Anti-Customer Service: How DHL Became TikTok's Biggest Logistics Brand

DHL eCommerce came to us with an ambition to become the biggest logistics brand on TikTok. Unlike the flagship DHL Express division, they had licence to rip up the rulebook.

Having already worked together on a paid campaign to reach one million followers, in 2026 they set us a new challenge: take over content creation and community management, and use it to build genuine fame and connection with an audience that barely knew the brand existed.

Our target was Gen Z and Gen Alpha, generations who held little to no opinion of DHL eCommerce at all.

The insight that shaped everything was simple: people weren't coming to the account with genuine customer service queries, they were coming for a laugh. So we made a deliberate choice not to speak as a brand, but as an individual admin with no one to rein in their more unhinged ideas.

We built content around our audience rather than at them, giving them something unexpected in their feeds and an open invitation to join in. Our humour skewed Gen Z, but rather than chase the biggest trends, we played in the niche corners of TikTok, leaning into trans-cultural moments and characters of our own creation.

An early post using the audio ‘The horse is here’ drew a strong response, and we resurfaced the horse as a recurring character, building a universe around our content alongside our followers.

We treated the comments section as a playground, replying tactically — enough that it felt busy with banter, but not so much that everyone could expect a reply, driving a feeling of exclusivity. The more followers questioned us with lines like ‘dhl are u ok’, the more we leaned into showing them maybe we weren’t.

A first-person persona kept the admin human rather than corporate. Even our customer collaborations, like a piece with delivery partner Sendcloud, stayed on-brand, amplifying the partner without alienating our audience. When a commenter asked for a plushie of one of our stranger creations, we hinted something could be in the works — and if someone did ask ‘where’s my package?’, we treated it as the joke it probably was.