UPS began on August 28, 1907, when Jim Casey and Claude Ryan launched a Seattle messenger business with a $100 loan. Their headquarters wasn’t a warehouse or an office tower: it was a basement beneath a saloon. The venture that became UPS originally operated as the American Messenger Company.
Casey was just 19. The original workspace measured roughly six feet by seventeen feet, near Second Avenue and Main Street in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. According to HistoryLink’s account of UPS’s beginnings, the founders started with bicycles, a telephone, and an unusually demanding commitment to service.
Their opportunity was simple: people needed things carried across town. Employees delivered messages, packages, baggage, and restaurant meals, mostly on foot. Bicycles and streetcars helped with longer trips. In a city where few homes had telephones, a dependable messenger could bridge an everyday communication gap.
The operation also had strict standards. Messengers wore uniforms, treated customers courteously, and followed rules that even prohibited whistling. Service was available around the clock, including holidays. That attention to reliability makes the basement story more than a charming detail: the business depended on customers trusting its young delivery crew.
As customers’ needs changed, so did the company. In 1913, it merged with a motorcycle delivery service, shifted toward retail packages, and acquired its first automobile, a Model T Ford. The business was gradually moving beyond handwritten messages toward the parcel delivery model associated with UPS.
The familiar name arrived in 1919, when expansion to Oakland, California, brought the United Parcel Service identity, according to UPS’s official history. The basement startup had taken another important step beyond its Seattle roots.
Enjoy unexpected company backstories? Test your knowledge with this Blue Ribbon Sports trivia question. UPS’s beginnings offer their own memorable contrast: a borrowed hundred dollars and a basement, rather than a fleet of trucks.