Back in April, Dennis Fish at the ICS Corporation invited me for a tour of his direct mail production facility just outside of Philadelphia.

Last week, I finally took him up on it.

If you’ve ever wondered how millions of loan offers end up in mailboxes every week, this is where the magic happens.

Let’s set the scene.

ICS runs a 450,000 square foot operation. To me, it looked 3X larger than my local Costco, filled not with shoppers but with giant rolls of paper, conveyor belts, and machines that rarely sleep.

They’re currently running 24 hours a day, six days a week, and sometimes seven when demand spikes. Four million pieces of mail move through the building every single day.

The first thing that hits you is the scale. (And then after that was the decibel level. Near the largest machines, we had to shout to hear each other!)

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You walk past five-foot-tall, 900-pound rolls of paper—each one holding up to 85,000 loan letters. These rolls feed into high-speed printers that churn out 14,000 pieces an hour. The paper moves from printing to cutting to folding to envelope stuffing, all in one continuous ballet of machines and people. There’s a relentless rhythm to it. Loud, fast, and precise.

But here’s what surprised me: for all the automation, the human element is everywhere.

At the end of every production line, someone is checking—by eye and by hand—that every name, address, and barcode lines up perfectly in the envelope window. If it doesn’t, USPS won’t mail it. I counted at least 50 to 100 people on the floor, each one part of a choreography that keeps the mail moving and the errors out.

ICS doesn’t just print letters and stuff envelopes.

They also pre-sort mail by destination, load it onto their own trucks, and drive it all the way to cities like Houston, bypassing local post offices entirely (they do that do get better postage rates and speed up the timeline from printer to in-home).

So it’s a logistics operation as much as a print shop.

The capital investment is real. Some of the machines cost over $2 million each, and I learned some vendors provide financing (3rd party financing is an option, too).

Dennis and team are just as focused on their customers’ experience as they are with printing perfect letters and envelopes.

Before the tour, ICS asked me for a few personal details—where I went to school, where I live, hobbies, things like that. I assumed it was for a “get to know each other” game we’d do during lunch.

They had other plans.

When I arrived, I found custom welcome mats with my name, the Columbia logo, my Zodiac signs, and a few others, right there in the hallway. It’s a small thing, but it tells you a lot about their attention to detail.

Last year, consumer lenders sent ~6 billion pieces of mail. About 1.2 billion of those pieces come from ICS’ facility in Philadelphia.

Closing Thoughts

One of the benefits of walking the floor was that I got to see who was sending direct mail letters.

For confidentially reasons, I can’t share names of brands or offers or anything like that.

But what did stand out was that there was a good mix of established, household name lenders, and some fintechs I had never heard of before.

It seemed to me like there are consumer lenders out there quietly building scale businesses totally under the radar. They might not be on Google, Facebook, or Credit Karma.

But they are in the mail.

Because they can dial in the audience, control the creative and messaging 100%, and scale without permission from anyone else once they find something that works.

Direct mail has been a steady or perhaps slowly declining marketing channel in consumer lending.

With how competitive the affiliate, paid social, and paid search channels are getting these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Direct Mail category started growing again.

Layer in what’s possible here with AI, and a full-blown renaissance isn’t out of the question.

To Learn More

To learn more about direct mail, check out the following resources:

• Industry overview (from The Free Toaster Newsletter)

• Direct Mail Deep Dive (from The Free Toaster Podcast)

And if you want to chat with the ICS team, you can contact Dennis Fish at [email protected].

Full Disclosure: I am not affiliated with ICS and they did not pay me to write this. But, before they knew I was going to write this piece, they did butter me up with 3 ICS golf balls, an IM Group hat, an ICS golf sweater, and some excellent mints. A little swag never hurts.

Coming Soon: Direct Mail Meetup

Want to meet other folks in the consumer lending industry who are interested in building world class direct mail programs?

In Q1, Nick and I plan to host a dinner to create a networking opportunity for folks in the space (including folks from the lending & DM production side).

To receive more information about that meetup (location: likely NYC), please reply to this email with “DM meetup” and we’ll keep you in the loop.

About Us

Welcome to The Free Toaster! The newsletter for marketing pros at fintechs, banks, and lenders.

Inspired by the free toasters banks used to give to each new customer, we’re here to help you acquire more customers at scale. We deliver fresh news, data, and insights to help you acquire more customers, minus the breadcrumbs.

Want to follow the authors on social media?

Carlos Caro is the founder of NMG, an agency that helps lenders build affiliate programs.

Nick Madrid is the co-founder of Uncovered Media and a co-founder of Ghostmode (a media company that builds Newsletters, Podcasts, and communities in high-value B2B niches).