IWCO Direct Investing in Its Production Platform, Rationalizing Assets

CHANHASSEN, MN—March 23, 2012—IWCO Direct, a leading national provider of direct marketing solutions, will invest $4 million to “reset” its production platform during the next 60-120 days. This move is driven by opportunities presented with the company’s recent $13-million purchase of high-speed equipment from DGI Services, combined with responding to market strategy shifts within the financial services and insurance sectors.

Certain customer service and production functions will be relocated to its facilities in Chanhassen, MN, and Hamburg, PA, which will reduce the operation’s cost structure and provide greater postal benefits for customers. Once the reset is complete, IWCO Direct will be positioned to produce up to 385 million direct mail packages per month, an increase of nearly 30 percent.

In addition, the company will close its facility in Downey, CA, during the next 60-120 days. The approximately 250 affected employees will be provided pay and benefits continuity, outplacement support and the opportunity to relocate to Chanhassen and Hamburg, where the company will look to fill approximately 100 positions. IWCO Direct will relocate equipment from the Downey facility to its Minnesota and Pennsylvania facilities.

“Resetting our production platform with facility consolidations and the higher speed equipment we recently acquired allows us to strategically incorporate greater efficiencies,” said Jim Andersen, IWCO Direct CEO. “This will result in additional advantages for our customers, such as better net cost from enhanced postal solutions.”

As part of its reset plan, IWCO Direct will consolidate leaseholds to take advantage of available space in Hamburg and a 150,000-sq.-ft. facility adjacent to its Chanhassen headquarters.

The company currently leases three facilities in Warminster, PA, but as a result of this strategic plan, production and fulfillment services will no longer be conducted there. Instead, two facility leases will be allowed to expire as IWCO Direct relocates the customer service and recovery testing operations of Mail-Gard, its critical communications recovery division, to one facility. The Warminster production and fulfillment services will be shifted to the Hamburg and Chanhassen facilities. With this change, the company will be better positioned to expand the Mail-Gard offering reflecting increased space and production capacity at these two locations.

About IWCO Direct
IWCO Direct, one of the nation's largest providers of direct marketing solutions, has served the needs of North American companies for more than 40 years. IWCO Direct helps its customers acquire, retain and engage customers and members through highly personalized paper-based and digital marketing programs. The company provides direct marketing like no one else by seamlessly supplying all design, production, mailing and management services in an integrated “total package” supply chain solution through operations in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. IWCO Direct pioneered commingling and continues to provide its customers with dramatic postage savings and faster time to market through its proprietary IWCO P.O.S.T. (Postal Optimization Strategy and Technologies) and RideShare™ commingling and logistics management programs, as well as its automated marketing program platform, proprietary data services and Mail-Gard critical communications recovery services.

Source: IWCO.