With new owner, AB&C Group gets a new CEO

Mike Lutz, a former executive at Hanover Direct, Spiegel, and JCPenney, has been named CEO of the AB&C Group, a provider of outsourced direct response processing, call center and fulfillment services.

Lutz’s appointment follows AB&C’s acquisition by BlueSky Brands Inc., which is investing $6 million to expand the company’s facilities and upgrade its systems. AB&C’s founder, chairman and CEO Michael O’Hara announced his retirement on June 19.

“Mike’s many years of experience running large-scale and highly complex fulfillment operations at major direct marketing companies make him ideally qualified to lead AB&C into the future,” said Rich Hebert, CEO of BlueSky Brands. “We are investing considerably in AB&C to expand its capacity and capabilities to serve third-party fulfillment clients. Mike’s knowledge of the industry’s best practices will be enormously valuable to the company and AB&C’s clients.”

“My immediate focus will be the integration of new systems and facilities and changes in our organizational structure,” Lutz said. “We will be moving our national fulfillment center to a new facility later this year and operating a second AB&C facility in New England. We are making strategic enhancements to our operating system and IT infrastructure, including upgrading to Ecometry 8.0, the latest version of the industry’s most advanced operations software. We soon will be able to offer our clients valuable new functionality, including state-of-the-art capabilities to forecast orders and demand.”

The AB&C Group specializes in multi-channel direct response fulfillment solutions. Customers include Healthy Directions, The Paragon, The Nature Conservancy, U.S. Golf Association, Junonia, Bra Smyth, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, National Geographic Society, National Rifle Association, The Heritage Foundation and Heifer International.