BABS International: Case Study

Direct Mail Systems of Bristol is a fast growing direct mail and fulfilment house with a
turnover of £1 million plus. It serves mainly business-to-business customers, and has
cornered a profitable niche market supporting European and rest-of-the-world distribution for a number of prestige US clients in the semi-conductor industry.
Its core business is more fulfilment than direct mail at present, says General Manager Adam Rayner, and it was for this reason that the company recently decided on a
DocuMail feeding/inserting system from BABS International. Their set-up comprises a Plockmatic 45 DocuMail inserter/sealer, a Plockmatic 46 booklet feeder and a Plockmatic 310 A3 collator. Although DMS regularly use it to accomplish all kinds of combination mailings involving newsletters and magazines, they’ve found it most useful for their fulfilment work.
Adam Rayner explains: ‘One of the advantages of the DocuMail is that you don’t have to run a full job – you can feed it by hand. People can just pick three items and chuck them on; then it puts them into the envelope and off they go through the machine. This flexibility was our main reason for buying’.
He adds: ‘As a relatively small mailing house, we didn’t want to lay out hundreds of
thousands of pounds on a mailing machine that would need a huge set-up time and wouldn’t be effective for small runs of mailshots. We wanted something that would give us a variety of applications and was reasonably priced compared to other machines on the market – and that’s
what we’ve got’.
Direct Mail Systems are always setting new challenges for their DocuMail combination. Recently, it coped with a 30,000 mail-out in C5 windowed envelopes. ‘This included a folded letter, which we ran through the collator, a membership card, which we put on the booklet feeder, and four cards, which we dropped on by hand. It was quite a package, but the machine came up trumps’, says Adam.