Today we’d like to introduce you to Hadley Allen.
Hi Hadley, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I was about 5 years into a career in Fire & Life Safety, servicing and inspecting equipment, and had begun to get a bit disenfranchised from the company I was working for at the time due to some directional changes. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the next step for me looked like, and in that time through a series of happenstance I ended up with a free, very old, vinyl plotter. I didn’t know anything about vinyl or decals, etc. but I always had a loose interest, so I spent about a week trying to get this old thing up and running, through some Serial port adapter and some weird driver jank.
After playing around with it, I started making some decals for a friend. I formed an LLC and was just doing it a bit in my free time. During an inspection up in Washington I had made a comment to a fleet manager about how one of his trucks didn’t have decals. After some back and forth questions, I told him I had just started, and he showed me a masked decal and asked if I could do them, I said no, because what he showed me was printed vinyl, and I only had a plotter (cutter). He asked “well what would it take for you to be able to do this?” I told him I had no idea but I could do some research, and he said “well, if you figure it out, I’ll be your first customer”.
So I went out and bought a used Roland VG-540 for $5,000 from a shop in Portland that was upgrading. I didn’t actually have the capital at the time, so it felt like a huge gamble, going into debt for this machine I knew hardly anything about, but it felt right, so I did. Immediately had to invest a few thousand more into getting it repaired and serviced, but then I was up and running (sort of). I genuinely had no idea what I was doing. I remember wanting to give up so many times after a failed lamination, or some sort of near printhead-strike, all of these crazy issues to have in the spare room of your home hahaha.
After I did a bunch of work for that guys fleet, I got really bored. I reached out to an old friend who did some art, and asked if I could print some of her stuff. I made these little sticker packs that were focused around a single artist, designed the packaging, and sealed em up, but none of em sold. I tried that with 3 different artists but it never went anywhere because I wasn’t marketing, I didn’t have an audience or a demand.
So I started thinking about what was missing. Turns out, it was a variety of things, because I was straight up goofing, not actually thinking about providing a real service or value, I was just having fun, but I found that there is a place where those two things merge, and it kinda started with asking “where do people buy stickers?”. Coffee shops, at the counters of retailers, etc. But what stickers? Where do they come from? Who designed them? Do the people printing them even know?
And that’s about when this project really came to life. I met some local Salem artists and we kinda brainstormed this. An artist-forward sticker printing business, designed to fuel artists and to give businesses an opportunity to buy wholesale, local, ethically-sourced high quality stickers. It’s really just evolved from there. And we’re only just getting started. Of course, this was also before AI “art” really began to become an issue. I hadn’t even considered the value I was potentially creating at the time, and now, as generative slop gets better and better, I feel that the only way to cut through that is integrity, and that is at the core of what Big Bad Sticker Co. is. Artistic integrity.
There’s a lot more to this story, but I feel as though I’ve already spent far far too long on this single question at this point.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
In no sense has it been smooth. I have been actively determined to build this business backwards, and the hard way, from the start. Literally at every turn, whether it was intentional or not, I have taken the most difficult approach, often times for no reason, but many times for the sake of doing it.
I mean, I’m not profitable yet, I still fund all of what I do from dayjob income, and this project is what gets about 80% of my free time.
Learning wide format printing from scratch with no one to really ask for training or help was quite difficult. There are a lot of things you’d learn really easily in a production environment, around people who have figured stuff out or gotten training. I have gotten so close to having to shut down, so many times, from close calls that would have cost more than what I paid for the machine to repair, lol.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m really detail-oriented and I’m quite mission-driven. I spent most of my career inspection fire safety equipment, and then more recently in general trades, doing some hvac/plumbing/entry-level mechanical stuff. I like building and fixing things, I love building computers, crafting, and just making cool stuff. Obviously I also really enjoy printing, which is something that I feel allows me to really hone in on small details and obsess over the smallest imperfections & differences. I’ve really enjoyed delving into some basic color-science stuff, which really is just me calibrating and using fancy color reading tools to build print profiles for various printers. I really love collaborating with creatives, I am creative myself, but not in the same way that an artist is, I think? But I think I thrive by bringing a more technical creativity into the mix with people who really MAKE stuff, ya know?
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Probably a bunch of slop. It seems many people love just consuming slop. I am proud to have already begun building something better with cool people. I do believe what we are making will only increase in the value it brings, as time goes on. The people who are okay with outsourcing creativity and artistic expression will drink their slop, and people who value people, and what people create, will hopefully just get lots of their cool art printed by me and my friends 🙂
Contact Info:
- Website: https://bigbadsticker.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigbadstickerco/
