Stickers are as popular today as they’ve ever been. We show you how to profit from your artistic flair by printing stickers to sell online
Everyone’s stuck on stickers!
One of the most surprising developments in the online marketplace is the enduring trend and popularity of stickers. It seems everybody wants them these days! Of course, kids love them — to stick on their pen cases, school files, mobile phones, and just about anywhere they can get away with it — but small businesses, independent creatives, and many others also use them to enhance packaging, as promotional tools, or just for fun. And they’re often components or accessories to popular board games. Lots of people, young and old alike, love to collect them, too. Let’s look at the simple steps you can take to come up with ideas, create designs, get them printed, and promote and sell your stickers online.
How do you design stickers to sell?
Start by brainstorming all the things you are interested in that might produce ideas for stickers. Remember that stickers can be printed with images, words, or both. The stickers you design could be funny, decorative, provocative, wise, topical, or anything else.
It’s a good idea, as you brainstorm, to look for links and themes between the ideas that pop into your mind. While you may want to sell individual stickers, it’s often more profitable to sell A4 sheets of stickers which all have a similar theme. For example, a sheet of cute animal faces, or types of transport, or emoticons, or anything else you think people might like.
When it comes to the artwork, if you have the skills, you can create it yourself. This is the best way as it makes sure that your stickers are interesting and unique. If you can’t design your own art, the next best thing is to pay a professional graphic designer to develop your sticker images for you. This need not be prohibitively expensive and you can find artists and designers on freelance sites such as Fiverr and Upwork. Finally, if neither of those options is possible for you, you can use copyright free and royalty free images from stock image sites or the Creative Commons. If you choose the last way, just make sure that the license associated with the images allows you to reproduce them for commercial purposes without attribution to the creator.
Creating the artwork and layout for your sticker designs
Now, if you’re outsourcing the art creation and design work to a third-party professional, they will handle all the technical details for you. But if you’re going to do it yourself — and in the long term this will be cheaper and so more profitable — you’ll need to use appropriate design software. We recommend the Adobe suite, particularly Illustrator and InDesign.
Ideally, you will export your finished designs as vectors in PDF format. But if you’re using Photoshop or CorelDRAW, for example, and you need to export in bitmaps, then make sure that your image resolution is at least 300 dpi. And while you may have designed your stickers in the RGB color space, you will need to reset to CMYK for offset printing.
Don’t forget bleed zones and trim lines, either. These are vital to make sure that your images come out well and the stickers are properly cut. If there’s anything you are unsure of and you’d like advice, please get in touch. One of our printing experts will be delighted to talk you through any technical issues and explain how to resolve them.
Choosing paper and special finishes for your stickers
We’ll print your stickers on adhesive paper with a special backing. You can choose from a range of different papers each of which has particular qualities. Some papers are thicker while others are thinner. You may want a shiny gloss surface, a matte coated paper, or even glittery or holographic paper. By all means ask us for our paper sample book, which we will be happy to send you through the mail for the cost of postage and packing.
Cutting your stickers
Your sticker designs will be printed in rows and columns on single sheets. But they’ll need to be cut so that individual stickers may be removed from the backing sheet. There are two ways to cut stickers. We can either use a technique called “die-cutting” or the so-called “kiss cut”.
With die-cutting, we cut out the exact shape of your sticker, all the way through, including the backing sheet. This is easier — and therefore cheaper — if your stickers are round or rectangular, for example. It gets a little more expensive if we must manufacture a custom made a die-cut mold for specific shapes such as human figures, animals, and plants. But it can be done. So, once your stickers are die-cut they are individual items which you can sell one-by-one or package together as sets.
With kiss cutting, we use a very precise technique which cuts only the cover paper around the shape of each sticker, but leaves the backing paper untouched. This is ideal if you want to sell whole sheets of stickers. The stickers remain on the backing sheet, but because they are cut out, they can easily be peeled away to be used by your customers.
Where to sell your stickers online
There are many viable online marketplaces for selling stickers. Among the most popular are Etsy, Amazon, and Ebay. But many sticker sellers have had great success marketing their products directly to the public via social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. It’s worth experimenting to see which marketing methods work best for you.
If you want to make a long-term business from selling stickers online, we recommend a multichannel approach including several different marketplaces, your own website, and social media. Obviously, if you sell on third party sites, you will pay a commission. Direct sales made through your social media accounts will be more profitable. But to reach sufficient numbers of people, it’s wise to have, as they say, a finger in every pie. You may also sell your stickers off-line at markets, in local stores, and at events.
Talk to us!
At QinPrinting, we have enjoyed over 25 years of success in the offset printing industry. During that time, we’ve developed a global reputation as one of the best online international printing companies. Our reputation is built on our excellent products, first class materials, unbeatable prices, and unparalleled customer service.
We always say that good business is based on clear communication and that it’s never too early to talk to your printer about the project you have in mind. Especially if it’s your first time working with offset printing or designing artwork, we’ll be happy to put our decades of experience, our expertise, and our enthusiasm at your service.
We’ve made it super-easy to get in touch with our printing experts. You can call us by telephone, email us, use Skype, the online chat, or the easy contact form. We guarantee you’ll speak to a real person, not a robot, and a true expert, not a call center operative.
We can’t guarantee your business success — that side of things is down to you — but we do guarantee a first-class product delivered with care and attention to detail at a price to suit every budget. Designing, printing, and selling stickers can be a fun way to share your creative flair and make a little money on the side. And if you really have the entrepreneurial spirit, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t develop your hobby into a full-time business. Whatever the scale of your ambition, talk to us! We look forward to helping you create beautiful and fun stickers to sell.
