Once Britain’s most-hated courier, Evri’s 2022 rebrand by Design Bridge and Partners has helped deliver record growth for the business. Craig Noonan, Director of Brand at Evri, Mark Wood, Client Partner, and Matt Boffey, Chief Strategy Officer at Design Bridge and Partners, spoke to Creative Review about why this is more than a rebrand — it’s a story of transformation, innovation and delivering on promises.

Cast your mind back to Christmas 2021. If you’re someone who does most of your gift shopping online, chances are you had some form of interaction with courier company Hermes. For hundreds (if not thousands) of customers who had to deal with delayed, damaged and missing parcels during the festive period that year, the Times’ undercover investigation into the UK’s ‘worst’ courier would’ve come as little surprise. Filmed undercover at a Hermes sorting centre in Buckinghamshire, the report revealed a company with a rotten culture and demotivated staff, struggling to deliver packages and its promises to customers.

“If you look back at that period, the business was going through massive growth off the back of Covid,” says director of brand Craig Noonan, who joined Evri, as it’s now known, in 2023. “Externally what happened is Royal Mail went on strike, the business probably tried to do the right thing and help businesses, but actually just took on too much volume and effectively fell over. That was why a lot of the well-documented stories came out and I think that’s why there was a huge investment in the capacity network.”

Unveiled just three months after the Times’ investigation, Evri’s brand overhaul and name change by Design Bridge and Partners (or Superunion as it was known before its merger with Design Bridge) garnered a huge amount of attention throughout the design industry as well as the national press. The agency had initially pitched for the rebrand earlier in 2021, following private equity firm Advent International taking a 75% stake in the business in 2020 and a period of rapid expansion for the courier that saw it effectively triple in size over five years.

The creative brief, recalls Design Bridge and Partners creative partner Mark Wood, was “to create something distinctive and memorable that tells the story of the business and helps signal that change that the business is going through”. But they were also conscious of the courier’s reputational challenges that needed to be addressed. “The first thing that we were all agreed on internally is a rebrand is likely to be unsuccessful if the change that you are signalling is skin deep,” says chief strategy officer Matt Boffey. “So what was really exciting for us as we went through the pitch process was actually learning more about the organisation’s plan to transform from the inside out. That gave us a lot of confidence in the approach that we were taking.

While it’s easy to jump straight to someone who regularly shops online when thinking about the typical Evri customer, the team were keen to have a broader outlook during the strategy phase. “When it comes to parcel delivery, it’s not just serving the needs of big business,’ says Boffey. “It’s also serving the needs of small businesses and individuals, such as bedroom entrepreneurs or even just someone who needs to get a parcel to a friend or family member. The third element was also thinking about the internal power of the brand. Building a brand for its employees, its partners, all the different stakeholders that we wanted to take on this journey.”

The end result was the new name, which Boffey says nods to “that sense of every person, every parcel, every business”, and a typographically driven visual identity developed with Monotype. By using cutting-edge variable font intelligence to create over 194,000 bespoke logo artworks, it meant that every vehicle across the Evri fleet was able to sport its own iteration of the brand’s official symbol.

“We often talk about the trucks as billboards going up the motorway, and every truck being different kind of felt like an interesting creative way of bringing that to life,” says Wood. “The work that Monotype did, the open type variable font spec that they challenged, has now made it more accessible for future type designers to create more expressive, interesting things in typefaces. So it really was quite experimental.”

While anyone who works in the world of branding will be all too familiar with the furore that often surrounds the unveiling of a major rebrand, Evri’s overhaul was particularly divisive among the design industry when it was revealed. In an opinion piece for Creative Review, Koto co-founder James Greenfield wrote: “Having consumed it all, I am left feeling this fanfare would have been much better spent on a more simple, pared-back identity, which promised to do the basics well and delivered some joy in the customer experience.”

Boffey admits that the team were prepared for a fair amount of backlash post-rebrand. “As humans, we all have a bias for the familiar, so change is always difficult for us to accept. That creativity, that novelty, that newness, it takes a little while for people to get used to it. But I think, from our perspective at least, what is really heartening is how quickly Evri got adopted.”

Industry critiques aside, the real test of whether a rebrand has failed or succeeded is whether it sets a company apart from its competitors in the right way (Royal Mail’s disastrous Consignia rebrand from 2001 being a prime example of what not to do). “When you’re developing a brand and an identity and you’re taking on the biggest, most well-established player who’s been around for hundreds of years, actually [you need] something which is memorable and acts as a counterbalance to that, and that’s exactly what the brand does. Within nine months we were back to recognition levels pre- rebrand,” says Noonan.

Fast-forward to the end of 2024, and the brand reported record annual results, having delivered more than 730 million parcels and reached around 85% of UK households as well as growing its total revenue by 15% to £1.7 billion. The company’s best-ever year was underpinned by a significant investment of £32 million in its operations and customer services, including the launch of a new chatbot and callback feature for customers, a ‘self-employed plus’ courier model providing paid holidays and sick leave, which has since been backed by the GMB union, and hiring more than 6,500 couriers to help it achieve a 99% on-time delivery rate.

It’s also seen a marked improvement in customer satisfaction levels over the last year. Noonan cites an upward trend for both its net promoter score and Trustpilot ranking. However, there’s clearly still more work to be done on this front, judging by Ofcom’s latest Post Monitoring Report, which showed the company still had the lowest levels of satisfaction among all its competitors despite improving on its 2023 score.

Ultimately, it’s all added up to a huge valuation for the courier company, which was acquired by private equity firm Apollo for a mammoth £2.7 billion last year. Asked what role he thinks brand and design has played in Evri’s wider business transformation, Noonan says: “If you engrain creatives within the business ideology and strategy that you've got for the long term, I think it shows areal power that design can have to give you a platform to grow. Businesses worry a lot when it comes to rebrands. It can go badly wrong, but I think this a shining example of what happens when you embrace it.”

First published in Creative Review.