A tale of a team building exercise turned side hustle
If you’ve ever visited the Stay Calm Industries headquarters, you’re already familiar with the multitude of branded stickers, magnets, and other items that adorn our workspace. We love our brand (branding is kinda our thing) and we can’t resist the opportunity to have some fun with our brand. Enter Sticker Mule - our go-to partner for all things cling. In addition to using Sticker Mule for a variety of applications from product labels to packaging tape, we love taking advantage of their deals as team building exercises to see what creative ways we can show off our brand. Evan sends out an APB asking for any ideas based on the sale (die-cut stickers, pins, holographic stickers and all sorts of other cool stuff). The team rushes to pitch their ideas in a race to make their vision come to life. Whoever had the best concept (as voted on by their peers) gets theirs made.
One day, a promo email came across with a product that we haven’t had the chance to work with in the past - vinyl transfer stickers. In lieu of our normal team building process, Evan issued a new challenge. “We are getting 4-inch in diameter white transfer stickers on our logo - whoever has the best idea of what we can do with them Wins.” He informed the team. From there we were off, racking our brains for unique and interesting ways to use these. Put our brand on our electronics? Already done. Brand the exterior of our office door? Not our style. Suddenly, like a beacon sent down from the heavens, the idea hit us - branded beer glasses. Let’s combine one of our favorite pastimes with our love for our brand. Sold. Once we placed the order we sought out the perfect beer glass to pair with our branding. We landed on a 16oz tallboy glass that would be an ideal vessel to house our favorite local craft beer. After days of patiently waiting for everything to arrive, we got to work applying the transfer stickers and marveling at our handiwork. Before we could enjoy the fruits of our label, we had to adhere to the old adage “Pics or it didn’t happen” and blast it out to our social media followers. To our delight, not only did our followers like the branded glasses, they WANTED one (or in some cases, eight). We did a quick numbers crunch and decided to go for it - Let’s sell some glasses! To date we have dozens of glasses ordered, with that number growing every day (especially every time we feature one in a post).
Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that Evan is also proudly sporting his Stay Calm Industries vinyl transfer sticker on the rear quarter window of his beloved Volkswagen GTI, and after months of exposure to the elements and plenty of car washes, it’s still going strong. And that is how a promo offer for transfer stickers turned into a business opportunity. Keep your eyes peeled for the next iteration of our SCI beer glass collection on our social media!
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