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“Anything that's got my name on it, I open, because you never know

what it will be," comments one focus group participant in a recent study of

direct mail trends commissioned by the Graphic Arts Marketing Information

Service (GAMIS) of PIA.



In the late 1800s, Richard W. Sears, a railroad clerk in North Redmond, Minnesota, acquired an abandoned case of pocket watches. Using his list of other railroad clerks throughout the Midwest, he marketed his watches with great success. Sears recognized immediately that an entrepreneur with a list of accurate names and addresses, and a stock of quality merchandise, no longer needed a store. He only needed a good message delivery vehicle and first-rate customer service. And so was born an American institution, one of the first and most successful direct marketing stories of all time: Sears Roebuck. The business grew to be the largest direct mail order company in the world. It wasn't until 1931 that its retail store sales surpassed mail order sales. And many, many more mail order business success stories followed. In fact, because distances between suppliers and consumers throughout the newly forming territories were so vast, and the increasing variety of merchandise being produced was in such demand, mail order opportunities seemed endless. A robust network of railroads connected countless small towns and cities, many without stores. And each community, no matter how small, was served by the U.S. Postal Service, a system established by the farsighted authors of the Constitution of the United States in 1787 to help knit the young nation together.



“Today, the U.S. boasts a $1.5 trillion market for direct marketers. This is without a doubt the largest and richest single market in the world and growing at an unprecedented 8.6% per year. With over 10,000 different catalogs alone being mailed in the U.S., there is a niche for...