SLO County sticker business makes big move — onto Target shelves
In 2014, Cal Poly graduate Maureen Vazquez was a stay-at-home mom looking for something to do as a side hustle after years of corporate graphic design.
Then an idea stuck — literally — and Vazquez’s sticker subscription club, Pipsticks, was born.
Today, Pipsticks has thousands of members across the globe receiving monthly packages of specially designed stickers and sticker books.
That community of sticker lovers is set to get even bigger now that the San Luis Obispo-based business has entered a partnership with Target Corp. to start selling Pipsticks sticker books in its stores and online.
“It’s been quite an experience,” Vazquez, who goes by “Mo,” told The Tribune. “It’s definitely marking this new stage of growth for us.”
So how did Pipsticks grow from a side hustle to an international community? It all started with a healthy dose of nostalgia.
How Pipsticks was founded
A self-described “child of the 1980s,” Vazquez had “a big love affair” with stickers as a kid, she said.
She remembered the flutter of excitement she felt when opening up a new pack or finding an especially cute sticker, and wondered what it would be like to experience that feeling again.
Vazquez wanted to share her love of stickers with her children, but discovered that finding cool stickers was a bit of a challenge.
Without the time to actively search for special stickers, she was limited by what was available on store shelves.
“I just couldn’t shake the idea of bringing stickers back into the conversation for everybody,” she said. “I found I realized that very little in my life since that time had given me ... butterflies in my stomach feeling that I got every time I got new stickers as a kid.”
Vazquez began talking to friends and family and discovered that others felt the same about stickers.
So she started a small subscription service sending out children’s stickers each month. The company soon added an adult stickers subscription option as well.
By the time Vazquez and her family moved back to San Luis Obispo from the East Coast in 2015, Pipsticks had roughly 700 subscribers. That number quickly grew into the “multi-thousands,” she said.
“Over the last seven years as I’ve been in the business I’ve come to realize that what I suspected back then was true — which is stickers do have kind of an incredible power to make people feel things and really, really experience a certain level of joy,” Vazquez said.
Nostalgia helps fuel SLO sticker company’s rise
Though there was always an interest in stickers among her fanbase, Vazquez said in recent years there’s been an explosion in interest in stickers due to corresponding boom in nostalgia for the 1990s.
“In the last two or three years ... the ‘90s has just come back (in popularity) in full,” she said. “Stickers are part of that.”
“You have literally people in every age category ... plastering stickers on their laptops, on their water bottles, or Tik Tok videos,” Vazquez said, adding that the trend has been embraced by everyone from tweens to millennials and Gen-Xers.
Vazquez said stickers have become “a real exciting medium for people to express themselves, and ... to find fun and joy in something that doesn’t cost very much.”
Pipsticks has captured the attention of national audiences, making its way onto lists of popular subscription services and write-ups by magazines such as Glamour.
During the “sticker boom” as Vazquez calls it, Pipsticks operated a retail store in downtown San Luis Obispo, which displayed and sold some of the company’s most popular offerings.
That store opened in 2017 and closed in 2021 in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We had to shut down our brick-and-mortar store,” Vazquez said. “All of our retail business collapsed ... Luckily, our subscription and our online business went up (and) that was able to sustain us through the pandemic and give us the revenues that we needed to come out of it.”
How Pipsticks made its way to Target shelves
Around that same time, Vazquez said, Pipsticks wanted to work with a large retailer to expand its offerings. That’s when the company started reaching out to Target, she said.
“It was obviously our first experience working with a big major retailer,” Vazquez said. “It’s all been a learning curve.”
She said when Pipsticks initially pitched to Target at the start of the pandemic, it looked like nothing was going to come out of it. Then about a year later, the retailer came back and asked to see what Pipsticks could offer to Target shoppers, she said.
“I think they’ve been really excited about the brand in general,” she said. “Then it was just a question of understanding how to get what we’re known for — which is generally really interesting creative designs and colorful stickers — into a form that would work for Target.”
Pipsticks created a Pipsticks Sticker Club book, featuring some of the company’s best-selling designs, as well as “creative challenges” on the back of each page.
The book launched online and in select Target stores in March. It was doing “phenomenally well” a month later, according to Vazquez.
Unfortunately for locals, the book is not yet available in Target stores in San Luis Obispo County, but Vazquez said she hopes the company will be able to roll out the product to all Target locations sometime in 2023.
In the meantime, folks can order it online at Target.com or get in the sticker action through one of Pipsticks’ several sticker subscription options, she said.
“It’s exciting because, at the end of the day, this will bring stickers to that much bigger of an audience,” she said. “That’s really our goal, to get our product — and more than anything, stickers and the joy that they bring to people — in the hands of as many people as possible.”
This story was originally published July 26, 2022 at 2:18 PM.
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