Overlooked Opportunities: Sticking With Stickers in Oklahoma

Oklahoma City Community College in Oklahoma City serves more than 18,000 students, making it the fourth largest public educational institution in the state. Providing almost all of the printing for the community college is its four-employee in-plant. This includes everything from quick copy work, to name badges, to door signage. One new service that has proven to be lucrative for the operation is stickers.

Justin Van Nest, the communications and printing operations manager, notes that once stickers caught on, they grew very quickly in popularity.

“We had been able to do them before, but no one was really taking advantage of them,” he says. “We produced around 3,000 stickers in FY23. We started a sticker of the month in July 2023, and by December, we were producing around 12,000 stickers. That increased in January to the point we had to discontinue the sticker of the month because we didn’t have time to produce and print them.”

The team at Oklahoma City Community College’s in-plant stands with the Mimaki CJV330-160 used to print stickers. From left: Silver Wakefield, Justin Van Nest, Sara Bakke, and David Schemenauer. | Credit: OCCC

All the stickers are being produced on a Mimaki CJV330-160 eco-solvent printer and cut on a Graphtec FC9000-160.

“We chose the eight-color option on it for a wider range of colors we can produce,” Van Nest says. But the real reason they were able to grow so fast was because they got the right person in the right place at the right time.

“We were fortunate that our last hire [Sara Bakke] had an extensive background in sticker production from a previous job,” Van Nest notes. “She had been let go during the pandemic from her job, and we got lucky in filling our last position available with her. Her background was part of the reason we decided to expand into stickers.”

And that service took off like proverbial wildfire throughout the campus. “We created a ‘Sticker of the Month’ that we attached to a card that listed print services available to our campus, along with deadlines and how to submit orders,” Van Nest notes. “We distributed one to each department every month. Eventually, people started coming to the shop and asking for additional stickers. From there, word of mouth around campus helped grow the success we had with the stickers. Once one department had something created for them, they would show them off and other departments would request stickers. Students would have the stickers on their water bottles and laptops, which led to other departments wanting stickers. Swag budgets were limited, but stickers were easily available to the departments to distribute.”

The top benefit of producing stickers, Van Nest says, is that they offer a cost-efficient promotional item that departments can easily work into their budgets without having to sacrifice anywhere else. Students love them, he says, and slap them on “all sorts of things and carry them around town. This leads to an increase in our brand awareness, not only with our on-campus community, but in our city as well.”
That said, Van Nest notes that in-plants wanting to offer stickers to their own organizations should start small, with simple designs.

“Learn how to do that well before expanding into more complex designs and shapes,” he advises. “Make sure to get training on any device you buy. But also don’t forget: it’s stickers. Don’t be too serious with them, have fun.”