2023 Hall of Fame Inductee Joy Gendusa Never Loses Sight of What's Important

Joy Gendusa

Before Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998, she had started a graphic design and print brokering business that she ran out of her 600-sq.-ft. cottage in Clearwater, Florida, with just three employees. She doesn’t remember what the company’s revenue was; all she knew at the time was that it wasn’t cutting it. She was a young mom with two kids who was working day-in and day-out. Gendusa knew she had to do something different.

“I said ‘something has got to give here. I have got to figure this out.’ And I kept thinking, ‘What can I do that’s more scalable?’ I knew I needed to hire more people but, to do that, I had to market my own company,” she says.

She received a piece of promotional mail from a postcard company based in New York and called them up to order postcards. It was the customer service experience that followed that made a lightbulb go off for her.

“It seemed unbelievable to me to be able to get 5,000 postcards for $425 — and this was back in 1998,” Gendusa says. ”At the time, I didn’t know what a gang run was and I didn’t know much about printing. I knew enough to broker it to know which shops to go to for my graphic design clients. But either way, I overnighted this company my designs and they overnighted me a proof back. But they had added their phone number to my design, and that simply wasn’t going to fly.”

Gendusa then confronted them about not wanting their number on her postcard. They said they would take it off … for an additional $50 fee — and from this frustrating experience, PostcardMania was born.

“I turned to my tiny team at the time and told them, we’re starting a postcard company. We’re going to call it PostcardMania and we’re NOT going to sneak fees in on people or try to put our phone number on their designs,” she explains.

Fast forward to today. June marked PostcardMania’s 25th business anniversary, and Gendusa has grown her company from a small startup into an industry leader that generated more than $97 million in sales in 2022; currently employs 350 people; and spans a 75,000-sq.-ft., custom-built facility in Clearwater.

Since its founding, PostcardMania has been featured on the Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 lists, printed 2.3 billion postcards, delivered over 250,000 campaigns, and helped more than 100,000 small business owners with their direct marketing endeavors.

Overcoming Growing Pains

Gendusa explains that for years, her biggest challenge was money. How was she going to pay for the growth? How was she going to pay the people she was hiring? Gendusa says overcoming those challenges was definitely her biggest growing pain. And for years, she was paying everyone else except herself.

“We were growing really rapidly, and in our small town I think people assumed I was making all of this money when in reality I wasn’t paying myself much at all,” she says. “I would say it wasn’t until 2007 that I started to feel like I was really doing well for myself.”

Gendusa recalls a time very early on when an investor wanted to give her $100,000 for 50% of the company, but ultimately, she turned him down. “Boy that was so tempting, and at that time I was definitely thinking about all the things I could do with $100,000,” she laughs. “But I said no, because I thought he doesn’t even work here and he’s going to own half of my company for $100,000? No way. I told him to keep his money.”

Money wasn’t the only growing pain, the digital revolution that happened at the turn of the century also posed challenges.

Gendusa says that the internet became an obstacle because competitors were coming out of the woodwork. She explains that as she grew, competitors started copying her model and in order to become more visible, PostcardMania had to figure out a way to differentiate itself from the rest.

To compete, Gendusa hired a full-time campaigns results analyst whose role was collecting successful campaigns from clients and cataloging key characteristics among those successes, like mailing frequency, mailing list demographics, and design similarities. She started molding PostcardMania into more of a marketing company than selling a commodity.

Creating Longstanding Client Relationships

Even with all of the successes that PostcardMania has seen, Gendusa never lost sight of the fact that she started her business to help people, and she never shies away from being hands-on with her clients.
Anne Strickland, owner of Canton, Massachusetts-based Great American Art — which helps its clients infuse their spaces with tangible, vibrant humanity through art and design — has been a PostcardMania customer for more than 10 years.

Strickland explains that she had already been a client for years before actually meeting Gendusa at a marketing seminar she was hosting. Strickland says her business had reached a plateau and she wanted to get some advice from Gendusa.

“During a break, I introduced myself and said, ‘You know, we’re having some problems. I’d really love if you have any time for me to talk to you about it,’” Strickland says. “And Joy said absolutely. She took me right up to her office and we had a long conversation, and she got us on the right track. And for me, it meant so much because Joy was already so successful at that point. But it didn’t matter, I told her I needed help and she was there for me.”

Strickland continues, “She’s very down to earth. If you say, ‘Hey, I need help,’ or, ‘Gosh, I’m not sure if that will work, what do you think about this?’ There’s no question Joy’s response would be, ‘Oh, let me help you,’ or ‘Let me explain this to you.’”

Setting Up for Future Successes

Joy and her husband, Sam, recently visited California’s wine country with two of PostcardMania’s senior executives — who are also their close friends. Pictured, from bottom, are Melissa Bradshaw, PostcardMania president; Rob Bradshaw, PostcardMania CFO; Joy Gendusa; and Sam Gendusa.

Even though PostcardMania has more than 350 employees now as opposed to a handful when it first started, Gendusa has always maintained the sentiment that her “maniacs” are all family. Even with more than 350 employees, Gendusa still goes out of her way to meet one-on-one with every new hire who comes on board.

“We work hard, but it has to be fun,” Gendusa says. “Part of the reason I started my company was to create a place I wanted to go to work every day — I wanted it to be light and fun, not serious and intense. And when you build something from nothing, those people that helped — well they’re your friends for life. That’s how I feel about my staff .”

And if you ask Gendusa’s employees, they love the familial bonds that exude throughout the company.

PostcardMania’s President, Melissa Bradshaw, who started working for Gendusa as her assistant when she was just 19 years old, has been with the company from the very beginning, and confirms that Gendusa is a leader who believes in a workplace culture that cares deeply for its employees.

“She met my kids when they were newborns; it’s truly like a family,” Bradshaw says. “We are also friends outside of work. We’ve traveled together. And Joy treats everyone as if we’re her family. She’ll do whatever she can to help us to get to whatever we’re trying to obtain. Joy really just goes above and beyond.”

Joy and Sam Gendusa pose for a family picture with sons James Rockwell (back left) and Zachary Rockwell (back right). Their dogs are named Conan O’Brien (left) and Tory.

Today, it’s Gendusa’s focus on just that — going above and beyond — that propels PostcardMania forward. In recent years, PostcardMania has made its latest and greatest pivot yet, from marketing company to tech firm.

“PostcardMania’s driving mission has always been about helping small businesses succeed at their marketing so that they can grow,” Gendusa points out. “In 1998, we could do that with postcards. In the 2010s, we integrated digital advertising to optimize campaigns that were offline and online.

“Now, we’re prioritizing direct mail automation. We launched our API in 2020, and it’s become our fastest-growing division,” she says.

A direct mail API allows businesses to program direct mail campaigns once according to certain triggers — e.g., when someone visits a website or calls a number for the first time — and the campaign will continue to run on its own, creating responsive, individually personalized campaigns at scale indefinitely.

“Bringing this technology to PostcardMania has been a labor of love, because I wanted to do it better than it’s been done before — and that’s exactly what we’ve done,” Gendusa says. “The future for PostcardMania is very bright indeed.”