Feb 19th, 2014
We're taking an extended break from blogging. Admittedly, it's been difficult to justify the time required to blog. It takes awhile to formulate a post and doesn't feel like an activity that brings our customers much value.
We have a long list of improvements planned for 2014 that we're working on diligently. Going forward, the best way to find out when we do something new is to follow us on Twitter or Google+.
Jul 22nd, 2013
We created a short video of our ordering process. A few highlights:
Hope you like our 1st attempt at video production. We'd love to know what you think. Leave a comment or tweet @stickermule.
Apr 2nd, 2013
Sharing access to ecommerce accounts is a common pain point with online ordering. We deal with it at Sticker Mule and often see our customers experiencing the same issue when ordering from us.
Recently, we came across a password manager called Meldium that solves this problem by storing you login credentials in the cloud so that you can easily share them with coworkers. More specifically, Meldium let's you:
To further improve security, Meldium let's users login without having to know the actual user name and password for a given web site. Their Google Chrome extension will log you into the site without exposing your actual username and passwords.
Meldium recently added Sticker Mule to their list of apps so you can use it to easily and securely share your Sticker Mule account with coworkers.
If your organization has lots of sticker designs they are managing, Meldium combined with our reordering system makes managing your sticker orders even easier.
Feb 2nd, 2013
We discontinued phone support recently. Our rationale is explained below:
You can't easily put a new person on the phone since you have limited control over the difficulty of calls they take. By contrast, you can let newer support agents respond to easy emails until they are comfortable handling more difficult ones.
It's time consuming to listen to calls, but scanning emails is quick and efficient. It takes me an hour per day to read all of our customer service communication, but it's incredibly useful. Our core team reads the majority of our emails as a source of ideas and to keep a pulse on how we're performing.
Phone support is more human capital intensive than email support. It's difficult to maintain the quality of your organization when head count grows quickly. Erring on the side of needing fewer people makes it easier for us to ensure all of our people are top notch.
Email support can be automated by developing faqs, macros, videos and efficient routing systems. It's not possible to automate phone support to the same extent.
We aim to be clear, concise and comprehensive in how we respond to your questions. Often that means taking a moment to research an answer and review our response with coworkers before replying. It's not possible to handle a difficult phone inquiry in this manner without putting you on hold or calling you back later.
Special arrangements made on the phone must be documented by an agent who could record them inaccurately. By contrast, all email inquiries are associated to your account and can be viewed our entire team so that we are all familiar with your needs.
Since implementing this change, we have been diligently reviewing every customer interaction, documenting problems and developing solutions to prevent common problems from recurring. Most support inquiries exist because we failed in some regard. Either our process had a hiccup or our ordering experience was confusing. Already we have fixed dozens of small problems and more improvements are coming soon.
We removed the phone number field from checkout for all US customers. Filling out forms isn't fun, but we hope cutting one needless field makes checkout a bit more pleasant.
Contemplating a similar decision? You may want to read Wistia's blog posts on this topic.
Nov 19th, 2012
350+ stickers have been added to the Sticker Mule Gallery since we launched it 3 months ago. We built the gallery as a source of design inspiration and as a tool to help you get extra exposure from your stickers. Today, we’re continuing along that path by adding the ability to group stickers into collections.
Curious what other breweries are doing with their stickers? Check out the beer stickers collection. Want to learn more about the latest startups and see how they’re using stickers? There is a startup stickers collection for that too. Within each collection, stickers are ranked according to how many “likes” they received.
8 sticker collections are available for you to browse today and many more will be added in the months to come. We hope you like what we’ve done so far with collections. If you have new collections you’d like to see, just let us know.
Jul 31st, 2012
The Sticker Mule Gallery is officially live. It's far from being finished, but here are a few things you can do currently:
Every week we photograph and add a new batch of stickers. If you'd like your stickers added you can fill out our gallery request form. We review gallery requests in the order they were submitted. Also, at the moment, only users with accounts can join the gallery so remember to sign up if you haven't yet.
Hope you like what we've done so far. Stay tuned as there are a handful of planned improvements coming soon.
Mar 21st, 2012
About a year ago we had an idea to let our team "star" interesting stickers in our backend much like you can star emails in Gmail. We each had stickers we wanted to remember for various reasons. It seemed like a cool idea to give everyone on our team a way to easily recall the ones they liked.
I merrily added "star interesting stickers" to our development queue and there it stayed while we worked on more useful things. Turns out, it's difficult to get motivated to build a "cool" idea for a handful of people. Internal systems are rarely beautiful and we like to work on things that look pretty.
Fortunately, a few months back, we woke up and realized we were being short-sighted. Building an internal system to organize stickers is lame, but creating a system where anyone can browse, remember and get exposure for their stickers is a bit more interesting.
It didn't take long for our design lead to create his vision for this project and ever since we've been obsessed with making it amazing. In the new few weeks, we'll be releasing an initial preview of our new project, currently dubbed: the Sticker Gallery.If this sounds interesting, then visit our teaser page to sign up and help spread the word.
A preview release is only a few weeks away so stay tuned!
Jan 31st, 2012
It’s been about a week since reddit blacked out to protest SOPA and PIPA. It seems the effect has been significant, as both bills seem to have been stopped dead in the water. But it’s good to remember that freedom on the Internet needs to be continually protected, as we’re sure that such legislation will continue to arise.
We wanted to do our part in spreading the message, so we turned to the reddit community to help us design a sticker to promote freedom on the Internet. Here’s what we came up with:
We’ll be adding one of these to every reddit sticker order for free until the end of February. To get your hands on one, visit the reddit Sticker Store and order any design to receive a free Protect Internet Freedom sticker designed by redditor thesluttymcslut.
Questions or thoughts? Tweet @stickermule.
Jan 4th, 2012
Defend your right to privacy by purchasing stickers from our brand new DuckDuckGo Sticker Store. DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine like Google or Bing with an important difference. It does not track you. It also works harder to reduce spam and clutter, and includes a ton of goodies
The DuckDuckGo store features 18 community designed stickers (more to come!), as well as official logo stickers and iPhone skins. There’s even a reddit-inspired sticker that also serves as the logo for the official DuckDuckGo subreddit.
We couldn’t be happier to power the official DuckDuckGo Sticker Store, but we need your help to make it a huge success. With SOPA looming, it couldn’t be more important to support companies like DuckDuckGo that defend our right to online privacy. So, for a limited time, we’re giving away a pack of 10 free DuckDuckGo stickers to anyone that spreads the word about this store and DuckDuckGo on their blog.
Dec 5th, 2011
So, we woke up this AM to find ~1000 orders in our system and this post on reddit. Our new referral system let’s anyone give their friends $10 towards their 1st order by sharing a referral link.
According to our accounting department, we can’t giveaway free stickers indefinitely so we had to make a change to our referral system. Anyone can still get a $10 credit towards their 1st order, but you can’t use the credit unless the order is greater than $50.
Since we’d still like to thank everyone on reddit for the awesome support, we’re going to giveaway another 1000 reddit stickers for free. Just fill out this form and a free sticker will be in the mail within 7 days. :-)
