How to Measure your Flat Mail’s Droop

It’s hard to believe but we’ve been talking about revised deflection/droop standards for at least eight months now.

For those of you who are just tuning in now, the droop (deflection) test measures the flexibility of mailpieces (specifically commercial flats). If mail pieces are too flexible they will topple over as they travel through the USPS sorters and scanners. Implementing deflections standards, or droop standards, will greatly reduce the amount of direct mail pieces that fall off the machines. Recently, the USPS extended the deadline for the deflections standard implementation to June 7, 2010. And, price consequences will take effect October 3, 2010. With the change in implementation dates, also came some changes to the way the droop of your mailpiece will be measured.

Click here to see an instructional video. Otherwise, read on!

(With regards to the video we know that the square piece is very close to failing, but it did meet the USPS standards.)

Written instructions about how to measure the droop of your mailpiece can be found here. (To get to the instructions, skip to section 1.6 of the document.)

You failed the droop test, now what?

Contact us! We have lots of solutions for drooping catalogs. We can work with you to make sure you optimize postage savings and pass the deflection standards … all without changing the style and branding of your catalog! (We have already worked with the client (along with many others) whose catalog failed in the video to transform their piece into one that will pass the newly-revised droop test.

Here are some additional resources if you would like to learn more about the new deflection regulations:

Click here for some of the industry comments about the new standards.

Click here to contact me or Susan Pinter, Arandell’s postal experts.

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