Valpak Direct Marketing Systems is moving its corporate headquarters from Largo to a St. Petersburg office park to get closer to its manufacturing center.

About 325 employees of the direct mail and digital marketing company will move to the new location at 805 Executive Center Drive West in Baypoint Commerce Center. Valpak said Wednesday that it has signed at eight-year lease for the site, beginning Dec. 7. The office park is near Gandy Boulevard at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street N.

Another 50 workers will move from Largo to offices within the manufacturing center, where Valpak employs close to 400.

The move involves a wide range of employees — franchise support, national sales, the executive group, business finance, marketing, IT and graphic design — who have been based since the early 1990s in Largo offices rented from Harrod Properties. The Largo lease expires this year.

Valpak has long discussed moving employees closer to its 470,000-square-foot printing facility, a landmark complex in the Gateway area just west of Interstate 275 which opened in 2007.

"The new St. Petersburg location not only gives us closer proximity to the (manufacturing facility), but also allows us to draw from a larger, diverse work pool with access to more of the Tampa Bay area workforce," said Michael Vivio, president of Cox Target Media, Valpak's holding company. "We decided on St. Petersburg because we like the cluster of tech companies in the St. Petersburg area along with the energy and quality of people."

Vivio said there is room to expand within the company's new three-story building, but he declined to speculate about adding more workers.

"Business is good," he said, citing new beta partnerships for distribution of its digital coupons and the core strength of its print business, best-known for its familiar blue direct mail packets.

This will be the third corporate headquarters for the company, which was founded in Clearwater in 1968 by entrepreneur Terry Loebel. It is owned by Cox Media Group and Cox Enterprises in Atlanta.