Parcel Pending Brand Guidelines: An Irvine Locker Start-Up, Neopost & Quadient

An apartment manager starts a locker company.

Parcel Pending grew out of apartment management. According to the Orange County Business Journal in February 2019, its founder, Lori Torres, spent thirteen years with the Irvine Company, the Newport Beach real-estate developer and one of California’s largest apartment owners, most of them as a senior vice president of property management. She knew how much trouble deliveries caused in large residential buildings, and her answer was a locker system that let residents collect their own parcels without staff involvement.

In 2013 Torres left the Irvine Company to start Parcel Pending in Irvine, California, putting her own money into it and looking for partners, the Business Journal reported. The local investor network Tech Coast Angels backed the company shortly after it began, and the paper said it was developed with help from Orange County resources such as the Small Business Development Center and the OCTANe network; the chairman of Tech Coast Angels called the company “a case study in local entrepreneurship.” Torres was named one of the Business Journal’s Innovators of the Year in 2017.

By the time of its sale the company had grown. Torres told the paper in 2019 that Parcel Pending had installed more than 2,700 systems, amounting to about 160,000 locker doors, and was taking in more than 1.2 million packages a month, by her account. The company began with apartment buildings, and its website still lists multifamily housing first among the customers it serves, ahead of retail, carriers, universities and commercial buildings.

Neopost, then Quadient.

In January 2019 the French mail-equipment group Neopost bought Parcel Pending, the Orange County Business Journal reported the following month, adding that only 32 days passed between the letter of intent and the closing. The paper described Neopost as a mail-services company looking to crack the American market for electronic lockers. Parcel Pending was to stay in Irvine, with Torres remaining chief executive for at least two years.

The parent soon changed its own name. In September 2019 Neopost renamed itself Quadient, French Wikipedia records, to mark a gradual shift from franking machines and mailroom equipment towards digital work. The locker brand was kept, and the company now trades as Parcel Pending by Quadient, which its website describes as one of Quadient’s three solution lines. In January 2021 the Business Journal still described Parcel Pending as an Irvine smart-locker provider “owned by France-based Quadient,” with Torres quoted as chief executive and founder.

New products followed the sale. In early 2019 Parcel Pending announced lockers for individual houses, starting with projects by the homebuilder Toll Brothers in Las Vegas, the Business Journal reported. In 2020 its installations roughly doubled, the same paper reported in January 2021, helped by a deal with the home-improvement chain Lowe’s that put Parcel Pending lockers in its more than 1,700 American stores; installations of refrigerated lockers and lockers for colleges also grew.

Quadient has also bought another locker company and brought it under the same name. Multifamily Executive reported in December 2024 that Quadient had acquired Package Concierge, a locker company based in Manhattan, Kansas, in a deal that closed on 17 December, adding about 3,000 installations and taking Quadient past 25,000 locker installations worldwide. Package Concierge was folded into “the Parcel Pending by Quadient family,” the magazine quoted Quadient’s Austin Maddox as saying; Maddox also dated Quadient’s locker business to “its first locker installation in 2013,” the year Parcel Pending began.

Lockers in lobbies, stores and campuses.

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.

A brand kept by its new owner.

Under Quadient, Parcel Pending has become the name for the group’s lockers in a number of countries. Its website offers country editions for the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Australia, and the company says its network covers more than 28,000 locations worldwide, with new installations across North America, Europe and Japan. Those figures are the company’s own. Multifamily Executive reported in 2024 that Quadient was concentrating its locker expansion on the United States, Europe and Japan, with a target of 40,000 installed units by 2030 under a plan it calls “Elevate to 2030.”

The product range is described by use rather than by model name. The website lists indoor lockers, outdoor lockers, drop box lockers and refrigerated lockers, alongside package-room systems, and says its open-network drop box lockers are now available to carriers and retailers. It calls its systems “vertical-, location-, and carrier-agnostic,” and says they are supported by all major global carriers. Its slogan, used across the site, is “Delivering More,” marked as a trademark. The about page now names Quadient executives for the locker business, including Benoit Berson as chief solutions officer and Maddox as executive vice president for the Americas.

For a design guide, Parcel Pending shows how an acquired brand can be kept rather than replaced: the start-up’s name survives with “by Quadient” added to it. Compare Quadient, the French group that owns it, and Smiota, a California locker company that is still founder-led. For this guide we use a navy, a pale sky blue and an orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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