Your Company’s First Sticker Probably Shouldn’t Be Your Logo

Most businesses start in the same place: the logo, in the brand colours, round or square. Then they put fifty of them in a bowl by the counter and wonder why nobody takes one.

There’s nothing wrong with the logo. It’s just been given the wrong job.

Logo stickers are business cards with adhesive

A logo says who you are. A good sticker says something about the person who takes it. That’s quite a big difference.

A sticker that’s supposed to end up on someone’s laptop is competing with bands, memes, trips, inside jokes and that cat somebody drew in 2019. Your company name rarely gets you all the way there.

Nobody has ever stuck an invoice to their laptop either.

Start with something people already like

A café doesn’t have to print its logo. It could print the coffee everyone orders.

The bakery could make a sticker of the cardamom bun that sells out every Saturday.

The bike shop could print the thing every second customer gets told at the counter:

IT’S PROBABLY THE CHAIN.

And if the office dog has more fans than the company, the decision has basically already been made.

This isn’t about being funny for the sake of it. It’s about finding something in your business that people like even when the company name disappears.

That’s usually where the best stickers are hiding.

The laptop test

Look at the design and ask yourself:

Would someone who has never bought anything from us still want this?

If the answer is “yes, if they know who we are”, you’ve made advertising.

If the answer is “yes, that’s actually good”, it’s starting to look like a sticker.

The logo doesn’t have to disappear. Put it small in the corner, like a signature. It just doesn’t need to be the main character every time.

When logo stickers are exactly right

Is the sticker there to seal tissue paper, go on a bag or label a product?

Then the logo is exactly what you need.

That’s branding, and branding should be clear.

They’re two different jobs. A label tells you where something came from. A sticker someone actually wants to keep is something else entirely.

When the same design tries to do both, the result is often very correct.

Which isn’t quite the same thing as good.

Test it instead of discussing it for three weeks

Order 25 with the logo and 25 with an illustration, phrase or idea from the business.

Put them next to each other at the counter and see which pile disappears first.

There’s no minimum order, so you don’t need to order 500 just to discover you picked the wrong idea.

Test it before it earns its own warehouse shelf.

From idea to sticker

If that cardamom bun should actually be shaped like a cardamom bun instead of being trapped inside a white circle, choose die-cut stickers. The sticker is then cut around the artwork itself.

You can find all materials, sizes and shapes under custom stickers.