About

Laura Hutchinson | Founder, CCI Strategy Lab

I built CCI Strategy Lab after a career building growth strategies, developing products, and leading market entry — and then creating the insights and strategy function that became central to how a global company set its direction.

The focus throughout: turning customer and market understanding into the decisions that move the business forward. That experience shaped everything about how CCI Strategy Lab works.

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 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…

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.

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.

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 that leadership brought their hardest questions to:

  • Redefining who the company was serving

  • Shaping the brand across global markets

  • Informing what to build and where to invest

  • Finding innovative ways to bring customers directly into the conversation 

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 real 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

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

The "Lab" reflects something fundamental about how I work — always testing, iterating, staying curious about what the next question should be. That curiosity is what started my career, and it is what drives every engagement now.