Monthly Mailings People Love

Sometimes you have an idea good enough that you keep it for yourself. My long running podcast Says Who needed a way to incentivise fan support that wouldn't go away once we mailed out a single backer gift, but it also needed to be cost-effective to produce and to ship, and it needed to not just be a cheap money grab, but instead something that people loved to get. The Says Who Sticker Club was born.

Stickers are a great gift, because they're quick to make, fun to get, and easy to mail out. For the price of a regular postage stamp, we send out a fun, unique sticker to a couple hundred people every month. It sounds easy. It isn't.

Designing each sticker involves a good amount of sketching and brainstorming. Pulling from current events, or from a turn of phrase from the podcast, I work through ideas that will be both visually fun and different from month-to-month.

It's not just about getting a great design, but also about using the right material for it. Sometimes you need metallic backgrounds, other times, glow-in-the-dark. Clear vinyl for a window sticker, matte finish for a satin feel. Each unique sticker needs the right finish, which means keeping tabs on a half-dozen sticker manufactures who offer differnet materials (and, let's be honest, also knowing which ones offer the fastest turnaround).

Once we get a few hundred stickers in the mail, the next phase of the work begins: printing our mailing list onto labels, generating postage, and labeling and stamping all the envelopes, before date-stamping the certificate of authenticity that accompanies each sticker, stuffing and sealing everything, and getting it in the post as soon as possible.

The sticker club is a full-service project. It's design, production, and fulfillment and every stage of it is something I love. Let's talk about how to bring this type of approach to a project you've got.