Powering GLS’s OOH Expansion in Europe

The Partnership

GLS was watching the same shift play out everywhere in the B2C market: customers moving from home delivery to out-of-home pickup. Lockers had to become part of the baseline offering, fast. The partner they needed to implement this change had to move quickly, have experience with real differences between markets, and deliver a reliable solution that GLS could put its name in front of customers and drivers from day one.

"In the B2C space, we're seeing a huge shift from home delivery to out-of-home options. Customers want flexibility, convenience and freedom. That means we need to offer lockers as a standard part of our delivery options. Not as a premium, but as a baseline." - Johan Holstein, Director of Digital & Last-Mile Transformation at GLS

What started as a handful of conversations in late 2023 has become one of Bloq.it's fastest-moving partnerships. Through 2025, the rollout carried on from Italy and Spain into Germany, with more than 2,000 locker modules already produced along the way and hundreds of lockers now sitting in neighbourhoods across all three countries.

The Project

Bloq.it's battery-powered NEXT locker gave GLS a way around the usual bottleneck: no electrical permits, no civil works, full locker functionality where it was needed.

"Installing a grid-powered network takes time. Battery lockers? You can go live in days. With Bloq.it, we turned concepts into operations across countries at a speed we didn't think possible." - Peter Rønde, Business Development OOH Advisor at GLS

For GLS, the lockers also needed to reflect their identity down to the smallest detail: a specific paint finish, and an on-screen interface tailored per market, with language, layout, and interaction flow adapted to local expectations instead of one template stretched across borders. Teams in Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, and Rome worked directly alongside local GLS teams to keep that rollout moving at pace without cutting corners on quality.

"We're building infrastructure that supports our partners' identities. That means neutrality, but with deep personalisation. We scale without sacrificing care." - Miha Jagodic, CEO at Bloq.it

Delivering that at scale meant Bloq.it's teams became an extension of GLS's own operations in several countries: handling site surveys, city-specific planning, transport, warehousing, and the installation itself, market by market. For a rollout this size, cost discipline mattered as much as speed: every new country meant new capital spend, so getting the plan right the first time counted as much as getting there fast. That same discipline is what let GLS hand Bloq.it something as visible as its own brand experience at scale.

"Our clients often don't see the complexity behind the scenes. But they feel the outcome: fast installations, smooth operations, and full visibility. Transparency and agility are core to how we work." - Miha Jagodic, CEO at Bloq.it

Looking Ahead

The partnership has kept evolving alongside the rollout itself. GLS started by leaning on Bloq.it's full end-to-end platform to move fast and get to market, and as the network has matured, they've shifted toward building more directly on locker.OS, giving them more control as the program scales into new countries. With reliable locker networks now live in Spain, Italy, and Germany, and more than 2,000 modules produced in 2025 alone, the goal ahead hasn't changed: one dependable, consistent experience, wherever a customer picks up or drops off a parcel.

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About GLS

GLS Group connects local businesses and global retailers across more than 40 countries in Europe and North America. Headquartered in Amsterdam and part of International Distributions Services, the company built its reputation on dependable, ground-based delivery at scale, and is now extending that same reliability into out-of-home pickup, with over 100,000 OOH points and locker networks live in Spain, Italy, and Germany.