Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

What would you do if your largest customer asked you to increase your current capacity to be able to mail up to five million books a month?

Well, if you are Ann Staup, Owner of Knoxville’s Direct Mail Services, you plan for the future and the ability to mail as many as eight million books a month. That means you build a new 46,000-square-foot facility in addition to the company’s existing 34,000-square-foot facility off Middlebrook Pike.

“We focus on being ahead of the curve,” Staup explains.

That’s a long way from the 3,500-square-foot facility that Ann and Mike, her late husband, inherited when they acquired Hensley Mailing Service in 1987. Five years later, the business relocated to its brand new building at 5911 Weisbrook Lane. The latest building, which will open in the Spring of 2025, is located in the Pleasant Ridge Industrial Park.

We sat down with her to learn about the company, the 37 years since the Staups purchased it, and how the business of mailing things for others has changed over the years.

“My husband and I always wanted to own a business,” Staup told us. At the time that they purchased Hensley Mailing Service, the couple had explored a variety of opportunities – from video rentals to pest control and a convenience store. They settled on the mailing service sector.

The straight-talking owner was candid in her observations.

“Our vision for the company was automation, automation, automation,” Staup told us. “What sets us apart is our technology.”

You might think it is a matter of simply attaching a mailing label to an item, affixing postage, and delivering it to the post office, but you would be wrong. There’s much more involved, as we learned from our interview with Staup and a tour of the existing facility.

Over the years, the company has added a variety of capabilities and has nine operating lines for its regular work with another held in case one goes down. It is all part of what might be described as a Direct Mail Services backup plan when the inevitable might happen.

In 2005, the company added poly bagging, a simple process where a printed item or items are wrapped in U.S. Postal Service (USPS)-approved film, trimmed and heated to shrink the bag, and labeled for mailing. Direct Mail Service’s book client decided that the poly film would serve as a protective wrap for the book through USPS processing.

In 2014, Direct Mail Services received certification as a Full Service Intelligent Mail Barcode Vendor. The company is also a certified Seamless vendor which automates the verification process, streamlining entry verifications. This certification is held by a limited number of mail processors.

They are also one of a limited number of companies in East Tennessee that offers comingling of first-class presorted letters or flats, meaning it combines various business’s daily mail, performing National Change of Address (NCOA) processing and adding an Intelligent Mail Barcode while sorting the mail by zip code to receive postage discounts and expediting mail delivery.

Need a custom mailing list for any geographic area in the entire U.S. – business, consumer, or occupant data for carrier route mailings? Direct Mail Services has you covered. The company can help you craft a targeted mailing list utilizing specific criteria such as lifestyle, income, age, interests, or geographic location.

Need your mailing list updated? Direct Mail Services offers a data cleansing option to de-duplicate addresses and identify undeliverable addresses. The company also can match the names and addresses in the list against the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address (NCOALink) database to get the current addresses of businesses, individuals, and families who have moved in the last 48 months.

Why are those capabilities so important? Direct Mail Services secures the lowest possible postage rates for its customers, saving them money and also taking so much of the ever-increasing complexity off of them.

So, you might ask the identity of the client that asked Direct Mail Services to have the capacity to mail up to five million books a month. It would be Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a business relationship that dates back to 1996, Since then, the company has mailed more than 200 million books to children from birth to age five.

Staup’s daughter, son-in-law, and grandson moved back after Mike’s death in 2013 to join Direct Mail Services. “We are very much a family-oriented business,” she says. “Owning this company is a blessing,” but later adds, “It’s not cheap to get into the direct mail business.”

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