Among Internet businesses, perhaps only one has managed to reach a market value of more than $1 billion by getting customers to hand out millions of promotional messages for it. The company is not Amazon, eBay or even Google. Rather, it is VistaPrint, a printing company that has strung together 28 profitable quarters by selling — and giving away — business cards. The free cards, of which VistaPrint has distributed 2.5 billion, carry the company’s marketing message on the back.

VistaPrint, a publicly held company based in Bermuda, sells a variety of wares online, from custom-printed rubber stamps, checks and notepads to marketing brochures for small businesses. Now it is stepping into the offline world, too, through a partnership announced this month with OfficeMax.

Eventually, all OfficeMax stores will have a station where customers can log on to a web site that uses VistaPrint’s technology and, with the help of an OfficeMax employee, design business cards and other materials that will be printed by VistaPrint and delivered to the OfficeMax store or the customer’s home.

Business cards are indeed a messy undertaking. Nickel-Kailing and other industry analysts say that printers generally dislike such jobs because they are not lucrative. Most business cards are ordered in small batches, on cheap paper, and with little in the way of inventive designs.

VistaPrint helped change the economics of the business in 1999 when it used a new approach to printing the cards. Traditionally, printers would produce business cards in distinct batches for each client, with a person’s card printed 143 times on a single sheet of paper. VistaPrint created software that allows it to print 143 different cards on each sheet, then print those sheets in large quantities. “Ganging up” orders, as the technique is known, is not necessarily difficult, but grouping similar orders efficiently is: in one batch, customers may want a specific paper stock or color combination, while in another batch, the card size may be different. VistaPrint’s software can group similar batches together efficiently.

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