Scandinavian Glue was an ironic art collective I started with my friend Mats — both of us shared an obsession with creating stickers and putting them up at scruffy bars. At first, it was just for fun, but the stickers started to gain popularity within our small circle of friends. That made us think: maybe we could do more with them than just ad-hoc bathroom art. We turned our sticker designs into posters and started selling them. Somehow, they caught on. Maybe it was the aesthetic, maybe the absurdity — either way, it worked. What began as a joke soon became a small business.
We had 20 sticker motifs printed as posters. Then we launched a very pretentious campaign where we acted as though we were big-name artists — we even hosted a gallery opening. We borrowed a camera from a friend and spent a few days taking nice-looking photos of the posters. Alongside it, we launched an Instagram ad campaign to see if we could get any traction.
To our surprise, the followers started pouring in almost immediately. We promptly launched a Shopify site over a weekend, hoping we could convert some of that attention into actual sales. Using the product photos we had taken, we dropped the posters online — and to our surprise, they actually started selling. What began as a silly idea turned into a real small-scale business that we ran for about six months.
In the end, neither of us was all that interested in making pretentious poster-art, that had started out as a joke. So, we sunsetted the art collective and went back to where it all began — making silly stickers.