InPost Brand Guidelines: Kraków’s Paczkomat Network, From Leaflets to a FedEx-Backed Buyout

A distribution firm that took on the post office.

InPost grew out of a leaflet business. Rafał Brzoska set up Integer.pl in 1999 to distribute advertising leaflets, according to English Wikipedia and InPost’s own history page, and in 2006 InPost was founded as its subsidiary. The company itself now dates its story to 1999, the year of Integer.pl.

Its first market was letters. Polish Wikipedia says InPost entered the postal market in November 2006, at a time when Poczta Polska, the state post, still held a monopoly on the most numerous category of letters, those up to 50 grams; full liberalisation of the Polish postal market, first planned for 2011, was pushed back to 1 January 2013. The new company built on the distribution network and technology Integer.pl already used for leaflets.

The change of direction came with machines. In September 2009 the first InPost parcel locker, the Paczkomat, was set up in Kraków, Polish Wikipedia says, and InPost’s history page describes it as a self-service machine for sending and receiving parcels, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. InPost shares began trading on the Warsaw Stock Exchange on 13 October 2015, the year it also bought Polska Grupa Pocztowa.

Letters were then dropped. Polish Wikipedia says that after a contract to serve Poland’s courts ended in early 2016, InPost restructured and on 1 August 2016 stopped handling traditional letters to concentrate on e-commerce parcels; its own history lists a door-to-door courier service launched the same year. In 2017 the shares were bought up by AI Prime, a company of the private-equity fund Advent International, and removed from the Warsaw market on 19 September 2017.

The Paczkomat and the app.

The locker is the product the brand is built around. InPost’s history page says the network passed 10,000 machines in Poland just before Christmas 2020, and the company reported 62,000 active machines across the group at the end of 2025, in nine European countries. The company’s own name for the machine is the Paczkomat.

InPost says its lockers are designed at its own research and development centre. It says its engineers designed all the electronics of a machine called New FM, the first of which went into service on 1 April 2019, and it lists newer variants: L-shaped and U-shaped lockers for sites where a straight bank will not fit, an indoor locker for shopping centres, car parks and offices, refrigerated lockers, a solar-powered locker and a screenless model operated only from a phone. Production is local too: in March 2021 the Polish technology site android.com.pl reported that InPost was building a new locker factory of 7,230 square metres in the City Logistics Kraków Airport park, due to start that June.

The phone became part of the locker. The InPost Mobile app, launched in 2019, lets users open a locker compartment remotely, Polish Wikipedia says, and InPost says the app also tracks parcels, finds machines and sends parcels without a printed label. In February 2022 the company said the app had 9.3 million users in Poland, which it described as the country’s second most popular e-commerce app.

The brand also travels through sport. English Wikipedia lists sponsorship of the Poland men’s national football team from 2022, of Newcastle United from 2023 and of Atlético Madrid as official logistics sponsor from August 2024.

How locker companies present themselves.

Parcel locker companies are seen first as street furniture. Their machines stand in banks outside supermarkets, petrol stations, railway stations and shopping centres, finished in the operator’s colours — often yellow, red or grey. The first InPost Paczkomat, for example, was set up in Kraków in 2009, according to Polish Wikipedia, and the company reported some 62,000 machines across its group at the end of 2025.

Up close, the brand is an interface. A touchscreen, a keypad, a QR code or a code sent by text message opens one door among dozens, and some operators, InPost among them, let customers open a compartment from a phone app instead. Some machines hide the storage altogether: a robotic locker keeps parcels on shelves inside and hands each one out through a single window, as the robot Cleveron installed at a Walmart store in Arkansas in 2016 did, according to the Estonian broadcaster ERR.

Not every locker is public. Makers also sell systems for apartment-building lobbies, offices, university campuses and shops, where the machine may carry the landlord’s or retailer’s name rather than the maker’s. In those places the locker company’s brand often lives in software, signage and the small print on the cabinet, while the delivery vans and couriers that fill the lockers carry the carrier’s livery.

Beyond the street, these companies present themselves at logistics fairs and postal-industry events, in trade press and in investor material, where lockers are shown as hardware, software and service together. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are designed and made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Amsterdam listing to private ownership.

The company went abroad and public again. InPost S.A., a holding company registered in Luxembourg, listed on Euronext Amsterdam in January 2021, while the Polish operating company remains in Kraków, Polish Wikipedia says. In July 2021 InPost completed its purchase of Mondial Relay, the French out-of-home delivery network, which its history page says opened France, Benelux and Iberia to the group. In the United Kingdom it took a 30% stake in Menzies Distribution in 2023 and the remaining 70% in 2024, and in April 2025 it took control of the parcel carrier Yodel; English Wikipedia says a High Court dispute over Yodel’s ownership was decided in InPost’s favour in December 2025. Czech investment group PPF became a shareholder in 2023, according to Polish Wikipedia.

In 2026 the company was taken private. On 9 February 2026 InPost announced a recommended all-cash offer from a consortium of Advent International, FedEx, A&R Investments and PPF. Bloomberg, in a report carried by Transport Topics on 18 September 2026, said the consortium led by FedEx and Advent had acquired InPost after 89.8% of shares were tendered, and that after completion FedEx and Advent would each hold 37%, A&R Investments, controlled by Brzoska, 16%, and PPF 10%, with Brzoska remaining chief executive. On 7 October 2026 InPost and the bidding company announced that the bidder would hold 98.49% of the shares, that a squeeze-out of the rest would follow, and that the shares would be delisted from Euronext Amsterdam on 23 October 2026.

The brand itself stays rooted in Poland: the company still describes itself as founded by Brzoska in Poland in 1999, and its group website sends French consumers to Mondial Relay and those in Poland, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Portugal to InPost sites of their own.

For a design guide, InPost shows how a piece of street furniture can become the brand: the locker, the app and the name Paczkomat do the work a shopfront would do. Compare FedEx, now its largest shareholder alongside Advent, and Cleveron, an Estonian maker of robotic parcel lockers. For this guide we use amber, charcoal and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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