Mail outs

The trouble with mail outs is that our house is always in a mess when we are doing them.

Dozens of boxes of invitations plus pre-printed envelopes and Royal mail plastic trays (always filthy). Sending out up to 12,000 invitations in a single mail out is hard work and though often we bring in outside help, the whole thing can take up to a week and that is excluding all the time that goes into artowrking the invites.

We get to watch a lot of television while we are doing this and of course foreign movies with subtitles are no go – unless in French.

We have been doing these mail outs since 1981 and they have become a feature of our lives.  We have to arrange holidays around them and often they mean we are stuck in the house for days on end.

Keeping the 60,000 strong mailing list up to scratch is a full time occupation.   As the Dazzle mailing list ages alongside us we are getting morbidly more and more returns marked “deceased” though in these days of so-called recession when fewer people are moving house, the number of updates we have to make is not so great.

We look back at the early days when we wrote out all the invitations by hand (that shows you how we have come on) until arts and crafts consultant Gerri Morris berated us for our unimpressive lack of efficiency.

So we then commissioned a special mailing programme from a University professor in North Wales who came up with a then revoltionary innovative programme, just for us.   Sadly when he died, we found out that he had incorporated so many security measures into it that our replacement IT geek could not access the database, other than superficially, in order to update its facility.

Many on the mailing list have been on it since 1980 and now there children and grandchildren are also included and buying from us.

Guess that Dazzle is all about its mailing list, so just as well we have so many security measures in place.  Reckon Fort Knox would be easier to break into.