PostNord Brand Guidelines: Posten Norden 2009, a Crowned Post Horn & a Blue Livery

Copenhagen 1624, Stockholm 1636.

PostNord joins two of Europe’s oldest postal services. English Wikipedia traces the Danish side to 1624, when King Christian IV issued a regulation on carrying letters; the service ran under private as well as royal control before it was nationalised in 1711. Even before then, the article says, Danish postal staff wore uniforms in red and yellow, colours that have remained the organisation’s distinguishing marks. Denmark’s first postage stamp followed in 1851, and in 1927 the postal and telegraph services were combined as Post- og Telegrafvæsenet.

The Swedish side dates from 1636, when the regency government ruling during Queen Christina’s minority issued postal regulations. Private monopolies ran the service for spells between the 1650s and the 1670s; from 1677 it stayed under government control, and the monopoly lasted until 1993. From 1685 Swedish letters were stamped to show that the sender had paid, and postage stamps arrived in 1855. A post horn with a crown served as the Swedish service’s symbol from the start, English Wikipedia says; its drawing was standardised for the first time in 1912 and changed several times in the 20th century and again in 2001.

The sources used for this guide do not say how PostNord’s Danish predecessor operated during the occupation of 1940–1945.

Both services became companies in the 1990s. Denmark moved its telecoms business into a separate company in 1990 and its postal operations into the state-owned Post Danmark A/S in 1995; Sweden turned its postal service into the state-owned Posten AB in 1994. Danish Wikipedia says the investment firm CVC Capital Partners bought 22 per cent of Post Danmark in 2005 and sold the stake back to the Danish state in 2009. In Sweden, post offices were replaced in 2001 by “parcel shops” inside partner retail stores, English Wikipedia says.

Posten Norden, then PostNord.

The merger came in June 2009. On 24 June that year the holding company Posten Norden AB took ownership of Post Danmark A/S and Posten AB, English and Swedish Wikipedia say. The deal was reviewed under European Union competition law and approved on condition that overlapping parcel delivery for business customers in Denmark was sold. On 17 May 2011 the holding company took the name PostNord AB. In 2015 the Swedish operating company, Posten AB, was renamed PostNord Group AB, while the Danish operating company kept its legal name, Post Danmark A/S.

The ownership is unusual. The Swedish state holds 60 per cent of the shares and the Danish state, through its Ministry of Transport, 40 per cent, but the voting rights are split equally and each owner names the same number of board members, according to English Wikipedia; the BBC gave the same 60–40 split in March 2025. Danish Wikipedia places the group’s headquarters in Solna, in Sweden, and PostNord’s own website says the Solna headquarters sits at the centre of a network with offices in Denmark, Norway and Finland. Swedish Wikipedia says that, counted by employees, PostNord is Sweden’s second-largest company after Volvo Cars; English Wikipedia gives an average of 28,358 full-time-equivalent staff in 2021, most of them in Sweden and Denmark.

Its business is mostly Nordic. PostNord delivers parcels in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland and works with DPDgroup on international parcels, English Wikipedia says; a separate business area, PostNord Strålfors, serves organisations that need to write to large numbers of people. In Sweden, PostNord moved letter delivery to every other weekday, a model Swedish Wikipedia says began across the country on 6 May 2022, while express letters and parcels are still delivered daily; on 1 September 2025 it ended domestic mail flights.

Postal operators and their signs.

Postal operators are among the oldest names a country carries. Many began as royal or state services centuries ago and became companies only in recent decades, and their identities often hold on to symbols from that past while the business shifts from letters to parcels. Colour does much of the work: red, yellow, blue and orange wordmarks appear on post boxes, vans, uniforms and counters, and a colour can outlast the institution that first chose it. Denmark’s postal service wore red and yellow even before it was nationalised in 1711, and Sweden’s has used a post horn with a crown since its foundation in 1636, according to English Wikipedia.

The symbols repeat across borders. Post horns appear in several European marks; envelopes, birds in flight and arrows suggest movement elsewhere. Names matter too. Many operators use the national name in the local language, or in two or three languages at once, and some now trade under a group name that sits above the post office itself.

Their public faces have changed with the work. Websites now lead with parcels, tracking and delivery options, then letters and stamps and, for some operators, payments, money transfers or banking. Parcel lockers, service points inside shops, delivery vans and counter photography have become as common in their imagery as the post box. Stamp issues remain a design programme of their own, with commemorative sets and products for collectors, and philately keeps older issues in view.

Most of these operators are state-owned, or were until recently, so laws, annual reports and press releases are the main record of their ownership and structure. This guide sets out what those records and independent press say about each operator’s history, ownership and visual habits, and marks the companies’ own claims as theirs.

Blue vans, red post boxes and the end of Danish letters.

The visual change came gradually. Around 2013, English Wikipedia says, PostNord began repainting Swedish vans and trucks from the old post yellow to its own light blue, starting with parcel trucks; since 2015 the colour has been applied across the Swedish business. In Denmark, Danish Wikipedia says, a 2016 campaign around the PostNord brand had the company call itself PostNord Danmark and switch its visual presence to the group’s blue, keeping only the red post boxes and the red logo with the post horn. Swedish Wikipedia notes the company’s own spellings, “PostNord” and, in lower case, “postnord.”

The sharpest change came in Denmark’s letters. On 6 March 2025, the BBC reported, PostNord said it would end all letter deliveries in Denmark at the end of 2025, after a fall of about 90 per cent in letter volumes since 2000 — from around 1.4 billion to 110 million in 2024. A new Postal Act in 2024 had opened the letter market to competition and ended its exemption from VAT. In August 2025 the BBC reported that 1,500 red post boxes were being removed from Danish streets and that the company would focus on parcels. Danish Wikipedia says PostNord Danmark delivered its last letters on 30 December 2025 and that Dansk Avis Omdeling, known as DAO, took over letter delivery in Denmark. The change did not affect letter delivery in Sweden, Swedish Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, PostNord shows how a merged company can move from national colours to one group colour while keeping a few inherited symbols, such as a red post horn. Compare Posti, the Finnish postal operator, and Deutsche Post. For this guide we use a Nordic blue, a post-box red and a pale sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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