Canva customer chief: ‘Head start’ on rivals still driving growth in crowded market

This is according to the platform’s chief customer officer Rob Giglio who says, “We’ve been looking to make design accessible to everyone for a very long time and I feel like we have a massive head start”.

That head start Giglio refers to concerns major competitors like Adobe and Figma. Adobe brought out a product called Adobe Spark in 2016, which was later replaced by Adobe Creative Cloud Express, an an all-in-one design, photo and video editing product in 2021, before rebranding as Adobe Express in 2022. Canva launched with its own mission to make designing easier in 2013.

The two continue to offer similar services, though they compete on features and price: Adobe Express is $9.99 per month for individuals, while Canva Pro comes in at $12.99. That price differential doesn’t seem to do Canva any harm – the platform recently posted a report of $2.5bn in annual revenue, soon after claiming that 95% of Fortune 500 companies are now using the platform, and boasting 220 million active users (Adobe Express has not published comparable metrics).

Giglio says that Canva’s goal to grow as much as possible is matched by its mission to “do as much good as possible” – the good being getting everyone designing.

Giglio (pictured above), arrived from marketing and sales software developer HubSpot in April of 2024. His career also includes a spell as senior-vice president at Adobe, where he was responsible for its Creative Cloud strategy. He’s called chief customer officer (rather than chief marketing officer) as “we liked the notion that I would be focused on paying customers,” he says.

At the time of Giglio’s arrival, Canva had 170 million monthly active users and was at a tipping point, ready to sell into businesses. This was a draw for Giglio, he says.

These customers are are a broad group, beyond design departments: creative professionals; marketers who are required to make a lot of content, including managing campaigns and social media; sales people who are creating presentations to sell their products; and HR workers who may need to build internal and external assets where content relating to training and events might need to be communicated.

These business users who aren’t designers have been identified as key professional groups while the brand targets growth. Promotional product videos would suggest that professional designers are less of a target group.

“In the past it has been hard to make compelling presentations and its been hard to scale marketing content to amplify your message, but we have a product that makes that super easy,” says Giglio.

Given the universality of the product’s appeal to business professionals, it’s being pushed in around 190 countries, he adds.

“You can pick almost any country in the world and there’s digital marketing and social media communication taking place. The platforms might change but that’s why Canva’s got a scalable integration with virtually any social media platform,” says Giglio. Integration is also a focus across other commonly used programs, such as Slack and Salesforce.

One route of customer acquisition is through the platform’s free-to-use tier. Users are bumped from there to a paid deal, which unlocks templates. There are also team deals which offer collaboration, and enterprise deals offering security and compliance features. Meanwhile, brand kits allow customers to standardize brand assets. “It’s a digital-led customer journey” says Giglio.

How Canva keeps its customers

But do customers stay? At the enterprise level, says Giglio, unique features aid client retention: once an enterprise subscription is bought, “we help them get more value out of the product by giving usage statistics back to the customer so they know who in their organization is using it. That’s not something that’s widely done. Our efforts are not around pricing tactics or things like that.”

As the products are developed further, Canva is looking at gaps in customers’ workflow to make improvements. Giglio describes this with a diagrammatic metaphor. The product in its current form is imagined as the center of a series of concentric rings. “We interview customers, observe them working and look at what they’re doing one concentric ring away from their main workflow. Then we look at the product and see how it can be developed to serve as a platform to cover their full end-to-end workflow,” Giglio says.

Increased capability through acquisition

AI integration is a big area of development for the platform. Some of these capabilities have been developed in-house, like Magic Studio, which brings together a host of AI tools. Others have arrived through acquisition. Kaleido, for example, allows users to remove backgrounds with ease. After its acquisition, this capability was folded into the Canva product.

Affinity, another acquisition, offers professional-standard design capabilities without the complexity of what Canva calls “traditional design tools.” And the platform launched image generation offering Dream Lab this year following the takeover of Leonardo.AI.

With “10 billion instances of the use of AI inside our product”, Giglio would claim this direction is a worthy investment. All of this development is driven by the ambition to “make these tools easier to use and more powerful,” he says.

The dream is simplifying an entire work-flow for those diverse groups of audiences – a marketer, for example, might take an asset and not have to worry about rescaling, resizing and thinking about aspect ratios. The Bulk Create feature inside Magic Studio means that outputs for different social media platforms can be created at the click of a button.

Is Adobe Express a threat?

Speaking on the brand’s market position, Giglio again sees Canva’s early arrival to the market as a key advantage. “I think we’re definitely leading in the innovation cycle because we have had a head start, we have a massive paying user base and we’re able to get better faster.”

By making designing easier for everyone, the company’s main “North Star” focus, Giglio says, “competitors, whether its Adobe, Figma or anybody” are just used for inspiration “if there are good ideas we see coming to market”.

Still, Giglio insists, the brand doesn’t feel threatened by those competitors, as “there’s functionality that’s built into Canva that’s way further down the path”. Rivals may have even had the effect of “raising awareness in the marketplace that accessible design is critically important.”

Giglio is keen to play down the importance that his Adobe Creative Cloud experience brings to growing Canva. Instead, he says, draws on career-long and “industry-wide” experience which includes senior roles at other companies like DocuSign and HubSpot.