Dispatching your self-designed peel-offs is the most satisfying feeling. You don’t believe me, start your own sticker business by following these steps, and I am waiting for a high-five.

Now that you are motivated enough, let’s dig into the process of starting a custom sticker business. Before getting into designing the stickers, you need to know a lot of behind-the-scenes logistics. Stop overthinking on ’what if’ and give a chance to your creativity and unique sticker design ideas to build a business for you.

This includes:

  • Finding your target audience
  • Deciding your niche
  • Planning everything from the type of materials you want to print your stickers on
  • Deciding which sticker design software you want to install
  • How you are going to ship your product to the buyer, etc.

    Let us have a deep glance at the step-by-step process for clearing your head.

Step 1: Choose Your Stickers

Firstly, we should talk about the stickers that you want to make. This will help you to figure out your targeted audience. Are you planning to make planner stickers, bumper stickers, or decorative stickers? There are various types of stickers mentioned in the sticker category, so first, you need to figure out what type appeals to you the most.

Step 2: Find Your Target Audience

Find out who is your target audience. If you decide to pin planning stickers as your niche, then your audience will be of the journalism category. More specifically, people who decorate their bullet or regular journals, planners, etc., make it more aesthetically sight pleasing while still being productive. Similarly, if your niche is decorative stickers, then school students should be your primary target. They often need those minimal to massive decorative stickers for uplifting the beauty of their projects and notebooks. Finding a targeted audience is necessary to plan the whole process productively by keeping only those people and their necessities in mind.

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Step 3: Make Your Stickers

Now that we are finding our audience and ticker type, we need to figure out how to turn your sticker designs into actual stickers to sell. Using sticker design software to create your stickers is the advisable way to start with. You can use clip-arts, fonts, colors and not customize your stickers in a few easy steps.

A few sticker shop owners design the stickers and then send them to a third-party company for printing and shipping purposes. Of course, you can do it by yourself too. Here, there are more sub-steps to conclude this step like:

Pick Your Sticker Paper

Pick a paper according to the quality you want to serve.

  • Standard white matte sticker paper
  • Removable white matte sticker paper
  • White gloss sticker paper

Are some of the standard sticker papers to make your choice from. Of course, there are various other types of sticker paper too. 

Choose Your Printer

Other than finalizing the sticker paper, you will also need to figure out the printer situation. Canon PIXMA iX6820 and Canon PIXMA MX922 are good-to-go options to rely on for quite a good amount of serving time and are great printers from all aspects. You can even go for a third-party printing option.

Find an Electronic Cutting Machine

It depends on you whether a pair of scissors will work for you or require an electronic cutting machine. It depends on the quantity, time, and speed of your manually cutting process or letting the machine do its work.

Step 4: Sell Your Stickers

The question: Where are you trying to sell your stickers? It is pretty important because you will have to search various blogs and decide which platform suits you best. Starting with Etsy is trending these days. It is a website catered to small businesses that make hand-made goods, so their website visitors would already be looking for hand-made items on an obvious term. Starting your business on social sites like Facebook, Instagram is also a great and affordable option to begin with. Creating a website of your own is another option to sell your stickers. But have a budget list too with you to be aware of your budget limits and choose the platform accordingly.

Step 5: Decide the Shipping Method

You will have to figure out which shipping carrier you want to use for shipping out your products. There are different shipping methods available in the market according to the size and weight of your parcel. You can choose online shipping too for directly submitting the weight and dimensions of your parcel, inserting the delivery address, and still getting a schedule with the delivery price.

Make sure you choose a packaging that prevents your stickers from bending. Wrapping the stickers in brown paper and including a freebie inside the package can enlighten satisfaction for customers. And for packaging, you can customize your packaging with product design tools to give a whole personalized experience or choose to use regular envelopes. 

Step 6: Create Your Designs

Finally, shifting to the fun part of creating the stickers. Doodling with pen and paper or an iPad and Apple pencil can create some inspirational stickers. So, first advice, never stop doodling!

 You do not necessarily need to have an iPad to create stickers. You can choose an affordable option of good old pen and paper. To get that digitized finishing, you can scan it with your phone before importing it onto your computer. To go hand-in-hand with your drawings, you can use Photoshop on the computer to give all the digital effects.

Step 7: Market Your Products

Marketing is the most crucial and tricky part of this whole process. According to me, the best and most affordable option to market your product is social media – it is entirely free. You can make videos on YouTube, post on Facebook or Instagram, let people see how these stickers are made, use them, the process of packaging order, etc. Social media Ads and paid promotions work great too. You can also try affiliate marketing to widen the boundaries of your business.

Sticking It Off

I hope this stopped your scratching the confused head activity. Stickers are in significant trend, from professional uses to personal uses; it has built a market that is not crashing any soon. Make the choices according to your necessities, requirements, and budget. Remember, quality and quantity both matter while making any decision. All the best for your business!