Product Exercise Day 29 — StickerMule Wall Graphics

This is day 29 in my 30 day challenge to product exercise

WHAT MAKES THEM SUCCESSFUL?

I have never seen a sticker company generate such enthusiasm like StickerMule does. Stickers should be a commodity product. StickerMule rises above this by offering an excellent experience, an excellent product, and fast service.

They’ve also been been smart to start with targeting startups as their early adopters. Stickers are the perennial swag product of startups. Having the coolest stickers is a way to market your startup and standout. StickerMule optimizes their process for this audience and will eventually cross the chasm to a larger one.

With wall graphics, StickerMule adds a new whole new SKU to their sticker line. Startups have a need to decorate their offices and most of them need to do it on the cheap. Plus some extra branding in the office never hurts. The wall stickers as a new product come with some significant challenges to produce, but also great opportunity from their average selling price.

WHAT DID THEY GET RIGHT?

StickerMule is the epitome of paying attention to every detail. It’s in every aspect of the ordering experience and the delivered product.

Take the wall graphics landing page. There are two inputs to enter the dimensions of the desired wall sticker, which updates in real time the quoted price. If StickerMule detects you’re visiting outside the US, it offers convert the default unit of feet into centimeters. This is a level of detail almost everyone else misses.

They also make sure the end product always looks good. If uploaded artwork is too pixelated and won’t print well at the dimensions chosen for the wall sticker, they’ll fix the image. They don’t send it back to the customer or ship a shitty sticker. They do it all behind the scenes like magic. They also claim to have “better color accuracy across all of our product lines than any other vendor”.

That attention to the small details and refusal to ship anything but a great product is what builds such enthusiasm.

HOW DID THE PEOPLE BEHIND THIS PRODUCT THINK ABOUT THIS IDEA?

The whole philosophy behind the wall stickers is great design. By “great design” I mean taking choices away from consumers. StickerMule knows the trade-offs better than a consumer does, so they made a great product and present the consumer with just the few simple options necessary.

This starts with the product options. Right now, there’s just one: upload an image to make a wall sticker. There are no pre-designed templates or options to use, although these are on the roadmap. There’s just one option for now, which is all that’s needed for the launch of this new SKU.

There’s no place to choose between a matte or gloss finish. This is for two reasons. The first is that it’s a hard decision for the consumer to make because they don’t necessarily understand the difference in how the end product will look in their specific environment. Consumers aren’t artists.

The other reason is that they chose a material that is optimal for on the wall installation. They traded off giving consumers an option on finish for easier install. Again, this is because installation is a huge pain and consumers don’t necessarily understand the benefits of matte versus gloss finish.

All of this only comes because StickerMule knows their consumer deeply through user research. They understand the consumer’s pain points and they have domain expertise to know the product’s potential benefits. Only by having deep knowledge of both audience and product can they prioritize features and make the trade-offs that they did to design a great product and experience.