I started selling NSFW stickers on Etsy. Originally it was a way for me to have a creative outlet but turns out a lot of people want this kind of product. Making just about $500 a month from it now. It’s great because all I have to do is draw the original art once and then I can just repeatedly print it and cut it out. It’s also a very relaxing hobby for me. I enjoy sending out envelopes with hand written notes. It’s refreshing from my usual 9-5 of spreadsheets.
How do you do the sticker printing? I recently helped make some stickers for marketing for a friend's business, and I was surprised how much they cost to order in small batches (which is annoying, because we wanted to make miniseries with different designs, but now we just ordered a larger batch of one design instead). Sounds like you use your own hardware, do you have any experience with different models?
I have the simplest set up you could imagine. I just use a Brother MFC-J4440DW printer, the same printer I’ve used for years to just print text documents and some glossy Kodak sticker paper. The printer was a couple hundred bucks and the paper is $10 for 10 sheets. I charge anywhere from $15 to $25 per sticker and usually get 4 stickers per sheet of paper. I then cut them out by hand using an xact-o knife. I’ve looked into automating the cutting process using something like. Brother Scan’n’Cut or a Cricut but I honestly enjoy the manual process of cutting stickers so I’m sticking to it (pun intended!)
There was a little bit of trial and error to get the level of printing quality I finally ended up with but now that the settings are dialed in it’s a very easy process. Drawing the art is the hardest bit. I just use an iPad Pro with the pencil and Procreate for that
Are you printing & shipping them yourself? I considered selling stickers at one point but print costs under 500 was too high, plus the hourly requirements of doing my own pick& pack. I thought about hiring the neighbor kid, but casual hiring seems to get messy/illegal fast.
Yep, print and ship myself. The shipping can definitely be expensive for a single sticker depending on where it is being sent to but I charge anywhere from $15 to $25 per sticker (all original art and I think that’s why I can get away with the higher prices) so shipping doesn’t dent into that too much to not make it worth it.
There are many services that do the printing/shipping for you, they take a big cut on the price though but you don't have to worry about anything at all.
