A dispatch app for bike messengers in San Francisco.

Postmates was founded in San Francisco in 2011. English Wikipedia names its founders as Bastian Lehmann, Sean Plaice and Sam Street, and TechCrunch, reporting the public launch on 15 December 2011, said the company had been founded that May. The writer, Eric Eldon, compared the service to taxi-dispatch software: a business or a consumer placed a delivery order through an iPhone app, nearby couriers and bike messengers were notified, and one of them accepted the job, picked the item up and brought it over, while the customer followed the trip through a tracking link sent by email. TechCrunch also noted that the company had been a finalist at its Disrupt conference.

From the start the company described itself as a courier network rather than a restaurant service. Lehmann, called a cofounder in that 2011 report, told TechCrunch that the focus was on local businesses, on any company that wanted to use its API, and on consumers, and that it was looking at other cities, likely including New York and Los Angeles, as well as suburbs. The early recruits, he said, were experienced couriers.

The consumer side arrived in May 2012. On 17 May 2012 TechCrunch reported that Postmates had released the public version of an iPhone app called “Get It Now”, active in the San Francisco Bay Area, which let users ask a courier to buy and deliver items from shops and restaurants around them. Lehmann, by then described as co-founder and chief executive, said the company had given its couriers credit cards so they could pay for goods on a customer’s behalf, and told the site that the idea was to let people turn any nearby place into one that delivers, rather than relying on the handful of restaurants that already did.

A Berlin logotype and a campaign in Los Angeles.

The company kept widening what a courier could carry. English Wikipedia says that in December 2014 Postmates opened its application programming interface to merchants, so that small businesses could offer local delivery, and that in November 2017 it launched in Mexico City, outside the United States, before leaving Mexico in December 2019. In December 2018, the same article says, it announced an autonomous delivery rover.

The visible identity was reworked in 2017. The Berlin design studio Neubau says on its project page that it designed a new Postmates logotype and an “exclusive custom designed corporate typeset,” and that the basic edition of 2017 comprised Postmates Bold, Postmates Medium and Postmates Regular. In 2019, Neubau says, the family was extended with further weights and a separate Display edition, also cut in several weights.

The advertising leaned on that name. On 24 January 2018 Postmates announced, in a press release, a campaign called “We Get It”, developed with its creative agency of record, 180LA, and its media agency partner, MBMG. The release said it would run on billboards, bus shelters and wild postings across Los Angeles, with digital and podcast extensions nationally. Jason Rappaport, a creative director at 180LA, said in the release that the work had been written for specific Los Angeles neighbourhoods, restaurants and food trends. Lizz Niemeyer, Postmates’ director of brand marketing, said users talked about being able to “postmate anything, from anywhere,” turning the brand name into a verb — a phrase that also sits in the title of the company’s website today.

In May 2019, English Wikipedia says, Postmates changed how it paid couriers, and a labour group urged workers to refuse jobs in response.

Icons, bags and decals.

A delivery app’s brand lives in more places than its home screen. The app icon is the smallest and most-repeated version of the identity: a square tile that has to read at thumbnail size beside dozens of others, so it usually reduces the brand to one letter, one symbol or one flat field of colour. Inside the app, that same colour tends to carry buttons, map pins and order-status screens, which is why delivery identities lean on a single owned hue rather than a full palette.

Off the phone, the brand travels with the courier. Insulated bags, backpacks and jackets turn the mark into street signage, and they are often seen from behind, in motion and in poor light, so a bold wordmark or symbol on a plain ground works better than fine detail. Restaurants add a third layer: window and door decals, counter stickers and tablet stands that tell passers-by which apps a shop takes orders from.

For a designer, the useful lesson is consistency across scale — the same colour and symbol should hold up on a phone icon, a courier bag and a shopfront sticker.

A brand that kept its name inside Uber.

Ownership changed in 2020. On 6 July 2020 CNN Business reported that Uber had agreed to buy Postmates in an all-stock deal, with Uber calling the company “highly complementary” to Uber Eats, its own meal-delivery service; Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, said in a statement that the two companies shared a belief that their platforms could serve local commerce beyond food delivery. The purchase closed on 1 December 2020, Supermarket News reported that day, and Uber said both delivery apps would keep running separately while sharing a combined merchant and delivery network. Uber has owned Postmates since December 2020.

Behind the scenes the two were merged step by step. In July 2021 The Rideshare Guy reported that Uber was taking the Postmates Fleet app, the version used by couriers, offline, and that people signing up to deliver on the Postmates website were being sent to the Uber Eats sign-up page instead. The customer brand stayed. Read in October 2026, postmates.com still invites visitors to “Order on Postmates,” carries the line “Anything from Anywhere” in its page title, and closes with a 2026 copyright notice in the name of Postmates Inc., while its sign-in and payment pages run on Uber’s systems.

In April 2020, English Wikipedia says, New York residents filed an antitrust suit, Davitashvili v. Grubhub, against Postmates, DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats.

The Neubau logotype and typeface, the “postmate” verb from the 2018 campaign release and the Postmates name all date from the years before the sale; the website read in 2026 still uses that name.

For a design guide, Postmates shows how an acquired brand can keep its own name and voice on top of a parent’s platform. Compare Uber Eats, the sister service that now carries its couriers, and DoorDash, another San Francisco delivery app. For this guide we use black, paper and an amber with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Postmates’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.