At this price, I could just buy admission to festivals and load up on stickers there...

September 8, 2010 8:12 AM

Looking for the cheapest/easiest way to acquire rather a lot of punk rock stickers.

I have a need to completely cover a surface of about 2 square meters with stickers so that there is some overlap and absolutely no uncovered space showing through.

I would like to do this with stickers for punk rock bands. Ideally I would also like to keep the colour palette to just white black and red. The stickers can be of varying shapes and sizes.

I used to attend a lot of punk shows and festivals, so I know that these stickers are often given away for free by the handful. As such, I expected to be able to find large lots of them cheap on eBay. But, alas, the prices are rather higher than I expected (tending towards a dollar per sticker, even when sold in lots).

Some examples of the kind of sticker I'm talking about:

one
two
three
four (This one is a lot. Some of them aren't for bands and others don't match the colour scheme, but the two sticker sheets in the middle are just about perfect. Even so, the price is too high considering I would need to buy between 15 and 20 such lots.)

Is there somewhere better to go than eBay for this? Should I be posting want-to-buy craigslist ads? Or writing to the record labels directly? Or should I just accept that I need a $200 sticker budget?

posted by 256 to Shopping (8 answers total)

If you're happy to use any stickers, and not just those from established/old school bands (I presume you mean US punk here - you'd struggle to find UK stickers) then your best bet is a rock/punk shop. I used to live in Manchester where there was an alternative shopping mall called Affleck's Palace, which sold posters, patches, rock merchandise and badges - if you have somewhere similar take a look there. You may find some promo stickers.

An alternative is Unamerican.com, if you want punk aesthetic as much as logos.
posted by mippy at 8:16 AM on September 8, 2010

Response by poster: Right. I guess my locale matters. I hadn't really considered the "acquire them locally" approach. I'm in Philadelphia. I don't know of any stores in the area that are likely to have free promo stickers. But I don't know Philly that well, so I'd be happy to be pointed in the right direction if such stores exist.

And it doesn't really matter to me whether the band is new, old, british, american, big or small. All I care about is that they be punk band and that the sticker have the right aesthetic. I'm not interested however in stickers for skateboard companies or punkradio.com or whatever, even if the look is spot on. Also, if acquiring stickers of minor bands in large lots, I'd like to avoid accidentally using stickers from white supremacist bands and the like. Though I guess the only way to be sure about that is judicious googling of every sticker I don't recognize.
posted by 256 at 8:26 AM on September 8, 2010

Maybe try going to some punk rock-focused websites, particularly ones with forums, and post some requests for stickers there?
posted by inigo2 at 8:35 AM on September 8, 2010

The cheapest way I can think of is to contact distributors (like interpunk) or record labels and see if they'll sell you bulk stickers by weight. You'd have to sort through 'em yourself and you're sure to have a bunch leftover that don't fit your aesthetic, but they've got to have tons of stickers laying around.
posted by Ufez Jones at 9:24 AM on September 8, 2010

Best answer: Stickerguy manufactures stickers for punk & indie bands (and are the source of a lot of those red/black/white stickers, since they'll do small print runs if you stick to that color palette)

They send free samples if you send them an SASE - maybe shoot them an email and see if you can buy random/leftover stickers in bulk?
posted by zombiedance at 9:40 AM on September 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you live near a brick and mortar alternative/second hand record store, drop in and see what they have. Every time my son goes to a local shop like this, he always comes home with a bunch of free ones.
posted by imjustsaying at 4:00 AM on September 9, 2010

And if going the bulk route, remember you can sell the surplus at inflated prices on eBay ;)
posted by brokkr at 9:31 AM on September 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Why not make your own?

• Do google image searches for your favorite bands.
• Right-click-save the images, and paste them into MS Word, Photoshop, whatever people use for documents.
• Print using sheets of sticker paper. Since you only want a limited color palate, you can specify in your printer settings to only print "grayscale."
• Cut 'em out and stick 'em.
posted by polyester.lumberjack at 10:11 AM on September 12, 2010