It’s the monkey. There hasn’t been a cartoon character who scowls and chomps a cigar with this much authority since the heyday of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
But why does StickerJunkie.com feature a cigar-chomping chimp in this day of bland, tasteful and PC corporate logos? “Because it rhymes,” explains CEO Andrea Lake of the StickerJunkie monkey. “And kids love monkeys.”
“Kids love making their own stickers,” she adds. “It’s a new medium that allows them to express themselves and promote their bands and clubs.”
The kids in question are between 18 and 24. Founded three years ago along with its sister venture, TshirtJunkie.com, the Internet-based companies are riding on the West Coast wave of customized T-shirts and stickers, according to Lake. Customers can create 1 by 8 inch stickers with customized slogans from a choice of more than 100 typefaces and 150 decorative graphic designs.
Lake expects to exceed her projections of selling two million stickers by the end of this year. A typical order is for the minimum of $25 per 100 stickers. She estimates one third of her orders are for 200 to 1000 stickers. Minimum orders of a dozen for $144 dominate sales of T-shirts with customized slogans.
But other than the young, it is difficult to characterize a typical StickerJunkie jockey. Lake cites one day when in the space of a few minutes both a Boy Scout troop and a speed metal band both ordered stickers. She, she says, was when she knew she had a winner. “Anyone can use this.”
Bands, however, do make up the largest percentage of her 50,000-name customer base. One fourth are for other Web sites and 15% are for other small businesses. Inside jokes, political slogans, and other miscellaneous notations make up another 30%.
Despite being an e-commerce site, most of Lake’s customers are repeats or find out about StickerJunkie by word-of-mouth. More than one third discover the company through space ads in such magazines as Spin, Vibe, Revolver, Rolling Stone and Mother Jones, as well as other music and alternative print media. Only 25% found StickerJunkie through a search engine.
Lake plans to expand her customer base beyond the youth market, indeed, even beyond the Internet savvy consumer. She’s targeting charities, church groups and tattoo shops with a prospecting direct mail piece. The idea is to capture customers who do not have or cannot use a credit card.
Both StickerJunkie and TshirtJunkie are outgrowths of Lake’s clothing company, Delinquent Distribution, which manufactures apparel for the youth market. Stores carrying her brand include the Hot Topic, Mr. Rags and Hastings Entertainment chains. Her specialty is T-shirts with clever slogans.
According to Lake, the idea for StickerJunkie came when many of the customers began asking for stickers with some of the T-shirt slogans. Lake now even shoots out mailers to her customer base offering $500 prizes for winning slogans for her Delinquent Distribution line. One winner was “I love poetry, long walks on the beach and poking dead things with a stick.”
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