Did you collect stickers as a kid and then trade them with your friends? It used to be a pretty popular activity.
When you look back on the history of collecting stickers and putting them in sticker books, you could argue that stamps were essentially the first stickers. However, the types of stickers we recognize today were common in the late 1970s and then became big business in the early 1980s.
In 1979, Graphic Designer Andrea Grossman founded Mrs. Grossman’s Paper Company and accidentally created the first commercial sticker – a big red heart. Her friend owned a popular gift shop and asked her for red hearts to stick on gift wrap, so Grossman cut out hearts from construction paper and sent them to the label printer. The hearts were mistakenly printed on rolls like ribbon, which ended up becoming a popular product. That led her to start selling what she called Stickers By The Yard. They proved to be a massive hit at her store.
