What would the past 18 months have been like without the ability for all of us to browse, punch a few buttons, and have packages appear magically at the front door or mailbox within days, or even hours?

And the final piece of that magic trick is being performed by a cadre of workers and brands whose names are as familiar as any of the other lifestyle brands that surround us. We’re talking DHL, FedEx, UPS and — in the U.S. — the U.S. Postal Service, who can lay claim to being lifestyle brands in their own right, given their ubiquity as a retail lifeline. (As best as we can tell, Amazon hasn’t licensed or created goods for purchase that bear the smile logo that’s on trucks that are cruising streets around the globe, and on the boxes they leave behind.)

Fashion Forward
That’s extended into merchandising.  DHL, for example, collaborated with rising Japanese clothing designer Yuki Hashimoto for a range of upcycled uniforms that were showcased last fall at the Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo (for which DHL was a sponsor). Then there’s the streetwear cred DHL gained when its designs were part of a Supreme X Northface collection, the track pants of which were selling this week for $825 on Farfetch.com. And both DHL and USPS have fielded collaborations with the streetwear brand Anti Social Social Club.

“Consumers took more notice of these delivery services during the past year, and they are being positioned as lifestyle or streetwear brands” in addition to their more typical day jobs, says Lesley Tuttle, Executive Director at Global Icons, which represents the USPS. “And younger consumers are being targeted because they are interested in brands with a story to tell.”

Just last week, more than a million copies of the USPS’s quarterly magazine Philatelic (which markets stamps bearing licensed images and characters) landed in U.S. mailboxes featuring a pullout section of USPS licensed merchandise, highlighted on the cover by Greenlight Collectibles’ dual branded “Cheers”/USPS diecast truck – remember that the character Cliff C. Clavin Jr. (actor John Ratzenberger) was a proud postal worker.

Collectibles Plus
Inside the pullout was an array of Ripple Junction and Trau & Loevner apparel featuring a variety of USPS marks from current iconography to more retro symbols such as Mr. Zip (a character created in the early 1960’s to encourage use of the newfangled zip code); a Terracycle tote bag made from recycled USPS mailbags; and a Polaroid/USPS 600 instant camera, which launched in March and features an age-old technology that’s enjoyed a renaissance with young consumers more accustomed to social media and email than the act of writing and mailing a letter.

Neither FedEx nor Amazon seem to have licensed out their symbols.  Greenlight has approached both companies about licenses for collectibles, but hasn’t landed an agreement, says Cale Hotton, Director of Licensing and Product Development. It’s in the midst of negotiating a renewal of its UPS licensing agreement.

Last year it shipped about 8,600 units of the “Cheers”/USPS truck to Target. “We have a list of evergreen items, but, for the most part, we produce one and we’re done, but the demand some USPS vehicles is such that we can’t keep up,” says Hotton. “There are many people out there that are collectors of USPS products, and then there are those that see the vehicle on the street and think it might be nice to have it as a collectible.”

The brands are ubiquitous; the challenge is to make sure they deliver.