With summer underway, there’s little else in the corporate fashion world that screams the season is upon us more than UPS drivers and their brown shorts.
Given that UPS has been consistently ranked as one ofFortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies, a notable uniform isn’t such a shock. In the most recent list, the company was ranked number 32.
Introduced in 1991 to help employees beat the heat, the shorts have become synonymous with summer. Dan McMackin, a current spokesman for UPS and a former driver, remembers his years in Wisconsin and the impact of those shorts on the job.
“There was a progression,” he said, noting the shift from wearing heavy winter trousers to a spring outfit made from a lighter fabric. “Certainly we knew it was summer when we put the shorts on. For any UPS driver in North America, shorts mean summer.”
