Scandinavian Glue

Scandinavian Glue was an ironic art collective I started with my friend Mats. We shared an obsession with making stickers and putting them up in scruffy bars. It was just for fun, but the stickers became popular in our small circle of friends, and we began to wonder if they could be more than ad-hoc bathroom art. So we turned them into posters and tried selling them. Somehow people bought them. Maybe it was the aesthetic, maybe the absurdity. The joke became a small business.

We had 20 of the sticker motifs printed as posters and launched them as pretentiously as we could, acting as if we were big-name artists. There was even a gallery opening. With a camera borrowed from a friend, we spent a few days taking nice photos of the posters and ran an Instagram ad campaign to see if anyone cared.

To our surprise, people cared. Followers started pouring in almost immediately, so we built a Shopify site over a weekend, hoping to turn some of that attention into sales. The posters went online with the photos we had taken, and, to our continued surprise, they sold. The silly idea ran as a real, if small, business for about six months.

In the end, neither of us was that interested in making pretentious poster art out of something that started as a joke. So we shut down the art collective and went back to where it all began: making silly stickers.