Deutsche Post as well as numerous postal companies and international organizations such as the Universal Postal Union and the International Post Corporation have announced their support for a proposal by Austrian Post to create its own emoji for mail carriers at the Unicode Consortium based in Mountain View, California.
The aim is to make visible the around 5.3 million employees in the postal sector and tens of millions more in the courier, express, and parcel (KEP) industry. Emojis are a fixed part of communication in digital media. There are 3,800 of these pictograms representing emotions, activities or professions. An important profession that millions of customers interact with every day is missing: that of the mail and parcel deliverer. On this occasion, Deutsche Post aims to draw attention ahead of World Post Day
tomorrow, October 9, which celebrates the importance of national postal services.
„Whether it is the joy of receiving a personal letter, sending important documents, or the eagerly awaited receipt of the ordered goods: the profession of the mail and parcel deliverer is worldwide an integral part of everyday life for people. The creation of a delivery-person emoji would enable billions of people to express the emotions associated with it in the digital world. We believe it's time to give the people who deliver to households and businesses every day, come rain or shine, their own face with their own emoji," explained Benjamin Rasch, Head of Marketing for the Mail and Parcel Division of the DHL Group.
Broad support from the industry
The proposal has received broad international support. It is supported, among
others, by the International Post Corporation (IPC), a consortium representing the largest postal companies in Europe, Asia and North America; the Union of Post Unions of the Americas, Spain and Portugal (UPAEP), the association of all North and South American postal companies, and UNI Global Union, a transnational organization representing 20 million workers in 150 countries.
To date, in addition to Deutsche Post, the national postal companies from Egypt, Ireland, Latvia, Poland, Switzerland, Slovakia and Slovenia have joined – and of course Austrian Post as initiator of the initiative. A resolution supporting the delivery-person emoji, which was proposed at the World Postal Congress of the Universal Postal Union in late September in Dubai, was unanimously adopted by the participating member countries.
The path to the emoji: process and next steps
The basis
for a new emoji is always a proposal submitted to the non-profit Unicode Consortium, which manages the standardized character set and defines individual emojis. The applicants could submit their ideas for new emojis by July 2025, and Austrian Post has proposed the delivery person with the support of IPC and UNI Global Union.
The Unicode Consortium now has until the end of November to review all applications received and decide on the next steps. If the proposal is approved, the Unicode Consortium will develop a design proposal. Based on that, software companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, WhatsApp and others will develop their own emoji and add it to their character set. In this case, the delivery person would likely be available as an emoji on all smartphones worldwide during 2026, according
