Custom die-cut stickers for Southold, New York

Fifty 4 by 4 inch die-cut stickers come to $224.00. A 4 by 4 inch sticker is 16 square inches, and at 50 pieces the rate is 28 cents a square inch, so each one is $4.48. Take the same artwork to 100 pieces and the rate steps down to 26 cents, which makes each sticker $4.16 and the hundred $416.00. The step is not applied only to the pieces above fifty. It is applied to the whole run, so the second fifty costs noticeably less than the first fifty did. That is the sum most groups are trying to do in their heads when they decide how many to ask for, and it is worth putting on paper before the quantity is settled.

Everything here is printed and cut at one storefront, 205 East Main Street in

Huntington, New York. Orders from the far eastern end of Suffolk County reach us the same way orders from a few streets away do, as a file and a piece count.

Where the price actually comes from

There are two numbers in every quote and no others. The first is the area of the sticker in square inches. The second is the rate that your piece count earns. The rate runs 35 cents at 1 to 24 pieces, 30 cents at 25 to 49, 28 cents at 50 to 99, 26 cents at 100 to 249, 24 cents at 250 to 499, and 22 cents at 500. Multiply area by rate and you have the unit price. Multiply that by the count and you have the order. Nothing else is layered on top, so you can test a change before you ask anyone about it: shave half an inch off a design and see what it saves, or move a run from 49 pieces to 50 and watch the rate fall a step. A group with a fixed budget can work the sum backwards just as easily, starting from the money it has and ending at a size and a quantity that fit inside it.

Five places within reach of one another

The useful thing about this corner of the county is how tightly the places we also print for sit against each other. Cutchogue is 4.2 miles from Southold, Shelter Island 5.3, Mattituck 6.9, Noyack 7.1, and North Sea 9.1. Every one of those is inside a nine and a bit mile radius. For a group whose helpers are scattered across several of them, that closeness matters more than it looks. One artwork file, one piece count, one order, and the boxes can be split among people who are not far apart. Counting the whole group as one order lets the rate reflect that, rather than letting three or four small orders each sit in a higher band than the combined run would have earned.

How small an order can be

The minimum is a qualifying threshold, not a price floor. An order qualifies at

10 or more pieces, or at $10 of merchandise, whichever of the two comes first. A large design in a small quantity can clear the $10 side without getting anywhere near ten pieces, and a run of ten little stickers clears the piece side on its own. This matters most when a group wants a trial run of one design before committing its real budget to it.

Sizing the artwork before you price it

Since area is half the sum, the size decision is the price decision. Work out the square inches first. A die-cut shape that is not square still resolves to a square inch figure, and that figure is what the rate multiplies, so a tall narrow shape can price very differently from a square of similar visual weight. Send artwork at the size you want it made, keep the detail large enough to hold up at a few inches across, and leave a little room at the edge so the cut line has somewhere to sit that is not on top of a letter.

Distance, pickup and where it goes

Southold is 51.4 miles east of the shop in a straight line. If someone from the group is coming this way anyway, local pickup is free and the order can be collected at the counter. Otherwise it ships, within the United States only, and the ZIP code that usually goes on the label out here is 11971. Put a person's name on the shipping address rather than only a group or a committee, because a box addressed to an organisation and nobody in particular is the one that gets put down somewhere and forgotten.

Who tends to order a run like this

A fundraising committee is usually working from a target, not a quantity. It knows what it needs to raise and what it thinks a sticker will sell for, and the piece count falls out of that. The rate ladder is the part worth showing the whole committee, because ordering 100 rather than 50 changes the margin on every sticker sold, not just on the extra fifty.

A parent organising a spirit run tends to have the opposite problem: a firm head count and a design that is still being argued over. The head count fixes the band. That means the price per square inch is already known before anyone agrees on the artwork, and the only thing left to settle is how big the sticker should be.

A team or club treasurer usually wants one order covering several groups at once. Pooling them is almost always the better arithmetic: three sets of thirty sit in the 30 cent band on their own but clear into the 28 cent band together, and a larger pooled run reaches further down the ladder still.

A parent buying a small quantity for one class is served by the minimum rather than the bands. Ten pieces qualifies. So does $10 of merchandise. Neither requires the rest of the school to be involved.

Questions we get asked

Our Southold order is 60 stickers. Which rate applies? Sixty falls in the 50 to 99 band, so 28 cents a square inch. A 4 by 4 inch design at that rate is $4.48 a sticker.

Is it worth taking a Southold spirit run order from 50 pieces up to 100? On a 4 by 4 inch sticker, 50 is $4.48 each and $224.00 in total, while 100 is $4.16 each and $416.00. The extra fifty are charged at less than the first fifty cost, because the 26 cent rate is applied to the whole run rather than to the portion above ninety nine.

Should our group place one Southold order of 100 or two orders of 50? Two orders of 50 are each billed at 28 cents. One order of 100 is billed at 26 cents throughout, $416.00 for the hundred. The single order is the cheaper arithmetic every time the pieces are identical.

Do helpers in Cutchogue or Mattituck need to order separately from Southold? No. Those are 4.2 and 6.9 miles away and we print for all of them, but the rate is set by square inches and piece count, never by where the order came from. Combining them into one run is what moves the band.

What is the smallest Southold order you will take? Ten pieces, or $10 of merchandise, whichever the order reaches first. It is a qualifying threshold and not a minimum spend, so a small run is priced on the same two numbers as any other.