Regal Greetings & Gifts may not be in the market to hire a database marketing agency after all, according to Lawrence Lee, the company’s president and ceo.

As was reported in the July 21 issue of Strategy DirectResponse, Regal had been considering farming out its database marketing work to an outside agency. But, after evaluating the data warehousing capabilities of a number of Canadian service providers, the company believes it might be better off hiring the personnel required to manage its needs under its own roof, Lee says.

Lee, a former executive with u.s.-based cataloguer Hanover Direct, says the level of data warehousing acumen is significantly higher in the u.s., where proprietary databases are generally much bigger than in Canada, thus creating more demand there for such expertise.

‘Here,’ he says, ‘it looks like we would wind up being the guinea pig on a (data warehousing) project of this type, and there would be a real heavy duty cost to us to doing that.’