Is time right for bulk-mail pictorial permits?

The following is an article by Bill McAllister, Washington Correspondent for Linns Stamps. This article appears with the permission of the author and publisher.

If the photo-stamp experiment is not revived, Vermont stamp collector John A. Lutz thinks his idea for a form of personalized postage could be a likely replacement, especially for bulk mailers.

The photo-stamp project, which was operated experimentally by Stamps.com of Los Angeles, ended Sept. 30 after seven weeks. The United States Postal Service is evaluating the program. For three decades, Lutz, publisher of a line of high-priced stamp albums, has been championing the use of pictorial bulk-mail permits.

The pictorials are an approved way of transforming the drab bulk-mail imprints that are required on mass mailings into colorful individualized postal labels.

The colorful permits have been legal since 1995, but Lutz said relatively few mailers know about them, in. part because the Postal Service never publicized they were being used.

Unlike photo-stamps, which were tripped up by the unsavory figures that got by the censors and appeared as stamp subjects, there is no approval process for adding a picture to a bulk-mail permit.

Just place it to the left of the permit information, says the Postal Service's Domestic Mail Manual.

The rules require the design extend "no further than 4'h inches to the left of the right edge [of the mail-piece] and 1½ inches below the top edge?

That seems easy enough, and Lutz promises that the permits should boost response rates to mailings. It is still a mystery to me why any user with a USPS permit does not make use of this simple and obvious way to improve the appearance and increase the interest in their mailing," says Lutz.

That's the same claim that direct-mail specialists make about bulk mail that carries a postage stamp. The presence of a stamp on a bulk-mail piece will draw as much as a 30 percent higher response rate over letters that bear only an imprint, mailers say.

Perhaps the confusion is caused by the language of postal regulation PO40.4.2f, which states: "Such designs must not resemble or imitate a postage meter imprint, postage stamp, postcard postage, or other method Of postal payment and must not include the words, symbols or designs used by the USPS to identify a class of mail, rate of postage or level of service unless such elements are correctly used under the applicable standards for the mail-piece on which they appear and the corresponding postage and fees have been paid."

Nine years after the regulation was issued, Lutz says he believes that fewer than 100 mailers nationwide are using the pictorial permits.

Many stamp collectors know the permits through mailings from the American Philatelic Society. It has used four different pictorial permits to promote its new headquarters in an old match factory in Bellefonte, Pa.

Last year's dues-renewal notice sent to 48,000 APS members carried one of the distinctive pictorial permits, which were printed by Lutz.

A number of colleges and universities have also used the pictorials, including some on their presorted first-class mailings.

Why so few businesses have moved toward the personalized label puzzles Lutz.

"I have had many contacts, but the interest stalls when the client makes it more complicated than what it is," he said. "Also, major mailers always ask, 'Who is using it?' Lutz, who sells the printed labels through Vermont Stamp, a printing business in Hartford, VT, believes that a 'critical Upping point," he said, is conning in the next few years, after a few major mass mailers adopt the practice. The interest that photo-stamps has generated in personalized stamps will help.

Lutz pioneered the pictorial bulk postage imprint, issuing the first one in 1972 in a mass mailing to Vermont real estate brokers. The idea was frontage news in Llnn's that year, but the concept didn't catch on despite the crisp pen-andink drawings of a covered bridge that Lutz used on his first permit.

After three such mailings, including one to stamp collectors and a memorial imprint for Vermont native Calvin Coolidge, the newly created U.S. Postal Service banned Lutz's colorful permits.

Postal officials decided they did not meet the existing permit rules.

The Postal Service did not want to have to review the designs, and it feared that the bulk mail "would be treated as frst-class mail," Lutz said.

Lutz wanted to create a stamplike image for mailings for his stamp album business.

"I wanted the saving of [bulk] permit mailings but knew that stamp collectors would not be happy with mailings franked with printed permits," he said. "So I decided to add an illustration to make it look more stamplike."

He used a drawing of a covered bridge, much like the one in the town of Quechee, Vt., where he lived.

When Lutz created the first permits, he said, "I knew that adding the illustration to the permit was bending the rules, but I used my usual approach of taking action instead of waiting for approval. Those mailings went though without incident."

At the time, Lutz said he was not aware of any similar items from other countries apart from the ads allowed on postage meter imprints.

After his mailings, Lutz said he learned of other examples in the United States, and he has included some in a stamp album he created for his early imprints.

Lutz continued to print imprints after the 1972 ban on their usage, but he placed his permits inside other envelopes with the required, but blank, permit markings.

In 1995, Lutz said he was surprised by the Postal Service's decision to allow permits. When I explored how this had come about, I learned that it had happened because the parent company of Moore Business Forms had successfully lobbied the Postal Service to add this provision,"Today, Vermont Stamp, a firm Lutz calls his "hobby business," has standing orders from 340 collectors for examples of every pictorial permit he creates. He typically sells these in strips of three or strips of five, much like strips of U.S. plate-number-coil stamps. Laser-printed labels from panes are sold in blocks of four for 75e.

Lutz divides the permits into three categories: those printed directly on the mailing piece or envelope, those "long-run self-adhesive labels printed on continuous rolls and short-run self-adhesive labels printed on laser label sheets."

He prints labels for his customers at his Hartford, Vt., company on a high-end Hewlett-Packard 5500 Series laser printer.

"When I am able to give this activity the attention it deserves, the interest in pictorial permits will greatly increase," he predicts. "I've kept a compete database of the designs I have prepared and have samples of most of the permits produced since 1995?

"I'm in tune with marketing practice and procedure, but I prefer to create a good foundation and track record with my product before I go to market," Lutz said. "2005 seems like the time when everything comes together."

Postal Service stamp officials are well aware of the pictorial permits, Lutz said. He met with Terrance McCaffrey, the Postal Service's head of stamp development, at the opening of a stamp art exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., two years ago.

"McCaffrey sees pictorial permits as an ideal way for any group or organization to get the stamp they want — those subjects which have no chance of ever reaching the national [stamp] program," Lutz said. "Now any group with a permit could get the impact of their own commemorative stamps for their mailings?

Lutz has proposed that Dartmouth College Issue a series of permits for its past presidents, a subject that would have no chance of getting on a U.S. postage stamp.

Vermont Stamp is located at Box 501, Hartford, VT 05047, www.vtstamp.com.