Deutsche Post, along with numerous postal companies and international organizations such as the Universal Postal Union and International Post Corporation, has announced its support for Austrian Post's request to create its own emoji for postal deliverers at the Unicode Consortium based in Mountain View, California. The aim is to make the around 5.3 million employees in the postal sector and countless millions more in the courier, express, and parcel (CEP) industry more visible. 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 touches millions of customers every day is missing: that of the mail and parcel deliverer. On the occasion of World Post Day tomorrow, October 9, which celebrates the importance of national postal services, Deutsche
Post aims to draw attention to this issue.
“Whether it is the joy of receiving a personal letter, the sending of 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 daily life for people. The creation of a delivery emoji would enable billions of people to express the emotions associated with it in the digital world. We believe it is 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. Among others, it is
supported by the International Post Corporation (IPC), an industry group representing the largest postal companies in Europe, Asia, and North America; the Union of Posts 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, alongside Deutsche Post, 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 in support of the delivery emoji, proposed at the World Postal Congress of the Universal Postal Union at the end of 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 nonprofit Unicode Consortium, which manages the standardized character set and defines individual emojis. The applicants could submit their ideas for new emojis until July 2025, and the Austrian Post has proposed the deliverer with support from IPC and UNI Global Union. The Unicode Consortium now has until the end of November to review all submitted proposals 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 deliverer would likely be available as an emoji on all smartphones worldwide over the course of 2026, according to Deutsche
