A quick history of the car bumper sticker

The idea of advertising something on your vehicle wasn’t new, in fact before cars, and car bumpers for that matter, workers would often advertise on their horses and buggies!

But for bumper stickers to be created cars first needed bumpers, with the majority of the earliest vehicles around missing out on this important safety feature. However, this changed around 1927, when Ford released the Model A, featuring – you guessed it – a bumper. They were now mass-produced and mainstream.

Not only did cars need bumpers, but to create the bumper stickers we are so familiar with today we also needed stickers. Ray Stanton Avery is often credited as the creator of the modern-day sticker, thanks to his invention of the first pressure-sensitive label. Avery would then go on to create the first commercial labels and the bumper sticker was born!

As for customised bumper stickers, credit goes to Forrest P. Gill, who lived in Kansas City, Missouri and in the 1940s took some adhesive-backed paper, a bit of fluorescent paint and combined them to create the first ever bumper sticker (although back then they were known as “bumper strips”!).

Over time, the process of how bumper stickers were made had to be adjusted, as ol’ Gill’s creation was messy and not streamlined as they were handmade.  

Using flexography became popular in the '50s, as it allowed printers to pass self-adhesive vinyl through presses for quicker production. By the 1960s however, the General Press was invented by James Black. Shortly after, this became the screen-printing standard and the prominent method for printing stickers.

By the 1990’s Digital Sticker Printing was the bumper sticker gold star standard, allowing for a quick turnaround on custom orders and is still the most widely used method today! Stickers have also migrated north, away from the actual bumper bar, now residing on windows.

Being able to customise your own bumper sticker was a game-changer for many industries, including the tourism industry, which was the first to grab hold of the trend and run, literally, to their cars and place their sticker on immediately with pride and joy.

It’s reported that while guests were visiting resorts, tourist attractions and amusement parks, staff would run out into the car parks and place their bumper stickers directly on to parked cars! That’s one way to advertise…

US Presidential campaigns were next to really embrace bumper stickers. The idea of using bumper stickers for political advertising happened in 1952 during the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson Presidential Election.

Eisenhower promoted his campaign EVERYWHERE, including on car bumpers, with the slogan “I Like Ike”. And the campaign clearly worked, with Eisenhower serving as the 34th President of the United States.

Since then, bumper stickers have been used for every single US Presidential campaign, and remain some of the highest-selling bumper stickers around, especially with the rise in popularity of memes. Even in 2022, political advertising is one of the most prominent uses of bumper stickers.

Closer to home, bumper stickers have been a way for drivers to show others on the road their thoughts and feelings on an array of social issues and their stance on things such as the ABC, teachers, climate change and COVID-19. On the other side of the coin are the cars driving around with what are now probably collector's items of radio station bumper stickers used to promote the station and for drivers to possibly win a prize.

And yes, you can blame the sticker and bumper strips inventors for the advent of the My Family Stickers...

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