what is
custom, small‑batch vinyl stickers at cost for bean & pal’s family and friends — just for the joy
custom
any way you want it
upload your art and shape it in the beanslaps sticker studio.
some ideas to get you started:
- your dog, obviously
- a napkin doodle
- kiddo's art project
- your startup's new logo
- a graphic for your noble invention
- a mural you stopped for
- something you made with AI
accepted file types:
- png
- jpg
- heic
- webp
- avif
- gif
- tiff
- bmp
- svg
design your sticker, and it turns up in the mail.
small‑batch
orders cap at one letter sheet
the studio packs your slaps onto the sheet as you add them:
- it shows the percentage used, and what is still addable
- bigger slaps eat the sheet faster (obviously)
so one sheet can be a lot of things:
- a contact sheet of all one sticker
- different styles and sizes of the same art
- mix and match — different art, different styles
and of course you can make more than one small‑batch order.
order less than a full sheet and it might wait a bit, while other orders fill up the rest of it — that way the leftover does not get thrown out. order a whole sheet and it goes straight through.
vinyl stickers
…these are quality!
vinyl is the industry standard for stickers meant to last. it is a thin plastic film rather than paper, so it bends around a curve instead of creasing and shrugs off water instead of going soggy. it is what road signs and race liveries are made of.
there are five layers to it, from the top down:
- laminate — the clear coat on top. it takes the weather so your picture does not have to.
- ink — your actual picture, printed onto the vinyl and then sealed under that coat.
- vinyl — the white film that is the sticker itself.
- adhesive — holds on hard, and still comes off clean.
- liner — the backing paper. you peel it off and bin it.
and they go on just about anything:
- water bottle
- laptop
- bike frame
- helmet
- car bumper
- suitcase
- notebook
- skateboard
- guitar case
- phone case
- cooler
- toolbox
- hard hat
- snowboard
- locker door
- fridge
and if anything ever happens to it, just reorder it at beanslaps!
at cost
it’s real cheap, y’all
no margin, no markup, no minimum. money is not why we are doing this.
you’ll pay for:
- materials
- envelope + stamp
- rig fund
venmo is the only way to pay at checkout right now. anything extra you add goes to building the features and capabilities people ask for.
bean & pal
just us kids
we live in east nashville and walk when we could drive, usually toward coffee.
bean — a college friend called KB started calling me that, and it stuck the way the good ones do. i’ve been bean ever since.
- trails
- lego
- bennettfarkas.com
- openmined
pal — allison called everyone pal, so her bachelorette party got named the pallison party, and after that it was just pal.
weekend mornings we’re at red headed stranger. come say hi.
married 18 september 2016 — ten years this september
family and friends
frictionless, and hopefully a lot of fun
beanslaps is invite-only and the invite comes by mail. after that, the goal is for the app to be as fun and easy as possible. if it is not easy, we would love to know about it :-) — it should work great on both mobile and desktop.
there are two buttons in the app we genuinely want you to press:
those two are how this stays fresh and working for everyone, so please use them.
once you’ve ordered, you can watch it go. the tracker on your orders page follows the sheet from paid to mailed, and status.beanslaps.com tells you whether the studio is up before you even sign in.
and honestly, we hope it is a hit with our friends’ kids.
for the joy
why are bean and pal running beanslaps?
i have always liked stickers, in a slightly complicated way. i like my things and my spaces tidy, and a sticker is a small act of untidiness. it is also expression, and expression is cool: a sticker can hold a moment, claim a tribe, pass along a joke, or just say something about you without you having to. i can get down with that. especially on a water bottle.
over the years i kept having ideas for fun, clever stickers, and kept getting stopped by the same thing: no reason to own twenty-five of one, and twenty-five dollars for a single decal for my bike felt like overkill. (…SO BUILD A WHOLE STICKER STUDIO, BENNETT. LOL.)
i am who i am. anyway — building beanslaps has been bags of fun: the editing studio, the packing engine, the software that talks to the printers, this homepage, the admin back end. it is the closest thing to lego (other than lego) i have had since i was a kid, and i spend so much of my time on a computer that it is a treat to work on something that shows up off the screen.
at first this was about opening custom small-batch stickers up to the people we know, because suddenly i could build all of it. the more i sat with it, the bigger it got — for allison and me, anyway. we see it as a fun way to interact with you, our family and friends, about whatever you decide is slap‑worthy. that alone is worth the production time. and it gives us a reason to send some snail mail on a regular basis, and to spread a little fun around y’all’s mailboxes, digital and physical.
beanslaps is not a business and there is no plan to make it one. nobody is paid, nothing is marked up, and it does not scale on purpose.
so: for the joy. for the joy of connecting with the people around us, and of being a lil expressive along the way.
— bean