Humble beginnings. John Jacobs and his wife Irene, with a handful of their friends, began a small mimeograph service in the basement of a clothing store in Manchester, New Hampshire, back in 1952.
They eventually expanded their small business to stuffing envelopes, folding and adding inserts to local newspapers. Eventually, it led to addressing outbound mailers for some local businesses that wanted to advertise using US mail. Mail was on the rise, and they took advantage of every paper-manipulating machine they could get their hands on to make it all a bit easier. By the end of the 50’s, they were moving ton’s of ad-mail from concept to press, to the Postal Service.
The postal service had no automation, no zip codes until years later, and mail was handled almost entirely by hand.
The “addressograph” machine, originally invented in the late 1800s, was becoming a popular medium for adding uniform addresses to US mail, so they started buying up used machines from a large insurance company, and automation sprang to life.
Zip codes came about in 1963, it was cutting-edge at the time. Mailways was on the ground floor with the new “Zone Improvement Program” and began to take advantage of mail discounts using the new zip-code sorting.
With television, radio and other forms of media being far too expensive for most, the US mail swiftly became the best way to reach a large audience with something people can see and feel. Mailways grew, expanded and continued to innovate – even building its own folding equipment to better handle newspaper and tabloid style mail.
Our first computer was a second-generation Honeywell 115. The punch card eventually replaced the tons (literally millions) of Addressograph plates which could then produce computer generated labels for the first time and what was then, high speed. It needed a special room with a fake floor, massive cooling equipment and staffed 24/7 to make it all work. The Honeywell proved a giant boost to mail production using paper labels called “Cheshire” which were cut and glued to mail pieces after being sorted for the best possible rates for its customers. (Thwarting high postage has been a life-long mission and tradition)
Mailways was one of the first to introduce detached card mailings, which were originally for product samples that didn’t have space for a mailing label, delivered at a low cost by the US Postal Service. Their first round of this was for a new freeze-dried soup product from a well- known Boston company that wanted everyone in their immediate area to get a free sample of soup in their mailbox. That expanded to a coffee company, and other “safe through the mail” food items soon followed.
One of the other innovations was the creation of a universal mailing list of every occupied home in New England. This began by simply picking a town and driving every street writing down addresses. Mailways literally had an army of people building lists through the 60’s and early 70’s, amassing about 4 million addresses – which it began to market to larger retailers wanting to “carpet bomb” larger areas. The lists were kept on computer punch cards as it was the only way the US Postal Service could update them – this also led to sequencing mail as the update took place by the actual letter carrier on his or her route. ( walk-sequenced discounts came many years later)
Mailways branched into magazine subscription fulfillment – this was still about 15 years before the advent of the desktop computer – so all things computer were important to the mail industry and to Mailways and the postal service. Outsourcing subscription fulfillment was really the only choice publishers had without its own large infrastructure. Yankee Magazine was one of our first titles and after a couple of successful years, the magazine did one of the first offers for gift subscriptions right around the holidays and Mailways was swamped overnight with hundreds of thousands of subscription requests – it took weeks to input all the data and Yankee has to find more paper for its presses to cover the influx of new subscribers – it was a huge success.
Mailways heavily embraced its computerization with our own development teams, programmers, systems analysts, and about 100 data entry people housed in a very large brick mill warehouse which Mailways eventually purchased from its owner. Our founder used reclaimed rainwater to cool the growing computer systems in an elaborate, yet functional air conditioning system.
Times changed, and mail automation, computer technology, software and the US Postal Service were swiftly evolving into a more efficient and information-driven network. Mailways was very much part of the early rule-making and instrumental in how data was updated between the USPS it’s users of its bulk-mail services, discounts, and network. Long before drop shipping and sectional centers. Some of these programs are very much in use today between the USPS and the mail industry.
Our business has never changed hands and remains a small, but powerful family business on its 3rd generation. We’re the overhead few larger printing companies, insurance companies and other users of the US mail system don’t want to maintain in-house while leaning on our extensive US Mail prowess. We’ve always been a good fit and when that takes a little sandpaper around the edges, we get to work.