MONTEGO BAY, St James – Chief Executive Officer of National Pen, Peter Kelly is informing that his company is already reaping success since it started a contact centre in the Montego Bay Free Zone in August with approximately 175 Jamaican workers.

He has attributed the early success to the work ethics of the local workers.

In fact, he announced that as a result of the successful start of the Jamaican operation, the world-class providers of personalised marketing solutions, has decided to expand here.

“I think we are feeling confident and even today (recently) we had some good news where we agreed that we would expand the operation here by a further 60 people, probably in the next something like 12 weeks. “Well done to the people here, for it has really proven that Jamaica has been so successful that that has allowed us to make that decision to expand,” Kelly stated.

He was speaking at the official launch of the Jamaica operation of National Pen, a subsidiary of Cimpress, the parent company of Vistaprint recently.

According to Kelly, 32 years ago, the company started its international operations, which covered 21 markets outside of the US and Canada.

He emphasised that the company focuses on “small to medium-sized businesses”.

“From we originally started, we started as the name says, very much as a pen company. Over the last few years we became particularly strong in the online market. We are selling up to 40,000 different promotional products. What makes National Pen unique is we are really kind of different than a lot of the competition in the marketplace — if we can call them competition — we really focus on small to medium-sized businesses. So we don’t target to sell our products to Coco Cola or Pepsi or companies like that, we go after plumbers, gardening companies, hair dressing salons and so on. So our target market is very much the small companies,” Kelly pointed out.

He revealed that National Pen opened their Jamaican contact centre, simultaneously with another in Tunisia.

“It’s been a wonderful success so far… I think roughly after nine weeks of operations some of the operations are very similar to, or on par with the US even after the nine-week period,” he said.

Both the president of the Business Process Industry Association of Jamaica (BPIAJ) Gloria Henry and Mayor of Montego Bay, Councillor Homer Davis, were on hand at the official launch to welcome National Pen to Montego Bay.