Which shipping company's brown color is a registered trademark?

Which shipping company’s brown color is a registered trademark? United Parcel Service (UPS) is associated with trademarked brown branding.

UPS has used brown as a defining corporate color since the company’s early delivery operations. The shade, commonly called UPS Brown or Pullman Brown, appears across its vehicles, uniforms, packaging, signage, and other brand materials. UPS’s branding documents identify the brown color as a trademark of United Parcel Service of America, Inc.

This is a useful example of a color mark. Trademark law can protect a color—or a combination of colors—when consumers have come to associate it with a particular source and the mark is used in a sufficiently specific commercial context. The protection is not a blanket claim over every possible use of brown.

The company’s name can also cause confusion. UPS is the familiar abbreviation for United Parcel Service, while USPS is the United States Postal Service, a separate government agency. DHL and FedEx are competing transportation companies, but UPS’s distinctive brown identity is the one tied to this trademark fact.