Flats & Package Services — USPS Plant Transport from Blackwood, NJ

Flats — catalogs, large envelopes, and oversized mail pieces that don't fit standard letter-processing equipment — are handled by USPS differently than letters, and the postage math changes accordingly. PMC's flats and package service optimizes how those pieces are prepared and sorted, running them through an EII 6-station flat & parcel sorter alongside the presort and commingling operation.

One of the more overlooked cost items in flats mailing is transportation to the USPS plant that will process the piece; PMC typically transports flats to USPS plants free of charge as part of the service, rather than passing that cost on separately. Clients also get custom cost-allocation reporting, so flats and package spend can be tracked the same way metered and presorted mail can.

For catalog mailers, publishers, and any client running oversized mail pieces out of PMC's print and bindery floor in Blackwood, NJ, flats and package service is the piece that connects a finished, bound catalog to the postal system without a separate freight or logistics vendor handling the trip to the plant.

Flats and package handling connects naturally to two other parts of PMC's operation: bindery, where saddle-stitched catalogs and booklets are assembled before they ever reach the sorter, and fulfillment and warehousing, where kitted packages that don't move through the postal system at all are picked, packed, and shipped via FedEx, UPS, or trucking instead. For a publisher or manufacturer running both mailed catalogs and shipped kits out of the same catalog run, having both paths — postal flats and carrier package — handled by the same production floor removes a coordination step that would otherwise sit between two separate vendors. It's a detail easy to overlook when comparing quotes, but it shows up directly in shipping cost and delivery timelines — and it's the kind of line item that's simple to ask a current vendor about before switching.