About

Laura Hutchinson | Founder, CCI Strategy Lab

I built CCI Strategy Lab on experience from both sides of the work: owning corporate strategy, product development, and marketing, and then building the insights and strategy function that became central to how a global company set its direction.

The focus throughout has been the same: turning customer and market understanding into the decisions that move the business forward.

The Path Here

I have always been drawn to unfamiliar territory — different industries, different kinds of problems, a curiosity about how different people see the world. That instinct shaped my career and shapes how I work today.

It started early — Public Policy and Russian at Duke, then Moscow for investment banking during a period of major economic transformation. It was a deliberate choice to step into something completely new. After Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and management consulting, I shifted to the operational side.

At Fidelity, I was inside a startup within a Fortune 100 company, figuring out which parts of a premium platform could serve a broader market. At Circles, a PE-backed company whose core product had reached its growth ceiling, I was finding the next phase of growth — new products, new audiences, new ways to use what the company already did well.

And then the role that brought it all together: twelve years building a global insights and strategy function at Vistaprint, called CCI.

Building CCI

Vistaprint was a company in constant evolution — as part of the Cimpress portfolio, I worked across multiple businesses, country markets, and companies at very different stages of growth.

My career before Vistaprint was spent on the business side — as someone who relied on research and knew firsthand what made it valuable and what made it ignored. When I had the opportunity to build the insights function at Vistaprint, that experience shaped everything. The goal was never to create a team that produced research and handed it over. It was to build something that operated at the intersection of customer truth and business strategy.

We shaped the strategic agenda ourselves, identifying what the company needed to understand before anyone asked. This was not an insights function that only measured what had already happened — it was one that shaped where the company was going. And we became the team leadership turned to with its hardest questions:

  • Redefining who the company was serving

  • Shaping the brand across global markets

  • Informing what to build and where to invest

  • Building direct, ongoing connections between the organization and its customers

What those years gave me is something I could not have built any other way: the experience of doing this work from the inside, through complexity, and across different stages of a company's evolution. That is what I bring to every engagement now. Not a methodology I will apply to your business, but a perspective shaped by having lived inside the kind of challenges you are navigating.

CCI Strategy Lab

CCI Strategy Lab connects customer understanding to business strategy — and stays through the human work of turning insight into action.

There is a reason I kept the name CCI. What started as Customer and Competitive Insights became shorthand for two things: a way of working — collaborative, rigorous, customer-centered — and a team trusted with the questions that shaped company direction. CCI Strategy Lab carries it forward.

The 'Lab' reflects how I work — always iterating, comfortable with ambiguity, and staying curious about what the next question should be. I thrive in the human complexity of helping organizations move — the moments where the path forward isn't visible yet and the work is building the picture from the ground up. That curiosity is what started my career, and it is what drives every engagement now.