Since 1998, we have purchased five companies in the lettershop/fulfillment industry.

What is a lettershop? Let’s assume you are a bank that offers a credit card and you want to get new customers signed up. You want lists of people who subscribe to newspapers and magazines in a specific geographic area and you want to mail one million pieces of direct mail to solicit new credit card customers. To do this, you would go to a lettershop that has the equipment to personalize the one million credit card applications, mechanically insert them into envelopes (possibly with a letter or a brochure from you, the bank, as to why potential customers should get your credit card), and bundle and sort all that mail into a special sequence in order to get a discount from the post office on the mailing. That’s what a lettershop does.

What is a fulfillment company? Let’s say you sell a product online or through a print catalog. You have hundreds of customers daily who buy from you, and your product offering consists of hundreds of different goods in different sizes and different colors. Since you don’t have the space or manpower to do the shipping yourself, you turn to a fulfillment company. The fulfillment company will house your products and take care of packing and shipping. You download to a FTP site the orders you received from customers on the previous day, and the fulfillment company ships the products out to your customers for you via your desired shipping method (post office, courier). You can even go online to see your inventory at the fulfillment company.

The companies we have acquired in this industry operate facilities in the range of 12,000 square feet to 65,000 square feet. We bring our expertise in direct mail and Internet marketing to further build the businesses we acquire.

The companies in the Lombardi Direct Marketing Inc. group are under the leadership of Carlo Cucullo.