What's so hard about mailing SWAG?

When I initially volunteered to manage sending out Blitz.Js's stickers to folks who signed up through a form on their website, I thought it was going to be easy peasy!

Brandon (the creator of Blitz.JS) asked for my address so he could have Sticker Mule send me the stickers directly and said just keep track of your expenses and I'll reimburse you monthly. Brandon placed an airtable form on Blitz's website to collect names and addresses of folks who wanted free stickers. Once the stickers arrived over 400 people had signed up for free stickers.

It was time to get to work! It was easy up until this point. Now things were in my hands to get these stickers out the door.

I decided to order blank address label stickers to be used for return labels and an envelope moistener to seal the envelopes. I already had a large box of envelopes from Costco so I planned to start using those.

While I waited on the return labels to arrive, I started addressing the envelopes by hand. Immediately I recognized a major pain point....addressing envelopes to folks who are from over 30 different countries. Each country has a slightly different address format making it difficult to just take the form data verbatim and put it on the envelope. (Note we collected each address part individually in the form: address line 1, address line 2, city, state/region, postal code, country).

To be a bit more efficient I filtered the addresses by country, looked up that country's address format, and addressed all of those envelopes in a batch. This did help speed things up, but after completing the first 15 countries I realized there were folks who signed up early on whose country I hadn't gotten to yet. So to be fair, I started addressing based on date of sign-up. I found a website that has nearly every country's address format so that has helped speed it up when going by sign-up date and not country.

The second major issue I ran into was the day I was ready to mail out the first 150 envelopes, (~75 in the US and ~75 international) I went to my local post office to get stamps. I asked for 140 US forever stamps and 400 international stamps. The guy looked at me dumfounded and replied "We don't have any international stamps".

Me: "Ummm...what?"

Sidenote: International Stamps are currently $1.20. US domestic stamps are $0.55.

Me: "Ok...well I guess I could put two US forever stamps on plus a 10 cent stamp, right?"

Mail Staff: "Yes, you could do that. Let me see how many 10-cent stamps we have."

He grabs a 1 inch binder that has stamps organized in clear dividers. He kindly lets me know that they have a whopping sixteen 10-cent stamps available. I was frazzled. I know I have over 300 folks in the sticker queue that are from countries outside of the US. And I can mail them to 16 right now!

I left with the sixteen 10-cent stamps and the US forever stamps and mailed out as many as a I could that day. Thankfully, through USPS.com international stamps can be ordered in bulk and so I ordered 400 and they arrived about 6 days later.

Ever since, things have been fairly smooth sailing. I have a system down to get the envelopes addressed, stamp on, stickers in, and envelope sealed. I'm up to getting about 100 envelopes out every 3 days!

Can you imagine if a SAAS founder undertook this project, they'd likely invest 30+ hours to mail out stickers to 400 people? That's why I'm starting Mail My SWAG (https://mailmyswag.com). SAAS founders should spend their time on other aspects of the business, not addressing envelopes.

There are a couple of ways I think I can get it up to nearly 200 envelopes/hr for my next Mail My SWAG project:

1. The intake form will allow the person to enter their address exactly how they'd write it on an envelope. This way I can copy and paste it into a label template, print them off, and put them on the envelope. No more looking up the country's format or handwriting the addressees' info.

2. Assembly line. Between my husband and I, we're putting our chemical engineering process hats on and have a more automated system mapped out. For each "run", we'll first get all of the return labels and address labels into the template and printed off. Then we'll work side by side. One person puts the return and address labels and stamp on. The other person puts the stickers in the envelope and seals it.

3. For quality assurance, we'll do a review of the completed envelopes against our address database and mark them as mailed so we ensure we don't miss anyone.

If we get this underway, we have a few more fun ideas to personalize the envelope to the company we're working with. I'm sure we'll find even more ways to automate the process too.

Stay tuned! More coming soon how many testimonials Blitz.JS has gotten from their form intake!