Now the CEO and Founder of a multibillion-dollar company, Canva, Melanie Perkins has made a name for herself as one of the youngest females to be leading a tech startup (pretty impressive, right?). But how exactly did she create a digital art empire?
Let’s rewind to 2002, when 14-year-old Melanie started her first venture. In hopes to raise a little bit of extra spending cash, she began designing and selling self-made scarves to locals in her hometown of Perth, Australia. A few years later, she entered college at the University of Western Australia to study Communications, Commerce, AND Psychology. While teaching students how to use design software, she realized just how long it took them to “feel remotely confident while designing something basic.”
This realization brought her to discover the untapped potential for a cheap and easy virtual design tool. With this in mind, she dropped out of college and moved back into her childhood home (where all great businesses start!), and began her first company, Fusion Books. While it was the general idea of her eventual business, Canva, Fusion Books catered to the extremely niche market of high school yearbook design and production. As of today, Fusion Books is still Australia’s largest yearbook publisher.
Using the experience and opportunities she gained through Fusion Books, she decided it was time to set “crazy huge goals and make them happen” by expanding into a larger market, marking the beginning of Canva.
Canva is a revolutionary design platform that many of you have probably used in the past. In fact, we use it to create all of our content posts over on our Empowering Economics Instagram (@empoweringeconomics if you want to go give it a follow haha). Melanie Perkins launched the company just seven years ago in 2013, and it’s already valued at $3.2 BILLION, according to CNBC. But, there were many more steps before the launch that we’re going to talk about to show you a bit of the extensive behind-the-scenes process that goes into huge projects like this.
When describing the initial idea for Canva, she says it all stemmed from a simple yearbook design business because she felt that yearbook designing was far harder than it needed to be with fancy programs. Once Melanie had the idea for one website where all of your digital designing needs would be met, the journey for funding started. In 2010, Melanie pitched her idea at a conference in Perth, Australia to get investors interested in her business, and she quickly succeeded when she secured the interest of Silicon Valley’s Bill Tai.
After months of more networking and carefully selecting a team of tech engineers and developers to design the platform and years of work, the site was finally ready. Today 15 million users a month use Canva, according to CEO Magazine. 190 countries use the ever-growing platform, and Melanie, the co-founders of Canva, and the 600-strong team are always seeking new ways to change the boundaries and accessibility of design tech.