Elizabeth Joyce Broderick, one of America’s first female entrepreneurs, founded the Joyce Letter Shop company. She first discovered the benefits of communicating through direct mail while selling hay for her dad. The ability to quickly sell her dad’s hay in record time with a small mailing was the beginning of what was to become one of New England’s largest direct communications companies.

The company flourished in Boston, even through the Depression, by rising to every challenge and providing a diverse array of services with uncompromising quality. As direct mail became a significant medium, the company began serving both businesses and marketers. Over the years, Ms. Joyce built her business by adding traditional lettershop services, addressing and inserting.

Mechanical innovations started to be developed in the 1930s to make life easier and more profitable for letter shops. Today, you can see some of this equipment in a unique mailing museum situated on premises at JLS Mailing Services headquarters. In the early 1980s analog devices and ink jet printers replaced this equipment, followed by the digital age in the 1990s with digital on-demand printing. Address and document information that required entire rooms in which to house them now can be stored on a device no bigger than your thumb. Processing equipment that weighed thousands of pounds now can be done on a device that sits on a desk. JLS was in the forefront of many of these innovations while preserving personalization and high quality as practiced by Ms. Joyce.