In France, one out of two parcels ordered online is picked up in the offices of La Poste, the French National Postal Services.

Yet 40% of them are returned, because of a simple reason : clothes ordered online that do not fit.

When we noticed that some of our customers came back to our offices a few hours after picking up a parcel to send them back, we decided to help.

And even if we can’t ensure that our customers’ online order will fit perfectly, we found a way to make their whole experience a little bit less frustrating.

To simplify the lives of our clients, we installed changing rooms inside our post offices.

Inspired by the design of our traditional yellow letterboxes, each changing room can be locked and features a mirror, chair and shelf, giving consumers a way to try on their online clothing orders and, if needed, seamlessly send them straight back to the sender.

This way, we allowed customers to collect the merchandise, check it out on the premises and, in the event of a poor fit, send it back. All this to help people avoid making pointless trips back and forth and save time.

The strategy was simple. “ Make our clients’ lives easier”. Yet, the stakes were big. Being a public company created in 1477, La Poste is no longer a company you only think of when you need to send parcels, but a brand diversifying itself as the provider of many new services to match the changing habits of a changing world.

Apart from solving logistical challenges, the changing rooms act to drive footfall to La Poste’s branches. This is crucial for La Poste because the French postal service is not just in the business of deliveries, it is also a major financial player, offering an unrestricted ‘basic’ savings account to everyone in France alongside insurance products, credit and even microloans – all accessible through La Poste’s branches.

Being our most talked about innovation ever, invading Gen Z social media streams, our changing rooms ultimately became a business driver.

We implemented our changing rooms in 3 phases.

First with a pre-release, with 9 cabins in Paris, to invite journalists to discover what was then an experiment for a national PR release.

Then, we implemented 253 cabins all over the country in selected offices, to collect feedback from both employees and customers, in order for the La Poste HQ’s to confirm or cancel the initiative on a larger scale.

Due to the incredible positive feedback from users (98% positive brand sentiment) and employees, a PR reaction with crazy proportions (the Changing Rooms being our most media covered campaign ever, in France and abroad) and daily uses of our boxes wherever they were implemented, our changing rooms became the spearhead of a vast transformation program of our 17 000 offices all over the country.

- 98% positive brand sentiment

- 500 million impressions

- 4,83 million euro in earned media

- Campaign covered on all the top 10 news TV shows in France

- 130+ Articles in France, UK, USA, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan

- x4 brand mentions online (Dec 2023 vs Jan 2024)