand I want to engage with?"
"No matter how big or small it is. We are being bombarded with a lot of information, a lot of marketing every day. And in a millisecond we make that decision. And what often defines whether we say yes or no, in our own mind, is the quality of the design and the image. And tweak.com can level the playing field and empower small businesses in a way that they have never been empowered before.”
This is no small project. Tweak is one of the most significant new web-based companies to launch out of Europe this year. Well over $10m has been invested in the company to date, and Kennelly believes he can be number one in this new market. A team of about 50 people in Ireland, a dozen or so in New York and others in San Francisco, London and elsewhere have been working on it for three years. They have over 400,000 individual pieces of design as they launch, and promise to have one million by the end of their first year. It means business owners sitting at their computers can design marketing material in a matter of minutes, that look like something designed by an agency.
A lot of thought has been put into the pictures, design and copy offered and rival companies are unlikely to end up with similar designs. “Right now we are the largest collection of customizable design on the planet, at launch. So the scale at which this business is going to create content is huge. We address 300 different business types. We’ve done the research in advance. This is a large scale global platform, not unlike the software business, which allows the cost to be shared among millions of transactions. We’re looking to serve millions of customers. We are wrapping up all that intellectual property and putting into a really simple interface and allowing people to get access to it.”
Of course, there will still be companies who will want completely original material designed specifically to their needs. Thousands of young freelance designers, with degrees from design courses, can offer competitive rates and will be competing with Tweak. But Kennelly is not worried.
“I think there is room for everyone in the marketplace, really,” he says, “We are not trying to do people out of business or anything. At the end of the day, if you can afford it and you’ve got the time, custom design is a very good solution for a lot of people. It’s a bit like the clothing business. I generally buy ready-to-wear suits. I don’t always get a custom suit. Up to now in the design business, you’ve only had the option of the custom suit. And this is a hybrid between the custom and ready-to-wear. All the research has been done. We understand the business types. We have had a huge research exercise and we have got inside the heads of small business owners and we’ve produced something we think is very relevant.”
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