Do you want fries with that package?

By Jill Spitznass

The Portland Tribune, Mar 12, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

As Michael Jackson can tell you, sometimes even the most well-intentioned makeover can go horribly wrong.

Witness the DHL Worldwide Express courier team, now sporting the alarming results of a recent corporate rebranding.

Once resplendent in navy blue and classic red, the DHL crew now greets the dawn wearing a combo of tomato red and mustard yellow. Passable hues on their own, when these colors come together some kind of chromatic alchemy occurs. It can’t be helped: The first thing that comes to mind is a popular fast food chain.

“Hey, I didn’t know McDonald’s delivered,” a fellow said to a DHL delivery guy downtown the other day, a razz that was met with stony-faced silence from the vividly dressed employee.

DHL spokesman Robert Mintz says there’s good reason for the company’s costume, er, uniform change.

“The new uniforms are intended to differentiate them from other courier companies” Ñ for example, UPS, with its brown attire Ñ “and to further build the corporate identity,” Mintz says. “Based on extensive customer research, we believe that our new courier uniform’s yellow and red combination will effectively unify our brand image in conjunction with our other branded items: vehicles, buildings and drop boxes.”

The image change was initiated by German transport company Deutsche Post, which recently purchased DHL. The deal also brought Seattle-based Airborne Express under the DHL umbrella.

Portland is one of 11 international cities where the new uniform is being test-marketed. In all, 3,600 DHL couriers worldwide are participating in the trial, with a global release of the fresh look scheduled for early 2005.

Mintz says other designs were considered during the 18-month research period, but he didn’t indicate which restaurants provided inspiration for these looks.

He notes that the company is open to criticism from its employees about the look.

“If improvements are needed based upon the feedback, they’ll be made,” Mintz says generously.

Feedback, schmeedback. Many workers aren’t waiting around to hear the guilty verdict on the new design. Portland DHL employee Lew Yocom already has gone back to the gray Airborne Express duds he used to wear, saying the red and yellow get-up was getting him down.

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