AN IMPORTANT REMINDER TO SUBMIT YOUR PROXY TO VOTE AT OUR ANNUAL MEETING OF STOCKHOLDERS ON MAY 15, 2019
Shutterfly’s Independent Directors Urge You to Vote FOR Our Proposal to Amend Our 2015 Equity Incentive Plan
May 7, 2019
Dear Fellow Shutterfly Stockholder:
We are writing to ask for your critical support for the agenda items for the upcoming 2019 Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Shutterfly, Inc. Our Board of Directors (the “Board”) unanimously recommends that you vote FOR all proposals, but would like to draw your attention to our proposal to amend the 2015 Equity Incentive Plan (the “Amendment”).
If approved by stockholders, the Amendment would authorize an additional 1,000,000 shares of common stock, plus any shares remaining under the 2015 Equity Incentive Plan, for grant to our named executive officers and other employees. The amount of additional shares authorized by the Amendment would represent approximately 2.9% of the total shares of common stock outstanding as of the record date.
The Board and the Compensation and Leadership Development Committee of the Board (the “Committee”) have been fully engaged and diligent in determining the number of shares requested, taking into account a number of relevant factors, including striking a balance between the potential dilutive effect of equity awards and the ability to attract, retain, and reward employees, anticipating the hiring of a new Shutterfly Chief Executive Officer and a new Lifetouch President, the addition of Lifetouch employees, and the company’s current stock price.
Linking Compensation with Performance
In 2019, we shared that our going-forward strategy would focus around three key priorities:
| 1. | driving growth in all three of our segments; |
| 2. | delivering substantial cost and revenue synergies from our acquisition of Lifetouch; and |
| 3. | returning capital to stockholders; |
As the first step of our long-term strategy, for the Shutterfly Consumer segment, we will continue to build on our success in mobile, in category and range expansion, and in the reacceleration of Personalized Gifts and Home Décor while making improvement in our prints and our holiday cards offering, supported by marketing and promotional investments. For the Lifetouch segment, we aim to drive account growth in schools and preschools and improve our participation rate through awareness supported bydirect-to-consumer communications. In the SBS segment, we will continue to focus on serving our existing large customers and landing large new customers.
We officially welcomed Lifetouch to Shutterfly on April 2, 2018 and are pleased with the performance of the business. We got off to a strong start on integration in the fourth quarter of 2018, testing a number of marketing initiatives for our multi-year plans around revenue synergies. In addition, we developed a robust plan for cost synergies centered around establishing a common manufacturing platform that will let us offer faster delivery, higher quality, and a broader selection to our customers, as well as generating significant cost savings.