My kids wanted to sell things they had made. The usual answers are a lemonade stand or a table at a craft fair, and both of those end when the afternoon does.
A website doesn’t. So we built one.
Toasty Peel Shop, a family sticker shop, is the result. My kids decide what goes on it and what it’s called. They run it themselves and keep what it earns. I set up the plumbing once… and then stayed out of the way.
What do they sell?
Stickers. Small ones, with a whole lot of personality.
Every sticker is a 3 x 4 inch kiss-cut decal on satin-finish vinyl, and they start at $2.99. Right now the lineup is 59 designs across six sets:
- Meet Toasty. Toasty himself, a slice of bread with opinions, plus the shop marks.
- Mood Words. One word for whatever today turned out to be. Baked. Fried. Salty. Lit.
- Pep Talk. Small reminders for the days that need them. Rest counts. Done beats perfect.
- Faith. Grace, mission and a nudge in bold letters.
- LCA. School spirit in sticker form: crest, mascot, wordmark and the sports roster.
- Everyday. Odds and ends. Sharks, sirens, cozy season and the occasional apology.
The shop has one test for every design, and I think it’s a good one: would it make someone smile at a stoplight?
Will they last?
That’s the question I’d ask, so the shop answers it.
The vinyl is built for real use. It’s water-, scratch- and UV-resistant. Water bottles, laptops and notebooks are all fair game. Hand-washing is suggested.
The surface matters more than the sticker. Clean and dry it, peel slowly from a corner, press from the middle outward, and give it a day before it gets wet. In the shop’s own words, ninety percent of sad stickers are a dusty surface.
Why kiss cut?
Because it keeps the price down.
A die-cut sticker is cut all the way through the vinyl and the backing, so it arrives in the exact shape of the design. A kiss-cut sticker is cut through the vinyl only, with a rectangle of backing left around it. That makes it easy to peel and a little cheaper to make. Same vinyl. Same design.
The shop wrote a whole post on it: why kiss cut earns its rectangle.
Can I get a custom sticker?
Yes. According to the shop, custom peels are the best part of the job.
Custom requests work in three steps:
- Send the idea. A sentence is plenty. An inside joke, a shop logo, your dog in sunglasses.
- Get a quote and a proof. You see the artwork and the price before anything prints, and you can walk away at either step.
- Peel and share. The stickers arrive in a box that says “fresh peels inside,” because of course it does.
Custom work starts at a small setup fee plus per-sticker printing, and you get the number in writing first. A proof usually takes a few days. If you have a deadline, say so in the request. The one thing they won’t print is somebody else’s logo or character without permission.
What has it taught them?
Now this is the part I didn’t expect.
Running a shop teaches a lot without anybody sitting down to teach it. Which designs sell and which ones only you liked. Why a photograph of the thing beats a paragraph describing it. That a price is a decision, not a fact.
It started as somewhere to test an idea. It turned into the most instructive project in my portfolio.
The honest part
It’s a small shop, and it acts like one.
The lineup is small, and nothing in it is filler. Replies to messages usually take a couple of days. And there’s no newsletter yet. The shop says so plainly: it’s not going to pretend it has one. That’s the right instinct for a shop this size.
How does the shop work?
Orders run through AnyCart, the cart I built for sites like this one, right on the page. Add a few stickers to the cart and check out when you’re ready. If you’re curious how that works, I wrote about it in AnyCart: a cart for the website you already have.
Where to start
- Browse the sticker lineup and grab a few.
- Request a custom sticker if the one you want doesn’t exist yet.
- Read Fresh Peels, the shop blog, for new drops, print notes and the occasional bread pun.
- Say hello with a question, an order issue, or a photo of your sticker in the wild.
The short version
Small stickers on good vinyl, from $2.99, with custom peels if you have an idea. Made by kids who run the shop themselves. And honestly… a few stickers in a cart is the nicest review they could get.
The Toasty Peel Shop project write-up has more on how it came together. And if you’ve got a kid with a business idea, or a small shop of your own that needs a home online, send it through the contact form. I’d love to help.
