Inside the Radical Redesign of the Country’s Largest Retailer: USPS

With more than 30,000 locations operating today, the United States Postal Service is still the largest retail network in the US. It’s also an embattled institution that’s struggling to stay afloat. That’s why last year, it enlisted a small design studio to overhaul its look completely. Here’s what they came up with.

Over the last several years, USPS has lost billions of dollars a year and struggled to find footing in a world that’s long since gone paperless. From ending Saturday deliveries to even more radical proposals aimed at cutting costs, the agency seems willing to consider just about anything to save itself. Including a complete overhaul of how it looks.

That might not sound very extreme, but it’s arguably just as important as, say, cutting back deliveries. Why? Because the way the USPS is perceived—as a crumbling, slow, often unreliable and usually inconvenient dinosaur—has a massively negative effect on potential customers. It’s not like people don’t still need physical mail. But convincing people choose USPS over FedEx or UPS is a battle that the carrier desperately needs to win.

It remained seemingly anonymous until this week, when the fantastic branding blog Brand New posted a look at the full redesign. It turns out that the revamp was the work of a small, three-person design firm in New York called GrandArmy, which spent three months completely reinventing the USPS, from its boxes to its actual retail presence. I got in touch with the studio to find out more.

Read More: Inside the Radical Redesign of the Country’s Largest Retailer: USPS.

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