The First Stickers & The Manufacturer Behind Them | Death By Stickers

Before the shop had a name people knew, I needed to find out if this was real. If this was a viable option for me. If running a business was a legitimate way to make an income while making an impact. If I could actually make my dreams come true. Not just an idea sitting on a hard drive but something people would buy. So I took the first step and got something made.

I placed the order and picked everything up in mid April 2025. I am only sharing this now because the shop just launched on May 30th. This has been a long time coming.

I partnered with a local manufacturer in New Jersey called Death By Stickers to produce my very first run of hand drawn original art stickers. They are based close to an area I spent a lot of my teen summers in, which made the whole thing feel a little more meaningful as a starting point. Low minimum order quantities, a 2-4 day turnaround for pickup, and genuinely cool people made it the right choice for a first run.

The product came out exceptionally well! The color, the feel, and the overall quality were solid. They gave me more of whichever designs they loved most, which was a thoughtful gesture I did not expect. And as a first experience designing for print it taught me a tremendous amount.

I also came away with a clear list of things I will do differently going forward. The printing process for the bleed, aka the border around each design, runs on RGB rather than CMYK, which limits how precise color matching can be, and a few of my designs came out with a white bleed I had not intended. If you look at any of my designs, most of them have a different bleed/border color. This is intentional, and not something a lot of people do. But when people do DO IT, it’s usually an artist. Also, some of the cuts varied slightly by design as well. I also realized my artist name needed to be larger on several pieces because it was getting lost, and that is something I will not let happen again. But that was a personal mistake, one that I couldn’t have known unless I had my own printer!

Manufacturing at a small scale also means accepting that you are likely in the negative until volume catches up. That is just the reality of starting out. But starting with 10 units per design was the right move and it gave me exactly what I needed, which was proof.

People bought them and that was the signal I was looking for.

I have just gotten my own machines set up and am working toward bringing everything in house from here, which is an exciting next step for where this shop is going.

I may return to Death By Stickers in the future if the business grows to a point where outside manufacturing makes sense again. But the goal has always been to produce everything myself, to my own exact standards. Not because they did not deliver a good product, but because I know what I want this brand to be and I am building toward it. Plus, it would create jobs in the future as well!