Meet The Mailers: Mail In Motion

In this episode, I chatted with Brad Bartlett, President of Opti Print & Fulfillment. Opti Print, parent of OptiGraphics, is a multi-award-winning print service provider based in Dallas, TX.

As Brad displayed numerous examples of his company’s work (including USPS Irresistible Award winners), we discussed how its techniques have been used in a wide variety of print applications, and in mail, increases ROI:

Among the many topics we covered:

• Brad’s background in music & how it helps his work today
• How OptiGraphics got started
• A brief description of lenticular printing
• Two other specialty printing techniques used in mail
• Final thoughts about the value of lenticular and specialty printing

Here are some questions and answers from our conversation (edited for clarity and space):

• For our audience who are people across the direct mail ecosystem, a lot of marketers included in there, why don’t we explain what is lenticular printing and talk about the types of processes that are used for it.
  

Great question. So lenticular printing in its strictest dictionary form would be the interlacing of images. So taking images and interlacing those to create an optical effect. At a base level that most of our viewers I’m sure are familiar with, lenticular printing is what’s usually called “Oh, it’s those winkies or that two-phase flip or whatever it does”. And so it does like this and it changes from image one to image two. I think we’re probably all familiar with that.

Obviously, the sophistication has grown over the years. And it really divides into kind of two different areas.

The first area is what we call motion. This is very simple, a flip from one image to another. And then the other that is often seen is what is called 3D. And what 3D is is a single image, but yet it has depth perception to it. So it almost looks like you can look around it.

OptiGraphics actually is, and Topan was credited with the inventing of this process. Quite to the contrary, it’s been around since the 1900s, but Topan had developed a unique process and really took it to the commercial marketplace. And I think that’s what’s made us so successful is that OptiGraphics has always been in that space of commercial.

We’ve had a long history with doing direct mail with the USPS. They’ve been our friends over the years and we’ve won so many awards from them. One that I did find as I was kind of looking through some of the archives is we were known as the most Irresistible Mail and direct mail people and Next Generation. We also have done millions and millions and millions of postcards.
I believe that lenticular is still an excellent vehicle, although it’s been around for years and is often known as the Cracker Jack toy. And we were the people that did that. So lenticular can tell a really valuable story and what makes it so great is the readership.

• And so the type of process used is offset… or digital?
  

Although we have all the latest digital equipment, as you can imagine, it’s still today is primarily an offset UV printed facility. And so we have the great big Heidelberg 28×40, 12-color UV presses. We have smaller ones that also do UV printing. But the dot and the registration is so fine that we have found that offset is the vehicle that we use most often.

• Thinking about all the possibilities, there’s a big question that comes to the mind of a lot of people: How much does it cost and what kinds of factors impact that consideration?
  

Back in the old days, obviously, when you’ve been here like myself, 36 years, it actually used to be priced by how many images you would show on the card. Those days have gone because of the advancements in pre-press, as you can imagine. So it’s not quite like a square inch or that type of thing. But what I would tell you is that when someone decides to use lenticular, it is a premium price product compared to your average cost of let’s say a 9 x 6 postcard, done on 14 point paper that can cost 8 to 12, 15 or 18 cents. The cost is going to be 3-4 times more than that. But what I would tell you is the people that use lenticular are number one, they’re looking for it to tell a story, okay?

And number two, they’re wanting redemption. They’re wanting consumers to interact with that. And when they’re used to 1/2 of 1%, and they can get 5, 12, 18% redemption rates, it really makes it cost-effective. Plus, they get it kept, it doesn’t get thrown away.

• Talking about the “why” behind bringing static images to life … why does it have an impact? Is it the visual appeal? Is it like you talked about – the staying power?
  

Yeah, it’s a great question. And in fact, it’s kind of all those things combined. We’ve had an amazing year because of some of our great customers. We do a lot of work for people like Taylor Swift. We produced a lot of stuff for her.

Here’s one of her old catalog, this type thing [shows example] …yes, obviously Taylor does it because of the visual appeal.

But here’s another great example of something that won a Grammy a couple of years ago for an album cover. Well, look at the visual appeal of this one.[shows example] So this is Caroline Rose, The Art of Forgetting. You’ll see, this is actually 3D with animation included in it. So the visual appeal of this is absolutely amazing.

I understand the whole music genre. I think I can talk “musician” and I think that helps us at OptiGraphics because it’s a different process and they want to be talked through how it’s going to work, how they create the artwork, a little bit of the technical side of it as well.

• Talking about direct mail and getting into that a little bit, you offer variable data direct mail.
  

Yes, we’re one of the few people that can do that. We have a brand new press that we just installed this year that truly is amazing. It’s kind of a hybrid between digital and offset, and we’re able to do variable direct mail. So not only, yes, can it be on the back, so when people are addressing the pieces that we can put this in and actually personalize it with their name and that type thing, but also we can variable image the front, which is very unique. It could say, “Hi, Paul, does your grass look like this and you want it to look like this”. So that is really a breakthrough that I would tell you it’s technological and it’s frankly because of the new press.

• So are there minimum quantities for that kind of thing? Is this something that you can …?
  

It’s interesting. Back in the day, the quantities used to be pretty darn big. But the great news now is that because we have a small offset press that prints a 14 by 20 inch sheet, that type thing, our minimum’s down to 250 pieces.

So yeah, it’s very small where it used to be thousands. So that makes it appealing for people to do smaller things. And also it’s really helped us, and we’ll show you some other things too, as far as going out to influencers. [T]o give them something that is highly personalized is truly a breakthrough.

• Are there USPS regulations or specifications that you have to think about when you’re planning a campaign like that?
  

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a great thing because we work with mail, any permits … so we can mail all over the place. But our relationship with the USPS is about as sound as any company I’ve ever known. We take products to them. We have them test them for us. They give us suggestions on how to do it. All the way from barcodes to Informed [Delivery] mail to all this mail tracking and all that type of stuff. We are absolutely on the cutting edge. And I will tell you that yes, lenticular works with all those different medias, but also they have been so helpful with us. Fabulous partners to work with, really are.

• Right, and that also, of course, ties in with the Irresistible Mail as well, obviously. And so are there incentives that USPS is going to offer in 2026 that will allow somebody to incorporate lenticular printing in their mail campaigns?
  

Absolutely. The one that people always ask for and use it or use the most, of course, is, price. And so they offer discounts throughout the year, various different times that give a unique postage rate because we obviously, you know, [mail] bulk first class, standard, etc. But they will offer discounts. They’ve been working some places where during special times of the year, they will offer special incentives for unusual mailers. And we’ve been able to take advantage of those as well.

We’ve also kind of expanded our product category into two different areas. One, not as much in direct mail, but I do want to mention it, and that’s Optichrome, because I think a lot of your people maybe have seen these type of things like Delta Airlines [trading] cards. So it’s a chromium product, used for very high-end stuff. That has also been used in direct mail.

But this one won the most Irresistible Mail award. And I want to show this to you too, because it was unusual. I’ll make a real quick story.

A few years back, an agency came to us and said, “you know, Brad, we want to do direct mail and we want to do magazine inserts, and we’re going to introduce a new product into the marketplace to compete with a powdered drink, only this is going to be liquid. …We want water to be an integral part of it.”

And like you, Paul, I at the same time, I went, “okay, well, we can make like, you know, lenticular waterfalls.” They said, “No, no, no … We want the direct mail piece to interact with water because that’s our point of differentiation with the product.”

So like you, you go, “wow, let’s see, huh? Direct mail with water. What could we do?” And so we worked with our ink manufacturers and various different coding people. And we invented a process that we have patented called Water Reveal.

We have it in various different forms, but this is the piece [shows example] that actually won the most Irresistible Mail award. And it was for Baylor University right here in Texas. And that was groundbreaking, especially they use this for college recruitment.

Again, we talked about that even with lenticular, but what we try to do at OptiGraphics is to match the message that they’re trying to send with a technology, and that’s important because people can look at water reveal and say, “wow, that’s really cool”. But if it’s a medical piece and they’re trying to show pills or this type of thing, other than the fact, I guess you take a pill with water or that type of thing, it really doesn’t make any sense.

• [I]t’s really a great way to tie in the story that you’re telling, but really bolster the story with the physical effects of the mail piece.
  

I mean, let’s … we all know that in the direct mail business, we’re competing with digital, okay? I mean, that’s just reality and that’s okay. And constantly we hear digital. Well, digital is so interactive. I mean, I can put it, and they get to see animation, emotion… And so that’s what we talk about in direct mail. We have got to compete against that.

And the way that we do it here at OptiGraphics is with the animation that we’ve been talking about in lenticular, making it interactive, getting the person to have to interact with the direct mail piece so that we have a connection there that goes beyond just looking at it and throwing it in the trash can because we don’t want that.

• It’s the power of interruption from whatever they’re doing.
  

It really is.

• I wanted to pose a question which I usually ask people: have you received a mail piece recently that really made you stop and pay attention to it and maybe even respond to it?
  

You know, I have. And one of the things that I saw that I actually really liked was just a simple scratch-off. I mean, the ability to use that, we make them, but to use scratch-offs, I thought that was highly interactive just because of the fact that it allowed you to see different windows.

Another thing that I saw that we also do that I like, and this happens to be one of our pieces, but I thought it was really well done, is red reveal. We have a whole reveal series, water reveal kind of being the bell cow. But there is a whole marketplace, as you know, for red reveal. Kind of what’s old is new. But it made you stop and go, “wow, let me interact with that”. And I love that.

[W]e all work with budgets. We understand that every day here at OptiGraphics.

[M]ail can do so much more than just a paper postcard. And so what I would tell everybody watching this is: I want you to open up and consider things. I understand budget, but when the message makes for one of these vehicles that we’ve shown today, it can be a fabulous vehicle for you, and you won’t believe the results. It’s unbelievable.

Here is our conversation (with all questions and answers). We’ve added timecodes for your convenience.

Thank you very much, Brad, for sharing your perspective and your expertise! To learn more about OptiGraphics, visit their website at OpticGraphics.com.

Your comments and ideas are very important to us in making your Who’s Mailing What! experience even better for you. Through these engaging talks, we hope you’ll take away practical tips, insights, and personal stories to inspire and build your own success.

If you have any feedback — or are interested in sharing your story and viewpoint with our wide and diverse audience on “Meet the Mailers” — please reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you!