"Stuck on Stickers" - WaPo, 1983
Untold billions; encapsulated flavors; grody to the max
December 1983: Sudden Impact is the number one movie at the box office, MTV is playing the new MJ video for Thriller, and the Washington Post publishes the following article (available online).
I have not fact-checked, but I did add some pictures.
Stuck on Stickers
The Washington Post
December 29, 1983
By Desson Howee1
We're talking craze. We're talking half a billion dollars a year. We're talking untold billions of these things being sold to untold millions of children.
Stickers.
As in the ones kids buy at K-mart2, Peoples drugstores, card and gift stores, toy stores, mom and pop stores . . . and then paste on things: themselves, their walls, pages of special sticker albums, whatever.
We're talking paper stickers, vinyl stickers, stickers with airbrushed pictures of unicorns and bats, heat-sensitive and pressure-sensitive stickers that change color when touched, "scratch 'n' sniff" stickers (with encapsulated flavors, ranging from strawberry to, yes, sneaker3), 3-D stickers (with accompanying 3-D specs), Ronald Reagan stickers, car stickers, space war stickers, and stickers of such commercial flotsam as Mr. T4 or the Cabbage Patch Kid5.
Industry estimates of the sticker market's size go up to $500 million a year. Hallmark, Gordy International, and 3M--three of the largest sticker manufacturers in the business--declare a range of $250-400 million, and expect sales to burgeon beyond that figure next year.
At an average of 20 cents per sticker, that would indicate a sticker output total in the billions.
"Sales have far exceeded what we dreamed they would be," says Paul Warshaw, vice president, Gordy International. "We alone probably put out 500 million stickers, so you're definitely safe in the billions."
Hallmark's John Prince winces at the thought of calculating the total number: "Considering our stickers come in rolls of 205 or so at a time, the market total would have to be in the billions. It's astronomical."
"Between the ages of 6 and 11, it's a craze," says sticker and teaching materials manufacturer Luella Connelly of Creative Teaching Press6. According to Connelly and many other manufacturers, teachers triggered the craze by taking the sticker beyond the ho-hum, gold-star syndrome, and rewarding pupils with more graphically exciting decals. Manufacturers then turned the popularity to advantage and have been reporting doubled and even tripled sales annually for nearly five years.
"Because they're neat" is the most cogent reply youngsters will submit in answer to queries about their sticker habit. They don't know why they like stickers, but they know which ones they like. Favorite subjects for most seem to be animals, particularly unicorns and bears, and, in the scratch 'n' sniff category, strawberry flavors are the definite best sellers.
After two years of no-nonsense accumulation, sixth-grader Christie Blevins of Yuba City, Calif., has 4,050 stickers, from "Toots" stickers to "valley girl" ones (lettered with such familiar phrases as "Grody to the max"). She likes to trade: "If my friends come over, I tell them they have to bring their stickers."
Her treasure is an Italian sticker her cousin gave her, which features two faces adorned with sunglasses and the legend "Fiorucci" at the bottom. She has discovered that "Fiorucci" is a company name and not, as she hoped, some exotic Mediterranean aphorism, but she loves the sticker all the same.
Michelle McGowan, 13, of Oxon Hill, started collecting two years ago when she saw her younger cousins' collections. She wants unicorns, horses and raccoons and will "do anything" to get her hands on a 3-D sticker.
"It's fun to collect them and show them off," she says.
Wednesday is "Supply Night," when her father lets her loose at the Livingston Square Mall to add to her 800-sticker collection. She frequently buys duplicates so she can have trading options for the next school day.
"I'm on my third book," says 11-year-old Laura Poseno of Baltimore, referring to her sticker albums.
Most collectors are girls, but there are many exceptions. Eric Loughman, 11, of Annandale, collects stickers of football players, Dallas Cowboys in particular. Another favorite: the pizza-flavored scratch 'n' sniff.
Serious collectors buy photograph albums (special sticker albums are also available) with plastic, pocketed pages, to mount the stickers, preserve the adhesive backings, and have the capacity to rearrange the thematic order of the stickers at any time. Stickers don't just tickle youthful fancy, they serve a overriding impulse to organize. And reorganize.
"Kids are having not only an esthetic experience, but also are learning to make judgments, categorize, and take care of things," says Andrea Grossman, president of Mrs. Grossman's Stickers7.
Her line features more than 150 sticker designs, along with sticker idea books that offer 48 pages of suggested patterns using composite sticker designs, and an accompanying package of more than 350 stickers.
"The stickers serve as conversation pieces," says Stickers! Magazine8 editor Ira Friedman, sporting a kangaroo sticker on his lapel. "You see a sticker on someone's lunch box and you strike up a conversation. Stickers help kids articulate something they can't say themselves."
Friedman, formerly of the licensing division of film producer George Lucas' Lucasfilm Star Wars fan club, established Stickers! after eight months of talks with children and research of the industry. The slick color monthly, devoted entirely to the stickers hobby, had a first run last November of 200,000 copies.
The element of competition among kids to have the biggest and the rarest collection can be obsessive. Friedman cites a poll conducted by his magazine, asking readers to state the size of their collections. Out of 2,500 respondents, 1,000 claimed sticker collections of 2,500-plus and many criticized the magazine's questionnaire for not providing categories for even higher figures.
While the more exotic stickers can cost a dollar or so, the simpler, more common ones usually range from 35-80 cents each. Even better deals can be made buying quantity, or "by the roll," as the cognoscenti say.
"We went through the Snoopy dogs and the Barbie dolls with all those accessories, which we had to buy," says Priscilla Platnik of Silver Spring, real estate agent and mother of two girls. "And with stickers, there's no comparison."
The Platnik girls have to collect trash, make beds, and put their clothes away to earn sticker money.
"They're really a low-unit cost," says John Grimes, president of CARDesign, which has a highly successful sticker line. "There can be a cost factor after awhile, but almost all hobbies have some associated expense. To me stickers are penny candy without the cavities."
Manufacturers think the craze has staying power. Hallmark, for instance, considered the market juicy enough to create an entire division exclusively for stickers. "We've made a total commitment to it and we see it as a viable business in the years to come," says product manager John Prince.
"Our retailers tell us sales are getting stronger and they don't see it subsiding," says Andrea Grossman, who also claims to be seeing evidence of a growing adult market. "More and more grown-ups are buying--women in the 20-to-30 age range are spending up to $35 a week . . . to put them on letters and decorate gifts."
The industry has catered to the collector impulse by discontinuing certain lines of stickers and labeling them "limited editions." Frequently, dates of manufacture will be seen on the backs of these stickers, to cultivate a sense of collector value with the two prerequisites--authenticity and rarity.
Laura Poseno specializes in Mystiks, the pressure-sensitive, color-changing sticker. So far, she has 13, including a dolphin, a four-leaf clover, and a bat. She pays for them by doing household chores.
"It's good to have a hobby," says her father, Harvey Poseno, a police officer in Baltimore. "But I think it can get to the point where you might classify it as an addiction, just like video games."
"I'm going to keep collecting forever," says Laura, who has weighed the long-term value of sticker collection, "and then pass them down to my kids and grandchildren. Or sell them--they could be valuable."
What items of questionable value are you passing on to the next generation?
Previous posts you might be interested in:
Desson Thomson - Wikipedia - maybe him?
RIP Luella Connelly, the “Sticker Lady”
Meet Mrs. Grossman of Mrs. Grossman's Sticker Factory. You can still order off the webpage!
Oh?
Oh to work in the sticker department of Hallmark in the 80s. Imagine the shit you could create!
Sneaker smell!