History

Hays International Mailing Services Inc. acquired the state of the art lettershop facility formally owned by Alaniz & Sons on Commerce Parkway in Hays, Kansas, April of 1994. Capital improvements for the plant, equipment, and an employee training program were made. The 40,000 square foot building was leased from Heart of America Development Corporation, which also provided financing for equipment.

Owner of Hays International Mailing Services, Larry Tucker, also owns a direct mail cooperative advertising business named Larry Tucker Inc., or Supermarket of Savings. Supermarket of Savings provides national advertisers (such as Sears, Gerber, and Sesame Street Magazine) with personally addressed envelopes containing their material, for specially targeted households. From 1994 through 1996 the bulk of business handled by Hays International Mailing Services was generated by Supermarket of Savings.

During 1997 there was a tremendous period of growth. Decisions were made to decrease dependency on Supermarket of Savings as sole customer, and to offer the services of the lettershop to other companies, thus expanding and diversifying the customer base, and increasing a steady flow of work through the plant. The effort was successful with new customers.

In order to meet the new customers' requirements, Hays International Mailing Services has and continues to acquire additional machinery and equipment, associated required electric rewiring, and reconfigure the plant to make room for the equipment. The use of storage space of production equipment caused the need to acquire additional warehouse space as well.

Product
Hays International Mailing Services is a one-stop resource for the nation's mail processing industry, offering a comprehensive range of services including inserting and addressing with high-speed, high quality personalization capabilities.

Located in Hays, Kansas, the geographic center of the country, this strategically located facility is already the largest 28-station lettershop in the world, with even further expansion in the works.

With almost 100,000 sq. ft. of available space, the plant processes more than 100 million mailing packages and two billion inserts a year. With a U.S. Post Office on site and ample loading platforms only minutes from major Interstate highways, Hays International can complete complex, multi-variety mailings in just a matter of days.

Hays International has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a Special Procedures and Classification called "Optional Procedure." The Postal Service accepts the computer print-outs submitted with each day's mailing without the normal weight verifying of every mailing skid or requiring any additional inspection or verification, based on Hays passing rigid auditing procedures over the past several years.

Hays International Mailing Services is a lettershop serving the direct mail industry. Printed material and special product samples are received by customers for DP/Presorting, machine addressing, collation, insertion into envelopes, sortation by postal code, and shipment to bulk mailing centers of the United States Postal Service. Customers select targeted direct mail households located anywhere in the United States and Canada, and provide mailing lists that are presorted on magnetic tape for use by Hays International Mailing Services' addressing machines.

Over ninety million envelopes containing up to 28 inserts are mailed each year. Annual postage of over $18,000,000 is processed through the Hays Post Office making Hays International Mailing Services the largest revenue provider, and the local Post Office one of the larger revenue centers in the Central Plains District and Midwest Area of the United States Postal Service.

On a typical 7.5 million piece program, approximately 750 skids of material are received (around 40 truckloads), and stored in one of three warehouses (a 20,000 sq. ft. area in the Hays International Mailing Services plant, 30,000 sq. ft. warehouse at Walker, and a 15,000 sq. ft. warehouse in Hays). Cardboard is bailed and sold to a recycler (nearly 20 tons per month), and nearly 120 tons of outdated or unused advertisements are sold or given to a recycler each year. There are 170 employees who live in the Hays and surrounding area communities who work three shifts to produce the products.

Company Market Area
Customers using Hays International Mailing Services are located across the United States. Printers and data listing businesses, the major suppliers of the direct mail industry, are also located nationally and in Canada. Mail is distributed throughout the United States, Canada and other countries to customer select households.