A growing new trend
Stickers are a hot new trend for designers & creatives for product and promotion.
While traveling, at school or in co-working space it can be hard to stand out from the crowd, especially now that more and more people have a knack for individuating themselves.
One of the ways to show off their uniqueness are with stickers. For example, lots of people now adorn their suitcase, laptops or phones with a wide variety of custom stickers — from bands logos and movie quotes to puns and political statements.
Calvin Klein recently made stickers using a classic 1980s image by Richard Avedon of Brooke Shields, while the fashion brand Coach has produced leather stickers, and Berlin’s hip o32c magazine featured sticker sheets from Louis Vuitton’s creative director, Virgil Abloh. A partnership between the luggage manufacturer Rimowa and Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson yielded a limited edition of suitcase stickers that sold out immediately.
Students’ laptop stickers show off their personalities!
You can tell a lot about a student from their sticker choices.
- Molly Snow, UW freshman majoring in environmental engineering says she picked her stickers based on her personality.
“I picked a lot of girl empowerment ones and earth because I’m an environmental engineer,” Snow says. “And ‘hold on I see a dog’ because I love dogs.”
- Nicole Shields, who is majoring in journalism with certificates in graphic design and French, says her stickers are representative of things that she likes to do or has done in the past.
“I like ‘life is good’ in general, but the clubs I’m in are fun,” Shields says. “I went on a trip to South Carolina and that’s why I have that one [the palm tree] because that was a really fun trip. And I like art too.”
Michael Kopelman, managing director at Stüssy, says: “It’s fun. You can put them on your laptop, car or lunchbox. It’s like tagging. Most won’t notice it, but the people who are interested do spot it.”
Alex Powis, co-founder of Stickerarchive, an online collection of popular graphics, says: “Slapping a sticker up … is instant, whereas graffiti takes time and guts. It’s like coded messaging.”
“Slapping a sticker up … it's instant! like a coded message!”
Trendy suitcase brand RIMOWA created custom sticker collection with artist Alex Isreal
Travel Suitcase Stickers Make You an Instant Globetrotter!
You see travel suitcase stickers a lot in cartoons when a character is traveling. Although this used to be a thing that people did, it’s faded in popularity. However, in an effort to revive vintage travel stickers on suitcases, many brands like Rimowa or Samsonite developed sets of stylish stickers for suitcases.
Still others design their own with companies like StickerYou and Customstickers . You can as well find the online stickermaker that people can use to customize their own stickers and travel decals.
Making your own travel sticker is a fun way to declare yourself a world traveler who has been to places like New York, Japan, Moscow, London and Australia, and gives every suitcase a story to tell.
Samsonite Teams up With Filip Pagowski for their Latest Suitcase – (The artist behind COMME des GARÇONS’ PLAY “Heart Logo.”)
StickerYou Immersive Sticker Store & Museum in Toronto
To answer a growing niche, e-commerce company and custom sticker maker StickerYou recently opened the world’s largest sticker store on Queen West in Toronto, Canada, last August. To stock the shelves and inspire the community with the potential of sticker art, StickerYou is collaborating with artists worldwide to provide a selection of creative, ready-made stickers, as well as custom options on site.
The model fuses the traditional and experiential to bring about a unique opportunity for consumers to engage with the brand.
A sticker museum and a sticker art exhibition, focusing on exhibiting the creative connotation behind the aesthetically pleasing adhesive patches. It also introduces for customers, the option to customize their own stickers in store.
StickerYou foresees this new venture to be a success and the activation has certainly caught the eye of media — including The Globe and Mail, the Daily Hive, Narcity, and more.
On January 30 StickerYou will open a permanent sticker museum and art exhibition in the store. The ‘Stickers: RePEELED’ exhibition will be done in collaboration with Dave and Holly Combs, editors of PEEL magazine, a publication that galvanized the global sticker art community in the early aughts.
The exhibition will feature sticker art from Shepard Fairey of Obey Giant, Matthew Hoffman of You Are Beautiful, and original sticker art from artists around the world.
And if you can’t go to the store, you can still design your own stickers using their online, mobile compatible sticker maker here.
