ABOUT

The Brief :
DHL eCommerce had an ambition to be the biggest logistics brand on TikTok. And unlike the flagship division DHL Express, they had license to rip up the rule book. We’d already worked with the brand on a paid campaign to reach 1 million followers, but in 2026, they came to us with a challenge to take over content creation and community management, and use it to build fame and connection for the brand among a brand new audience on TikTok.

Mediums:
Social media

Concept:
We quickly noticed that people weren’t coming to TikTok with legitimate customer service queries - they were coming for a laugh. So, our strategy centred around content that gave the audience something unexpected in their feeds, and an invitation to join in. Our humour skewed Gen Z, but rather than follow big trends, we played with niche corners of TikTok, trans-cultural moments, and characters of our own creation.

Our content was also built around our audience. We responded to their reactions, and quickly expanded our creative universe by doubling down on the facets of our content that sparked the most conversation. And if someone did ask us ‘where’s my package?’ we treated it as the joke it probably was.

Target audience:
The target was Gen Z and Gen Alpha – new generations who currently had very little opinion at all about DHL eCommerce. We won them over by speaking not as a brand, but an individual admin with no one to stop their unhinged ideas.

Execution:
We began creating content with a chronically online sense of humour that felt at home on the weirdest corners of TikTok. One of our first pieces used the audio 'The horse is here', which saw strong audience response and presented the opportunity to resurface the horse as a recurring character in our posts – supporting our aim to build a ‘universe’ around our content along with our followers.

Our audience wanted a reason to engage, so engagement bait was a key part of the strategy, albeit executed with signature weirdness.

We treat the comments section as a playground (especially when our followers let us roast them). We recognised that there was a strong section of commenters who were eager for recognition, and we were tactical in who we responded to – replying enough that the comments section felt busy with back-and-forth banter, but not so much that everyone who commented could expect a reply – driving a feeling of exclusivity. We also treated it as our main inspiration ground: the more they questioned us (‘dhl are u ok’, the more we showed them that maybe we weren’t). When a commenter asked for a plushie of one of our strange creations, we hinted something could be in the works.

Crucial to the success of the account was maintaining a first-person persona. We knew that the shared weirdness we had with our audience rested on them seeing the admin behind the brand, not a faceless corporation, so small touches like always using ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ helped us maintain that identity.

Our content doesn’t deviate when it comes to customer collaborations – examples like this piece made with Sendcloud amplify the brand without alienating our audience base.

Results:
+994.3% increase in comments and +239.6% in shares on TikTok since the implementation of the new strategy 

2,317 comments and 28,642 shares on our top performing piece of content