Custom stickers are fast-becoming one of the most popular and lucrative small business ideas. Relatively simple to make with low-cost equipment, for wanna-be business owners, stickers represent an incredible opportunity to produce items in bulk and sell at a reasonable price.
Why Are Custom Stickers Such a Popular Business?
There are a few reasons why custom stickers have become deeply popular businesses in the last few years, let's explore these before we dive into the trending sticker ideas of 2024.
A Conversation Piece
Customizable stickers a popular conversation starter. We've all been there, sat in a café and see a cool sticker on someone's laptop or phone. Customisable stickers are a great way to connect with other people who may have traveled to the same place, or enjoy the same hobbies as you do!
Low Overhead Costs
For creative entrepreneurs, custom sticker designs represent a business with a relatively low start-up cost. Not only that, but custom sticker businesses also save money in shipping and handling costs, as most orders can be shipped in standard letter mail envelopes. Their lightweight nature also makes them extremely easy to ship and package for maximum damage protection.
Design Flexibility
Stickers offer fantastic design flexibility. You can put almost anything you want on a sticker! Custom decals, botanical designs, Celtic knot designs, Kawaii figures, and so on. You are almost only limited by your creativity, as a custom sticker design and print business.
Universal Appeal
One of the wonderful things about sticker marketing is that it has an almost universal appeal. You can create create awesome stickers in languages other than English, so long as you get the design right. Because of the design flexibility of stickers, you can customize your sticker marketing to target a specific country or region, using different regional phrases or other colloquialisms. Your sticker marketing could also extend to different hot-button issues.
Stickers have a spectacular universality to them that makes them a perfect outlet for the creative juices of creative entrepreneurs looking for their next venture.
Now that we've sold you on the versatility and appeal of stickers as a business venture, here are some cool sticker ideas that are trending in 2024.
1. Motivational Stickers
One of the primary trends coming out of the custom sticker market in 2024 is the motivational sticker. These stickers use short inspirational quotes that can be applied to water bottles for the gym, laptops or binders for work or class, giving you that motivational kick that you sometimes need!
2. Using A.I to Create Sticker Designs
While this might seen as something of a heresy among graphic designers or graphic artists who create handmade pieces, the use of artificial intelligence to expedite designs and make your sticker creation process faster is an undeniable asset to custom sticker makers.
Using artificial intelligence-led design also allows cool sticker ideas, like optical illusions to be created with better accuracy.
3. Vibrant Colors
Creating stickers with vibrant colors like bright greens, red, purple, pink, or blue is becoming increasingly popular among those in the cannabis industry, or among tattoo artists. These cool sticker ideas can also be combined with abstract shapes, or made using reflective material to really stand out from the crowd.
Stickers featuring time beloved characters with vibrant color palettes invoke feelings of joy and wonderment.
4. Holographic Stickers
Combining well with vibrant colors, holographic stickers feature a rainbow-like sheen on them when exposed to light. These often feature quirky characters and are best displayed on darker colored surfaces.
5. Au Naturel
On the other side of the custom sticker spectrum, we have the au-naturel style of stickers, beloved by sticker creators that choose to use nature as their muse. Whether that's mindfulness imagery featured on stickers handed out at yoga class, garden club stickers for the green thumb or the VW bumper sticker for van-lifers, neutral greens, blues, browns, beiges and muted yellows feature heavily in this color palette.
6. The Family Stickers
You've all seen a car's rear windows with stencil-like figures stuck on the back with the correct number of children and adults in the family? These stickers continue to be popular in 2024, as their stencil-like design makes it easy to add on to them, be that additional children or even pets!
7. Device-Sized Stickers
Gone are the days when stickers came in a few different sizes. Now, one can choose (or customize) a sticker size to match their device size, whether that's a 13-inch Macbook, iPad, or a Samsung A14 or other larger-than-average cellphone. Stickers that are proportionate to the area they'll be stuck to are important to people in 2024.
8. Rounded Stickers
In a bid to avoid sharp edges, circular stickers are becoming far more common than their square or rectangular compatriots. These rounded stickers offer opportunities for different business logo styles to be displayed.
9. Branded Stickers
Offering your customers personalized stickers with your branding on it as part of their purchase package is a neat way to market your brand for pennies. Give 'em a couple, one for their friend, too.
10. Cri-cut DIY Stickers
While professional sticker makers may scoff, Cricut machines have revolutionized the sticker-making industry. Making funny stickers at home for the kids has never been easier! There's even a Cricut Design Space, which means that you don't have to design anything for yourself. Cricut users have done that for you already!
11. Stickers for the Seasons
No matter what the time of year, there's a sticker for it! Seasonal stickers will surely continue to take the world by storm in 2024. Whether it's the "Pumpkin Spice and Everything Nice" of Fall, or the "Spooky Szn" of Halloween, there's a sticker for any annual holiday, event or season.
12. Car Manufacturer Stickers
Metallic stickers are popular among drivers of all vehicles, but it seems as though ALL-CAPS JEEP-based stickers are becoming more of a thing than ever before. Jeep must be experiencing a vehicular resurgency.
13. Glow-in-the-Dark Stickers
These types of stickers that used to only be seen in bowling alleys and on children's ceilings of the 90s are making a resurgence. Glow-in-the-dark stickers are a great way to introduce kids to sticker design ideas and possibly encourage space exploration.
14. Personalized Pet Stickers
There may be better ways to memorialize a beloved pet, but personalized pet stickers are a way to get your pet's personality onto a sticker! Even if nobody else but you knows about it, it's a fun way to create a sticker! And, given that pet Instagram accounts are becoming more popular, offering personalized pet stickers that are downloadable as JPEGs through your customer newsletter or merch purchase, well that's just marketing that writes itself.
15. Eco-Friendly Stickers
Everyone understands the importance of doing everything we can to protect the planet. This includes sticker design. Instead of being made from plastics, eco-friendly stickers are often made out of craft paper, or other recycled paper products (that can themselves be recycled). Eco-friendly stickers may cost a little more upfront, but you're saving the planet for the sake of a dollar.
16. Travel Destination Stickers
As the world gets back to traveling and tourism industries begin to recover from the pandemic, travel destination stickers (typically with bold typography letting you know where you are) are making a huge resurgence. Perfectly small stickers to fit inside a travel brochure, or make their way to every gift shop in the land, stickers are a great way to put your town on the map, whatever it's size.
17. Hexagonal Sticker Designs
While not a weird shape, a hexagonal sticker design allows for multiple stickers to be placed together on a surface, sort of like a honeycomb. These hexagonal sticker designs are perfect for smaller surfaces like laptops!
18. Domed Designs
While traditional stickers have always been understood to be 2D objects, 3D designs like domed stickers are becoming more popular! As they're a raised surface, they're a little easier to remove and these bubble-like labels also have business applications like taps for breweries or pubs.
19. The Personal Touch
Never underestimate the personal touch. Hand drawing a sticker design is a great way to connect with the people who'll buy your stickers. They'll be able to tell that real people created the design.
20. Watercolor Effect Stickers for Artists
These sticker types are perfect for artists to include with prints of their watercolor paintings. By introducing a watercolor effect, watercolor stickers may feel and appear a little more premium for potential customers.
21. Vintage Stickers
What's old is new again as vintage fonts and minimalist designs, with brown and beige color tones, square and rectangular designs, along with vintage-style fonts.
22. Cultural Stickers
Representing one's culture in stickers is a relatively new phenomena since the popularity of stickers has increased in recent years. Having specific stickers that showcase cultural roots with unique designs is a great conversation piece, as well as providing customers with an opportunity to showcase their culture and heritage.
23. Disability Stickers
Stickers that highlight an individual disability represent a critical part of acknowledging how different we all are as people, and could even assist in interpersonal interactions, if, say, a deaf person has a custom sticker that denotes that they're hard of hearing. It allows people who would otherwise just start speaking them to recognize their deafness and begin using ASL, or other means of communication.
24. Sports Team Stickers
Team sports are going nowhere and rivalries are just as hot as always! 2024 may not be the year that your team wins the Stanley Cup, NBA Title or World Series, but you sure will be able to showcase your beloved team with pride. Additionally, interesting takes on traditional team logos make for cool sticker ideas.
25. Band and Music Stickers
Small-scale band or music stickers are not only a great way for bands to sell the most affordable form of merchandise, they're also a great way for music shops to get their logo and brand name out there, by offering free stickers with musical instrument purchases.
26. Internet Culture Stickers
Remember when you saw that fantastic meme of Pepe the Frog, or the Akita dog from Dogecoin? Well, internet memes are not going anywhere anytime soon, and their popularity makes them great options for funny stickers.
27. QR Code Stickers
The QR code is everywhere! It's how you access some of your favourite websites while on-the-go, or how you get a discount code or place an order at a fast food restaurant. Now, QR codes are finding their way onto stickers. Placing QR code stickers around town is a great way to advertise a small business!
28. Photo Stickers
Using your own photographs at much lower resolutions to create stickers is a great way to promote your photography business. Or, adapting an image that you've taken to become a pencil drawing, stencil rendition or other artistic representation, then printing that on a sticker, could become a neat addition to a landscape photographic print you've sold.
29. Augmented Reality Stickers
Wait, what? Yes, augmented reality now exists in sticker format. By using a digital image overlay, like a GIF file, folks that work in sticker technology R&D have created a whole new type of sticker and a whole new way of displaying imagery and artwork. Augmented reality stickers will likely grow in popularity in 2024 and beyond.
30. Celestial Bodies
The Great Unknown continues to fascinate us as a species and so stickers featuring celestial bodies are bound to maintain popularity going into 2024, particularly with events like the solar eclipse taking place this April. Space, the moon and stars are sure to continue to keep our minds wondering long into the future. Celestial stickers give you the opportunity to create your own little slice of space on a sticker!
Conclusion
Sticker creation and sticker artwork isn't going away anytime soon. Cricut machines have made DIY sticker making a relatively accessible and easy activity. If you're thinking of creating your own sticker catalogue in 2024, you'll have to up your game!
We hope these design ideas will inspire you to create your own sticker artwork this year.
