Self-Service Postal Store Is the New Hybrid Space of Online Shopping

Gone are the days of waiting at home for your deliveries and forgetting (or avoiding) having to go to the post office and return your items. Posti Box is a retail concept by Posti, Finland’s dominant postal service, with local studio, Fyra, and consultancy, Motley, offering self-service parcel collection and drop-off.

The first Posti Box store is located in the centre of Helsinki. When you enter, you are met with a lounge area, where you can even have a coffee, with 600 postal lockers in hues of pink in the background. Users of Posti Box, can collect parcels from the lockers, try on their purchases in the plush fitting rooms and then recycle the packaging or pack it up and return it. Each area is colour-coded to streamline the process and make the flow through the store intuitive.

While online shopping offered the convenience of having your purchases delivered straight to your door, bumps have appeared in the road where people might not be home to accept their deliveries or returns are made difficult when you can’t simply drop your parcel in a post box. Posti Box addresses these issues while dressing up the store as a calm retail space, lounge and fitting room. Posti Box even includes a shop window of featured online products and brands so you can see your next purchase in real life before ordering it for collection at Posti Box.