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 the 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.

Evri’s distribution centre in Barnsley