Launching a global leader in logistics
“This new brand will serve as a North Star for our business — rallying our employees around the world and instilling confidence among our customers. Logistics is more mission-critical than ever, and only GXO has the global scale and expertise to meet the moment. The brand we created with Lippincott shows that.”
CEO, GXO
“This was a fast-paced, iterative process. Lippincott provided an unmatched level of creativity and focus on solutions, with an eye for making sure the new brand would have maximum impact for investors, employees and customers. I couldn’t have imagined a better strategic partner to guide us.”
CEO and Chairman, XPO
“In March 2021, XPO announced it would spinoff its contract logistics business into a separate publicly traded company called GXO. Those shares began trading back in August 2. GXO has gained roughly 17% since then compared to a nearly 4% decline in the S&P 500 over that same stretch of time.”
Launching a global leader in logistics
How do you claim leadership in a fragmented and dynamic industry? This was the challenge XPO Logistics brought to Lippincott when it made the strategic choice to spin off its supply chain management business into a new entity.
This new company was poised to be the largest pure-play contract logistics provider in the world, and it needed a brand that would match the size of its ambition. All in a mere six and a half weeks.
Partnering with the company’s 20-person leadership group, helmed by the new CEO, Malcolm Wilson, and XPO CEO and Chairman, Brad Jacobs, our teams collaborated across multiple, concurrent workstreams including brand strategy, naming, tagline generation, logo and visual system design, website development and more.
We established clear criteria: the new brand had to be differentiated from long-established competitors, while positioning itself as a next-gen leader among them, and appeal to global audiences, investors and an existing customer base of blue-chip companies.
Our North Star was set by the company’s new purpose: to unlock logistics at full potential. From there, we established the name, GXO. A nod to the brand’s XPO heritage, it’s inspired by the idea that the company brings game-changing opportunities to customers, employees and shareholders. It’s short, impactful, and memorable, able to stand alone across key customer and investor touchpoints, such as the stock ticker and company URL. The new tagline, “Logistics at full potential,” brings the brand purpose to life for external audiences and signifies GXO’s commitment to push what’s possible every day to deliver the best results.
The visual execution of the brand was the heart of shifting perceptions of what a contract logistics company can do. The system needed to convey GXO’s technology-driven agility, its ability to execute with precision, and the confidence of an industry leader. The logo was our starting point; custom lettering and bold color assert the company’s focus on performance.
The choice of imagery, patterns, typography and illustrations reflects a world of data and highly efficient robotics. Motion was purposefully considered so that the system behaves, feels and looks like the powerful supply chain it represents. Whether across all digital platforms, video, print or even on uniforms, each piece of the brand is designed to imply that this is a company that can unlock full potential.
Following the announcement of the new name in March 2021, Lippincott worked hand in hand with company leadership to prepare GXO to go public, helping them activate the brand across their employee base with messaging development and trainings. The GXO brand was fully revealed to the world at the New York Stock Exchange on August 2, 2021. In August of 2022, XPO’s Investor Presentation recognized GXO Logistics spin-off as the best-performing stock of all fully divested spin-offs in 2021. In a time where logistics is more mission-critical than ever, GXO is ready to change the game with its fresh, forward-thinking brand.