UK credit card holders brace yourselves – Tele-Jet is after your flexible companions, with a new messaging service it is launching next Thursday into the void left when the Post Office put the stops on its telegram business. For UKP5.90 Tele-Jet will hand-deliver a card and message anywhere in the UK in less than five hours – or for extra cost a range of 14 gifts including champagne, a set of Beatrix Potter books, perfume, teddy-bears and chocolates. Surbiton, Surrey based Tele-Jet has set up a network of 130 franchise centres around the country to operate the service, similar to to the distribution network set up by the Next retail chain for its Home Directory mail order service and it hopes to double the number next year. You simply call your local centre with details of the message or gift you want to send – the number is found in the Tele-Jet catalogue or by ringing a freephone Tele-Jet line. The message is then faxed to the centre nearest to its destination address, and personally delivered. Managing director Peter Ingoldby, who dreamed up the idea, believes it will revolutionise the gifts and greetings business. He is pitching the service at the general public, but is also hoping to attract the business customer with a recorded delivery and reply service, especially for addresses without a fax machine, citing examples of outfits already signed up firms seeking order confirmation and acceptance of quotations, or public relations companies wanting to send out the ubiquitous personalised Christmas message to a client’s customers. Before you reach for the phone to send a Beatrix Potter book set to a far flung relative in John O’Groats by tea-time however, read on… To join the Tele-Jet service will cost you a UKP35 subscription fee – for this you get the catalogue and paperwork processed – applications will take a month to process, and if you haven’t got a credit card or you live in or want to send anything to Northern Ireland, the Scilly Isles or the Scottish Islands – forget it! Tele-Jet hopes to tempt around 40,000 customers, or 2% of all UK credit card holders within a year, and sees revenues of UKP13m for that period, on the basis that each subscriber will send one message or gift a year – which seems to work out at UKP40.90 a time.
