Line stickers: Design your own & sell them

09 กันยายน 2557

With 18 billion Line stickers sent around world every day, now anyone can design & sell their own carton characters in the Line Market. One popular Thai character "Bloody Bunny" even became popular in far-away Argentina.

With 18 billion Line stickers sent around world every day, now anyone can design & sell their own carton characters in the Line Market. One popular Thai character "Bloody Bunny" even became popular in far-away Argentina.

Line stickers: Design your own & sell them

Screenshot of the front page of the Line Creators Market where everyone can gain entry to the sometimes lucrative business of creating and selling Line stickers.

ART & BUSINESS

Sticking the world together

Line Creators Market is not easy gold, but still a gateway nevertheless
9/09/2014
Parisa Pichitmarn

Sanya "Oh" Lertprasertpakorn creator of the sticker character Tidlom, a "country teenage buffalo who has a dream to fly".

Eighteen billion stickers are sent through Line every day. The emotions they carry with them however, are boundlessly immeasurable. This green-iconed chat application has changed the way we communicate, merely through its infectious selection of cheeky rabbits and poker-faced bears.

It's not just Line's original characters that have replaced our words, but stickers of mascots, anime and personalities of all sorts that have also burrowed their way into our conversations.

Since the Line Creators Market opened in April everyone will have the opportunity to sell their own creations to 500 million Line users worldwide.

There is an average two-month reviewing time and there have been 149,000 creators since the market opened, 30,000 sticker sets sent in and 10,000 sets available in the market today.

At a seminar regarding how to succeed with character design at TK Park, Chaiyaporn Panichrutiwong, animator of almost all of Thai show title credits, feature animations and advertisements you've ever known, compares Line stickers to Government Savings bonds. "Line is a never-ending source of money that trickles in unlike my Yak animation, where I find out how many millions it makes in the theatres and that's it. Now the first thing I do every morning is to check the sales total of my stickers. I'm smiling all day when I make ¥100 [30 baht], as if I've won the lottery."

A lot about succeeding is to simply understand the market, and the animator suggests, "Line sells to women more because guys just talk but don't buy anything. Unisex stickers don't sell as well. If you want to be really safe, capture the female market that gets excited when they see a really cute character and just press buy before thinking. Pink is the colour to use. The office worker is a group that doesn't have enough money to buy a Louis Vuitton, but definitely enough to spend online."

He speaks from his own stickers' success: his best sales are from Happy Hat, a pink-clad girl wearing a pink heart-emblazoned hat. However, other sets make him namtaa ji lai, or want to cry. "I have my Persimmon, which is a weird and crazy character that didn't do so well. Yellow Sun did a bit better because I have fans who've read the book, which is about 4,000 people."

Other countries, such as Japan, create animation and merchandise after a comic or book has achieved success, such as the case of Doraemon. Korean character Pucca started out small on pens and stationery, before getting her own animation. But Chaiyaporn believes Thailand has been doing everything backwards, by creating an animation or character first, then pushing it towards audiences. Without an established fan base that time-honoured characters like PangPond and Kai Hua Roh enjoy, it is fundamental that you start breeding your character in the online world and let it grow from there. Continue to interact with fans on social media, so they will buy into your creations when they are in the store. Panatda Rasee from Vithita Animations, who is in charge of producing the Kai Hua Roh, Noo Hin and PangPond stickers, says "have a Facebook page ready and update it a lot so people feel involved".

Arriving into the market with a bang is hard to achieve without the two things that Akkharat Jarusilawong, creator of Bloody Bunny, finds most important in succeeding: impact and impression. "You have only three seconds and you need impact to make your character jump out from what the market already has. When people see my work abroad at fairs, sometimes they stand there laughing at my character so it's important that you leave an impression after you've reeled them in."

As there are hardly any restrictions for submitting your stickers, with the few obvious rules such as no violence, sex and profanity, it's a border-free space hopefuls can work with. Akkharat reveals that Bloody Bunny is a lot like himself. He laughs: "Characters are kind of like dogs, they tend to be a bit like their owners!"

In fact, Bloody Bunny was born out of his own pet rabbit at home. "I wondered why all the rabbits in the market had to be cute and die easily. I thought I'd make a rabbit hero that looked fierce and I was into Kill Bill at that time. There's a lot of me in Bloody Bunny because I'm hot-tempered and not talkative. A good point to start with is yourself, then think about what you like and draw inspiration from those things. "

After your character is good to go, keep sending your stickers to your friends — to the female ones specifically, according to Chaiyaporn. "The system is basically like a direct delivery. Yellow Sun sold really well in Argentina when I don't even know anyone there! It's a chain reaction; if your friends send it to their friends and more people like it, it can spread continually. If you can afford it, gift it to people so your stickers don't fall down towards the poorly-selling bottom of the list — which nobody scrolls down to."

Character design may be far from a full-time job and even more difficult to strike big projects the way Bloody Bunny has with Japanese superstar Ayumi Hamasaki and Channel [V]. But luckily for character designers today, Akkharat says: "Before, there weren't any channels to promote your work and nobody even knew what character design was. Today, there's Facebook and Line."

On that note, the creator of Happy Hat, who mainly devoted time to understanding the art of Line stickers in order to teach his digital art students at Rangsit University, urges Thai talent to up their game — and fast. "Thai characters can never survive, but Line helped it to. But don't just do character design, you need to know how to do everything related: making models, 3D, texture, motion, lighting. I did character design and games in New York and even in the US, the industry isn't big enough for a whole department devoted to character design. In the end, Thai people just want to hire one person. Now is the golden opportunity to make and send in as much work as you can to Line, because when the animated stickers come out, it's a big threat since they could be sold for the same price. Animation and GIF images are a lot of work that requires a lot of practice, so get ready and learn how to do it."

Visit creator.line.me/en/ for more information about sending in your sticker sets.