In the digital age, Lovepop creates beautiful laser-cut pop-up cards designed on ship-building software and handcrafted in the ancient art form of kirigami. It has thrived year-over-year as it pockets hundreds of billions of VND from sales every year. Lovepop is on a mission to create one billion magical moments by making it easy to do something creative and meaningful for the people you love. The company has always made customers an important factor in the design - production process.

Mr Wombi Rose, the co-founder and CEO of Lovepop based in the USA, talking with young startup entrepreneurs at the Da Nang Business Incubator late August

Late last month, Mr Wombi Rose, the co-founder and CEO of Lovepop based in the USA participated in a talkshow with young startup founders at the Da Nang Business Incubator.

During the event, entitled ‘Lovepop - How to grow a consumer product business’, Wombie shared about the process of building and growing his business, as well as valuable experience needed for a startup, including teamwork and cooperation with partners and investors.

Wombi studied naval architecture and marine engineering at the Webb Institute, where he met his future business partner and best friend John Wise. The pair always dreamed of starting a business together, and enrolled at the Harvard Business School together 4 years after graduating from Webb.

By happenstance, on a Harvard Business School trip to Viet Nam in 2014, they stumbled upon a street vendor in Ho Chi Minh City selling cards featuring pop-up, 3D designs. The duo came up with the idea to take their engineering background, and combine this ancient art with the sliceform structure used in ship design to develop Slicegami, and Lovepop was then born.

With Americans spending an estimated 7 billion US$ a year on cards, according to trade group The Greeting Card Association, that’s big business.

Pooling the assets they had, the co-founders launched the business in 2014 while they were still in school. When that still wasn’t enough, they took out high-interest loans and worked out of Harvard’s shared student work space to save on office costs.

Available online, at retail locations across the U.S.A, and via thousands of third party retailers, Lovepop’s products create a memorable, shared connection between giver and receiver - a meaningful, beautiful, unexpected or seemingly impossible experience. That’s a magical moment.

A 3D wedding invitation card made by Lovepop

Since earning an investment from Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O'Leary on ABC's “Shark Tank” in 2015, Lovepop has created hundreds of unique designs to help make every occasion magical - whether it’s a birthday, holiday, anniversary, or any milestone for someone you love.

Securing a 300,000$ deal with O’Leary for a 15% stake in Lovepop proved to be a turning point that led to later rounds of institutional capital, including a 12.5 million$ round led by Highland Capital Partners in January, 2018.

Inspired by the Lovepop co-founders, Da Nang-born man, 27-year-old Ha Trinh Quoc Bao decided to startup with making 3D handmade greeting cards, and then the Lovepop Viet Nam company was born several years ago.

After 4 years of doing startup business, the Lovepop Viet Nam company now owns a 1ha plant in the Hoa Khanh Industrial Park with a total of nearly 500 employees and the daily production capacity of up to 30,000 cards.

Meanwhile, in the USA, Lovepop has also become a big name in the card industry, with its products securing appearance in more than 2,500 stores across the U.S.A, and more than 1 million customers.

Lovepop has grown year-over-year and is on its way to creating “one billion Magical Moments”.

According to Market Screener, Lovepop’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm's customer relationships, reached 87 out of 100. It is clear that customers love the company and its products.

In the coming time, Lovepop will expand its design team in Da Nang, focusing on recruiting more local staff members, hereby turning this place into a ‘design hub’ rather than just the place of production.

What started out as a project that developed from a trip to Viet Nam, has now grown into an incredible multimillion-dollar company that employs a large number of people across Lovepop’s offices in Boston, New York, Viet Nam, and in retail locations across the East Coast.