Little more than a year after opening with the aid of a $1.2m government grant Toby Pitt’s Trade Mailing business has closed its doors. The Geelong based business operated out of a 2,500sqm premises with its 14 staff – now made redundant – manufacturing and printing letters for direct mail campaigns. Pitt is reported as saying that the ‘market was not yet ready for the technology’ and said that ‘not enough clients took up the concept’. The new business was based on using customer data to design personalised campaigns, but Pitt says not enough companies have their databases up to speed. According to Pitt the business only actually received some $700,000 of the $1.2m grant, and says he walked away form $200,000 that was due to be paid on the start of the new financial year last month because he knew the outlook was looking bleak. The closure of Trade Mailing is the second high profile closure of a print business backed by the Government’s regional regeneration grant, last year Focus Press famously collapsed just weeks after opening its new $6m backed Wollongong security print business.

Closed down: Trade Mailing, Geelong

Pitt was formerly managing director of Trade Envelopes, which began as an envelope overprinted four years ago, and then moved into manufacturing with the collapse of Australian Envelopes six months later. Trade Envelopes, which operates out of Sydney and Brisbane, is unaffected by the Geelong closure as it is an unrelated entity.

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