Melanie Perkins, the CEO and Co-Founder of Canva always had a passion and desire for design. She came up with the idea for Canva back in 2007, when she was just 19 years old. It started in university, when she was teaching design to her fellow classmates. She then realized that most of the equipment and programmes were way too expensive and complex.
She envisioned a future where none of this would be a problem.
After a lot more research, Melanie then embarked on the journey to turn her vision into a reality.
She was able to team up with Cliff Obrecht, the other co-founder of Canva.
They both envisioned a tool that would be extremely user-friendly and cheap.
Melanie and Cliff’s journey started in a small apartment, where they encountered countless obstacles on a daily basis. With very little business experience behind them, the couple started small and created an online school yearbook design business called “Fusion Books” to test out their idea.
They then launched a website for students to collaborate and design different ideas for articles. The pair would then print the yearbooks and deliver them to schools all across Australia. Not before long, Canva was winning over major investors and building out a design platform with a fast-growing team of tech engineers.
Today, Canva is one of the most valued female-led startups in the world. The company raised over $200 million in cash and declared a $40 billion valuation in September of 2021. Canva also has reportedly helped in creating more than 3.5 billion designs across 185 different countries with over 60 million active users. Forbes also recognises Melanie Perkins as one of the “Top Under 30 of the Decade” in 2020. With a net worth of over $3.43 billion, Perkins debuted on The Australian Financial Review Rich List in 2020.
Canva is one of my favorite platforms and is innovative and convenient, unlike most design software. It makes complete sense that they saw a gap in the market for user-friendly design software. I had no idea they started out as a yearbook design program though, that is so cool! I think this perfectly sums up the essence of a good idea–something that makes people’s lives easier, where her passion met a problem.