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About us
About Us
It all started with a sticker that was never meant to be sold.
2023, north Cologne, Grüner Brunnenweg. In the warehouse of Hookain Onlineshop GmbH, shisha heads, tobacco tins and boxes are piled up. Between two pallets, someone slaps a home-printed sticker onto a roll container: "Fog Her Life!" — a pun that pretty much nobody outside the shisha scene understands.
Two weeks later, the first customer asks whether the sticker is for sale. Then the second. Then someone from Hamburg who saw it in a photo. There was no sticker to buy. There was only the one on the roll container.
The workspace where a silly idea turned into a whole range.
The detour via the water pipe
A sticker shop growing out of a shisha retailer sounds like a mix-up. It isn't. Anyone selling shishas sells to people who mark things: their own hose, their own box, their laptop, their car. And those people have a very particular sense of humour — one you either get instantly or never will.
That's exactly what the stickers left over from that time still tell today: "I Love Chinese Chemicals" is the most self-deprecating love letter the vaping scene has ever produced. "Little Miss I Lost my Vape" nails a moment anyone who has ever taken a sofa apart in a panic knows all too well. And "Aroma Score" is the nutrition traffic light for something that has no nutrition to begin with.
"We never thought about what would land well. We thought about what made us laugh in the warehouse. That was the entire selection process."
The rule we set for ourselves
At some point, 60 designs were on the table and the question was which of them would actually make it. The answer became a house rule we still stick to today:
A sticker has to work in the moment someone walks past it.
No explanation, no second line, no "you get it if you know that …".
That rule has killed a lot of pretty designs and saved a few very dumb ones. "You park like an asshole" looks like a 50-euro note under the wiper blade — which makes it the only sticker in the range you slip under someone else's wiper with a certain sense of anticipation. "Free WiFi" doesn't even need text: the QR code does the rest, you just have to stand far enough away. "Can we fix it, Bob?" rings truer on every German building site than the sign next to it.
The moment the whole range exists for.
Why we obsess over materials
The least funny part of funny stickers is the material. A sticker that fades on a bike frame after three weeks isn't a joke any more, just a grey stain. That's why we print on weatherproof, UV-resistant vinyl and make sure everything can still be removed without leaving residue.
That's why "Out of Order" is still legible after a winter on a cigarette vending machine — and why you can peel it off again afterwards without any hassle. We write about the details regularly in our magazine, because it turns out more people ask about adhesion and surfaces than you'd expect for this kind of range.
"The most common support question isn't 'Is that quote too much?'. It's: 'Does it stick to powder-coated metal?'"
Where we draw the line
A range with quotes like "Testsieger Hurensohn" ("Test Winner Son of a Bitch") or "Fick dich soooooo viel!" ("Fuck You Sooooo Much!") has to face the question of where the line is. We've asked ourselves that question repeatedly, usually louder than necessary.
Our line: a sticker is allowed to be cheeky, disrespectful, silly and crude. It's allowed to make fun of situations, of authorities, of car brands, of us. It is not allowed to make fun of people who can't defend themselves. Anything touching on origin, religion or physical traits doesn't even make it to the table — not out of caution, simply because it isn't funny. "You Suck!" is aimed at the entire world at once. That's roughly the target group we consider fair game for insults.
The actual home of our products.
What happens to a parcel here
We're not a mass shipper. Orders are packed in the same Cologne warehouse that still holds the roll container with the first sticker on it. Every order goes into a paper envelope with a protective sleeve so the edges don't crease — for die-cut, edge-to-edge stickers, the edge is exactly the delicate part.
Orders usually ship the same or the next business day; DHL then takes two to three days. From €50 we cover the shipping cost. And if something does go wrong: your e-mail lands with the very same people who picked out the stickers.
No high-bay warehouse. Just a table someone stands at.
"At the start, we slipped an extra sticker into every parcel. We still do. It doesn't pay off. We don't care."
Who else pitches in
Range, warehouse and shipping are just three stops. Behind them stands a small team that takes care of everything else an online shop needs:
Keeps the shop running, when he's not under the hood.
His head is often still in Mallorca, his work is here regardless.
Always across what's landing well, in the range and in the skincare routine.
Brings an eye for style to the team, online and offline.
Tells the world about us, ideally without breaking a sweat.
Makes the calls. You rarely meet him in person.
Knows every lunch spot within 500 metres by heart.
Makes sure the books balance at month's end — ideally with an Aperol after.
Where it's going
The range grows slowly and on purpose. New designs usually come about the same way the first one did: someone says a sentence, someone else laughs, and three days later a design is on the table. Some never make it past the plotter — the rule above doesn't bend for anyone.
If you've got an idea that passes that rule: we read every e-mail sent to info@stickershop24.de. And if you want to know whether a particular sticker will stick to your surface, just ask. Tanja will answer.
Stickershop24 — a brand of Hookain Onlineshop GmbH, Cologne.
