Earth Class Mail Recruits Military Customers

Earth Class Mail, the Seattle-based digital mailroom management company, is on a mission to digitize the world’s post offices. One of the key elements of this operation will be the military—not its munitions, but it’s thousands of lonely soldiers who want to stay connected to their loved ones back home.

About 30 percent of Earth Class Mail’s customer base is made up of soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, says CEO Ron Wiener. By having the contents of their mail scanned and posted on online, soldiers who are often on the move won’t have to wait for days or weeks for mail to catch up to them; the average time to get a letter to Iraq is 12 days.

To further develop these military connections, Wiener hired Carl Hicks, a retired officer who served in the U.S. Army’s Airborne Rangers special operations unit, as Earth Class Mail’s COO. So far, he says he has been in discussions with Department of Defense (DOD) officials, who have shown serious interest in Earth Class Mail’s system.

Following his military career, Hicks worked in corporate sales and was COO at two other companies involving medical devices and high-tech applications of building systems. Now on his third startup, Hicks calls Earth Class Mail “by far the most exciting company” he’s worked for. “It has the most potential to transform lives,” he says “You instantly get what the service is about.”

Beyond the morale-boosting benefits of speeding up the mail service, Earth Class Mail also may see its best return on investment in DOD clients, Hicks says. The military spends an enormous amount of money to ship mail overseas. All letters sent to Iraq, for example, first go to New York City, where they are processed at a facility at Kennedy Airport. Then, they are shipped overseas by air to Bahrain and then transferred to another aircraft to go to Baghdad, where people risk life and limb to deliver the precious envelopes.

But the mail often has to compete with other commodities on the crowded transports. “If there’s no space for the mail, the bullets go over instead,” Hicks says. During Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91, Hicks says he, personally, did not get any mail for eight weeks.

Another major problem is returns. “A significant percentage of overseas mail has to be shipped back home—something like 30 percent—due to the constant turnover of service members returning from tours of duty,” Hicks says.

In addition to serving their country, many National Guard troops are trying to keep their stateside businesses afloat while they’re deployed, so many of them forward all of their mail to their APO/FPO address—including junk mail.

“The military lifestyle tends to be atrocious on credit ratings,” Wiener says. “So many of the soldiers who don’t have good credit ratings get inundated with ads for check cashing services.”

By switching to Earth Class Mail, Wiener says the returns and the junk mail could be cut drastically, saving more than $500 million dollars in fuel costs each year in avoided air transport. Those soldiers who already have individual Earth Class accounts have achieved a 94 percent reduction in forward-shipped mail, he says.

Of course, Earth Class Mail will also make sure that any soldier who wants the feel of actual letters from home will still get them, Wiener adds. “Some will say ‘I want to smell the perfume on my girlfriend’s letter,’” he says. “That’s very important to them.”