Stickers. Decals. Foils. Whatever you want to call ’em!
We love ’em!
Over the last 20yrs we’ve built up quite a collection of original samples and “rubbings” from vehicles that came through the workshop.
Many original factory stickers have been redrawn in detail and reproduced.
We’ve also created a couple of unique stickers which never existed as an original item but nethertheless maybe should have.
In this time we’ve gathered a lot of samples and a lot of information from those involved with the production of the original decals VW fitted in the 80s.
We have amassed a collection of original production stickers probably not rivalled anywhere outside of VW archives.
We’ve contributed information to various projects to rebuild a catalogue of this stuff.
We’ve also got some we know VW themselves don’t have.
You’ll excuse us for smirking when we see people claim to be making decal sets in the “same OEM way” and doing something unique.
Especially when we’re sat here cataloguing the original stickers we have and comparing them to some they have produced…
Here are some photos of the original versions of these sticker sets, which I’m sure you will agree were produced in the “OEM way” because… well they are all from the OEM.
The exception to these is the California decals we sell. We used to produce these in the “OEM way”, but the fact is that the front and rear panel decals especially are so small that they have a tendancy for the overlaid material to lift on the corners. We were also selling so many of these that production by hand would be so time consuming that we’d never do anything else so we print them to colours matched to an original set.
It’s also a better option as it means you won’t receive a decal with a beard hair between the layers. Yes. We’ve seen it 😀
At least we hope it was a beard hair. Gip.
Whilst we are on the subject of decals…
Recently we were contacted by a trade customer who we supply stickers to with some stickers he’d received from another supplier.
The one that caught attention was one of these unique stickers that we’ve produced, so blatantly a copy.
The “Gas Info” sticker never existed, it’s something we produced after comments regarding the difficulty understanding the Westfalia gas tank. Oops.
This is where we discovered a certain supplier of decals has been taking the lazy route rather than putting in any effort himself and buying odd ones of our stickers to scan.
Lets be honest here, most are reproductions, but letting someone else do all the work redrawing them and then thinking you’ll get an original quality reproduction by scanning it is a bit off.
Somewhat ironically they are also more expensive than ours, which suggests they are either greedy as well as lazy, or begs the question that if they can’t produce them (badly) for the same price as we can from our own original artwork, why not just approach us to buy them on a trade basis like every other legitimate trader does?
The answer of course is that we know this company of old, and we wouldn’t wish to deal with them.
Hence the only way they can get our stuff to copy is a sneaky little order.
The one we were shown is pretty poor quality.
It was obviously a very poor scan of the sticker that someone had gone to the trouble of making. Badly.
All our reproduction decals are redrawn in a vector format to ensure the quality is as good as it can be.
When you scan an image regardless of how much you process it you will never get that quality.
This is how we can make this comparison. I’m sure we dont need to explain which is the scan and which is ours.
Even with the reduced quality of a JPG image, it’s pretty clear. Or not.
The one in on the left is our artwork. The one on the right is pinted from a scan of our sticker.
Does it matter?
Not to some it seems, its only a sticker. Years down the line there will be scans of scans of scans…
Safe to say we wouldn’t print the one on the right. We’d prefer to put the effort in once.
They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, we just wish they’d done a better job.
