Who doesn’t love stickers? Stickers are as popular today as they’ve ever been. In this helpful post our expert print designers show you how to profit from your artistic flair by printing stickers to sell online in marketplaces like Etsy, Ebay and Amazon among others.
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! And it’s not just the kids. People of all generations and walks of life find uses for stickers.
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, designers, non-profits, schools, clubs and societies, 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, and display them in custom made sticker books. Let’s look at the simple steps you can take to design and print stickers to sell. We’ll explore how come up with ideas, create designs, get them printed, and promote and sell your stickers online. Ready? Let’s get stuck in!
How do you design stickers to sell?
If you’d like to design and print stickers to sell but don’t have a clear idea already of what designs you might want to make, 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, promotional, 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.
But you can take some of the guesswork out of the equation by doing a bit of market research first. Look online at the most popular marketplaces and search through the bestselling stickers and sticker-related products. See if you can figure out what are the most popular kinds of ideas and images, the age group of the people buying them, and whether there are any types which look as if they always sell well or others that may be part of a popular but passing trend. You’ll make a better return on your investment if you come up with ideas that are “evergreen” and have broad appeal rather than going too “niche” or trying to follow a trend, which is always more difficult to predict. Don’t copy what someone else has already done, but once you have a feel for the marketplace, you should have a better sense of what’s most likely to sell and you can then come up with your own ideas in that same category.
When it comes to the artwork, if you have the skills, you can create the sticker designs 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 and you need only request revisions or sign the designs off if you’re happy with them. But if you’re going to do it yourself — and in the long term this will be cheaper and so more profitable if you have the skills or are prepared to learn them— you’ll need to use appropriate design software. We recommend the Adobe Creative Suite, particularly Illustrator and InDesign. It’s professional level software available on a subscription basis so you can tailor it to your needs and budget. It’s also what we use at QinPrinting in our own design department. So, if you choose to print your stickers with us—and we hope you will!—then it makes the pre-press and file-checking faster and smoother. But we can work with your preferred software, too. No problem!
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 on your computer, you will need to reset to CMYK for offset printing. You can save yourself time and trouble by organizing your image settings before you start designing: resolution to 300 dpi, and color space to CMYK. This resolution means that your images will print perfectly without any pixelation or blurring. Images that look great at 72 dpi on a screen may not transfer to print. Likewise, while the default color mode for screens is RGB (red, green, blue) printers use CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key). Key just means black in printer-speak! It doesn’t mean you can only use these colors, but these are the color-bases that the machines use to generate all the colors in your design.
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 about bleed areas, trim lines, and safety zones, don’t worry; it’s not as complicated as it sounds! Collectively, these are known as “crop marks” and you can find out all about them in our easy-to-follow tutorial here. If you’d like personal advice, please get in touch. One of our design and 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
Once you’ve finalized your designs and sent us the files, we’ll check them and if everything’s in order, 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.
Cutting your stickers
We’ll print your sticker designs 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.
Bonus ideas to design and print stickers to sell
Depending on the kinds of stickers that you want to print and what your aims are, there’s a range of accessories and bonus options you might want to consider when developing your sticker business. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Design and print themed sticker books to sell that your customers can use to stick their stickers in!
- Make themed collectible sets and issue special “booster packs” from time to time
- Consider designing and printing seasonal or holiday-themed stickers to keep your stickers selling all year round
- While Amazon, Etsy, and eBay may be the most popular marketplaces for stickers, several of our clients have had success selling directly via their social media, especially Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok
You may be able to come up with even more ideas of how to develop, expand, and accessorize your sticker business. But these are good proven ideas to get you off to a great start. So, let’s just pick up on the last of these and ask, where to sell your stickers online?
Where to sell your stickers online
There are many viable online marketplaces for selling stickers. Among the most popular are Etsy, Amazon, and eBay. However many sticker sellers have had great success marketing their products directly to the public via social media channels such as Instagram, Pinterest, 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 offline at markets, in local stores, and at events.
Stick with us! We’re here to help
At QinPrinting, we have enjoyed almost 30 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. So, if you’re ready to design and print stickers to sell online, stick with us! Shoot us an email to [email protected] or call us on +1 951 866 3971. We look forward to helping you create beautiful and fun stickers to sell.
