Advertise and promote your products, services and offers with ease!

Customised stickers are ideal for any uses relating to promotion and advertising. As they are so light and versatile, they can be transported anywhere and used almost everywhere to get across key information which you want to say. You can include promotional text, logos, graphics, contact details and any other information to create branded stickers which advertise your product, service, event or establishment. You can even create special offer based promotional stickers which immediately entitle anyone to an offer of your choice whilst further increasing brand exposure. When it comes to custom made stickers, the choice is yours!

The finishes and options available also add further dimensions to your full colour stickers. There are a range of shapes to choose from, whilst FastPrint also allows you to add in any measurements for completely custom sticker sizes. You can also choose from finishes such as gloss, matt, clear and more, whilst the weatherproof properties of vinyl allow you to use them indoors or outdoor stickers in almost any scenario. Finally, the backing adhesive used in our full colour sticker printing services means that they can be applied firmly for years of use, but also removed carefully without residue if required.

History of Label & Sticker Printing

Adhesive labels have been around since the 1880s, when retailers in America began to use small pieces of paper printed using the new technique of lithography, attaching them to products with sticky gum. They were used on crates of fruit and other foodstuffs to advertise the manufacturer and make the product stand out on a shelf or in the marketplace. Self-adhesive labels were introduced in the 1930s, invented by R. Stanton Avery. He developed paper that was covered with adhesive and a liner. This type was called pressure-sensitive, as it simply needed pushing down to fix in place. The company Avery founded is still a market-leader in label production today.

Many of the early ones are highly collectible – some collectors are interested in the history of the retail label, while others pick more specialised uses, such as the suitcase label. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, grand hotels across the world printed their own, and travellers who stayed there attached them to the large luggage trunks that were fashionable. Many of them were mini works of art, often with a picture of the hotel or sights from its location in a beautiful lithographic print. The boom in luggage label production was the 1920s, when growing social mobility and new forms of travel such as the steam ship, allowed people to explore the world. Many of the largest hotels and travel companies employed artists to design them, such as Mario Borgoni, whose iconic art deco designs used colour to catch the eye.

Another artistic avenue for them was the record label, originally the disc of paper glued to the centre of a vinyl record. Record companies soon began to use this space to advertise their brand, and the bright colours and striking logos of Atlantic, Island, Columbia and Decca became instantly recognisable to a generation of music lovers. In the 1930s, printing businesses began to find new avenues for selling smaller stickers to the public. Stickers for children began appearing, featuring farmyard animals or vehicles. Usually this type was licked to wet it, and it could then be stuck into a book to make a picture. Bumper stickers were produced from the 1930s and 1940s, often as souvenirs of tourist attractions that advertised where a car had travelled – and gave some free advertising space to the attraction too! Later, they were produced with slogans and jokes.

The 1960s and 70s saw the founding of the Panini company and introduction of the football sticker. Tobacco companies had been producing series of collectable cards on various themes for a century, but Panini were the first company to sell packs of them as stand-alone items. Their glued stickers featuring sportsmen encouraged people to collect the whole set into an album. More recently, the invention of the inkjet desktop printer has brought them into the home, and digital printing has made ordering and printing them cheap and fast. They are now a part of everyday life, from the labels on food and postage addresses to fun stickers for kids and nametags for events. They have become more sophisticated, and can now be applied to a huge variety of objects. The introduction of vinyl has meant that they can now be used outdoors, on vehicles or windows. Decal stickers are now used to cover everything from branded company cars to racing cars, trains and planes. The use of sheets of vinyl for this process means they can be removed and replaced relatively easily if branding or messages need to be changed, making them ideal for advertising.