BUSINESS

The Successful Troll Behind the Print-To-Order Company “Sticker Mule”

The tale of how the Zazzle cloned channeled the power of memes for fun and profit

Sticker Mule was founded in 2010. It is a private company specializing in selling custom stickers and other products. It is comparable to other print-on-demand services such as Red Bubble or Zazzle, albeit with an admittedly smaller inventory of potential products to print onto.

If you have heard anything about the company, it's probably because of the shenanigans of CEO Anthony Constantino, a person who supports Donald Trump (he gave $500 in 2016 to Trump's campaign), has done a myriad of promotional stunts, and is currently trying to jumpstart a career as a professional boxer.

And yet, before entering the limelight for his antics, he was a privileged man from upstate New York who would sink his family's company only to build back a newer, stronger one in his own image: a fascinating story that reveals how to make a fortune as an Internet troll.

The Fall of a Business

Something to note from the get-go is that Sticker Mule's origins take a lot of work to parse. More modern retellings talk about how cofounder Anthony Constantino was down on his luck because his family business faced bankruptcy when he received an angel investment from an unnamed family friend. As we learn from an April 2023 episode of The Pozcast: "He started building Sticker Mule as he was stabilizing his father's company, and once Sticker Mule was growing, he ended up acquiring that company and transferring over all the employees as well as the location."

Yet when we go back into the record, we hear about a brother, Nick, being one of the co-founders (who has since moved away from the business), and the Anthony brought up is not Constantino but Thomas, which is possibly a typo. As written by Alyson Button Stone in Social Media Today in 2011, one year after the alleged founding:

“[Sticker Mule] involves two brothers and a family friend who’s their sole angel investor. That investor is also their 70-year-old godfather, a long-retired executive eager to tackle a new project. Without even knowing what the business would be, the small team assembled funding, began development of a website, fleshed out their business plan, and staffed their company-in that order.”

Seeing as Social Media Today provides content marketing, and this blog post reads as advertising copy, it's possible this was a paid promotion purchased by Sticker Mule itself, though that is speculation.

Right away, this article provides us not only some interesting questions on the nature of Anthony's benefactor, but these origins also paint the picture of a very privileged person. Anthony not only inherited a business but was able to start another one without a business plan due to the generosity of an unstated "family friend." He could then roll his old family business into the new one: that is not a “working from the bottom” narrative.

According to The Pozcast, that initial family business was called Noteworthy, founded in 1954 in Amsterdam, NY, by Tom Constantino. It was a business that emphasized being a supplier of plastic and paper promotional products — so very similar to Sticker Mule, if we are honest. Tom died in 1989, and his wife, Carol Constantino, succeeded him as CEO. Anthony had to be a young child at the time (around 6 to 9 years old).

Noteworthy was, by all accounts, a decent company. Tom's claim to fame was that he invented the "litterbag," a bag motorists could use to dispose of their trash, which is not the worst thing a company could be known for. Noteworthy's community values in 2010 were focused on things like "fair wages" and "Eco-friendly manufacturing." In fact, the one donation I found for Carol on the FEC database was for Democratic progressive Paul Tonko. It almost seems strange that this family would give birth to a son who would later donate to Donald Trump's campaign.

By 2007, Anthony would take on the role of the Chief Operating Officer for Noteworthy after attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (he alleges that he did not graduate), with him being groomed by his mother to be CEO, saying in an interview: "I don't think he's had the luxury of trying other venues that could be outside the company. When you have a family business, very often the family is drawn in like a magnet."

Yet the company would start to have money problems almost immediately upon him joining leadership. According to Anthony, a significant part of their business was from the photo packaging industry. The move away from in-person photo development, coupled with the 2008 recession, totaled their profits. It's possible that his being a very green executive contributed to that decline, but regardless of the reason, by April 2018, Noteworthy, after 64 years of being in business, would cease all operations.

The Rise of Sticker Mule

While these financial problems for Noteworthy were happening, Anthony was secretly setting up a new company, which was initially called Print Bear (that we would later know as Sticker Mule). "We didn't tell any of our employees that we were setting up a separate company…that I was setting up a separate company," he tells The Pozcast. "Because I was dual managing both, and I didn't want to scare them if the one company was going to fail."

You might naturally ask: How did he have enough money to create another company while his old one was cratering into obscurity?

This brings us to Anthony's angel investor, his brother Nick's Godfather, Tom Cummings. Anthony would later describe Cummings as a parental figure and a "math genius" who liked to bet on horses. Anthony allegedly pitched Cummings the idea for Sticker Mule after the man received his first-ever computer. The story fluctuates on how much money he gave Anthony — it seems to be at least $100,000, but in later years, the amount would increase to them dropping money on lawyers and other such applications.

Not much is known about Tom Cummings besides he is from the Schenectady area in New York and was once an executive for a large company, as Anthony tends to keep his relationship with him private (even learning about his name was difficult to find). He was born in 1941 and, if still alive, would be in his 80s. Tom was involved in the business in 2010, but at some point, he has since stepped away— his name dropped from the record as the years went by.

However, the story of an out-of-luck businessman receiving funding from a technologically illiterate family friend is a good one when looking at it from a distance. If Anthony Constantino is good at one thing, it's branding. The differences between Noteworthy and Sticker Mule are more about aesthetics and customer experience than product. Sticker Mule is self-described as the Internet's most "kick-ass" brand, and Anthony would spend a lot of his time over the years doing stunts to up his business's brand awareness. He would donate 100K to a park for Veterans, 50K for a concession stand, establish a free burger day, and give out $1,000 Christmas Bonuses in 2019. According to The Daily Gazette, in its reporting on the latter stunt, at the time, the company was spending about $250,000 annually on such stunts in trying to up its recruitment and name recognition.

In 2019, a hot sauce — first used for their Free Burger Day — won the best mild hot sauce award in Zest Fest's Fiery Food Challenge (it would go on to win it in successive years as well). The company has since used the publicity of that award to make their hot sauce a "thing," sending it to customers for “free” with Sticker Mule orders, as well as donating over 1,000 bottles to a local food bank. This success has allowed them to sometimes cheekily brand themselves as the "Internet's best hot sauce company" as both a joke and a serious thing you can do (you can buy Mule Sauce on their online store for $8 a bottle).

This sort of half-joking mentality appeals to a particular type of personality on the Internet: the troll, the person who loves to claim they are joking even when they are quite serious. It will not surprise you that Anthony Constantino, who speaks often about the "hustle," regularly retweets Elon Musk, another man who lives for making "jokes" on the Internet. Sticker Mule's official Twitter account reposts Musk as well. It also posted an anti-vax-adjacent post during the height of the pandemic questioning the seriousness of COVID, reading: “Covid infection rates are going crazy in NYC! 😱 But wait, the fatality rate is almost zero! 🤯”

Anything to grab attention.

This stunt-based mindset would culminate in the launch of the social media site Stimulus in 2022, a website self-labeled the "happy social network." The goal was to swap out the advertising model behind many businesses with a giveaway model. In essence, through Stimulus, Anthony is replicating the gimmick he has used for publicity his entire career. Brands would be able to gain attention by attaching giveaways to their posts. As Anthony told the site, the Label & Narrow Web:

“Twitter and Facebook are making the world a darker place. We want to live on a happy planet and that requires fixing social media to make the world better rather than worse. Stimulus aims to show the world what is possible when your mission is to increase human happiness. Twitter was designed to provoke mob rage. Stimulus is designed to invoke generosity and happiness.”

It's too early to say whether Stimulus will succeed in this goal. It's a project within Sticker Mule itself, with its headquarters inside Sticker Mule's main building in Amsterdam, NY, so this might be yet another one of Anthony's feel-good publicity stunts. As of September 11th, the website claims that $237,205 has been given in total. The Sticker Mule account has given $236,100 of that, or 99%. A direct check might have been more efficient.

Anthony hasn’t talked about Stimulus much in the last year. He is focusing on his social media career by starring in podcast episodes on how to run a successful business. He also has had an emerging boxing career, winning a match in Mexico City, which seems to be what a lot of rightwing influencers are doing these days, so it's possible his interest in Stimulus may fall to the wayside like Noteworthy. He may talk a big game about changing the culture of the Internet, and maybe he does believe this in an abstract sense, but ultimately, this stunt seems to be more about building his company’s brand.

Unfortunately, underneath the curated social media image Anthony claims to despise, Sticker Mule has received more criticism over the years. While these criticisms are tame compared to the abuses larger companies commit, they have still started to hurt the company's image.

The Souring of a Brand

In 2020, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of Tierra Bonefort and dozens of other plaintiffs, who alleged that the company did not pay the proper overtime rate, violating the law in the process. The general counsel for Sticker Mule would later call this payroll error an honest mistake, and company staff would claim to start rectifying the issue by paying people what they were owed.

This case was settled out of court in 2022. I am not sure there was ever a “there” there regarding the abuses mentioned (we will most likely never know), but its mere existence brought more scrutiny to the company. People began more publically commenting on the conservatism of founder Constantino, resharing his campaign contributions to Donald Trump as well as his donations to Republican politician George A. Amedore Jr.

In 2023, there would be a minor controversy when a user alleged that they ordered a shirt for “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Awareness,” and the proof they got was for a separate design with the phrase "Liberal Moron." Like many such assertions on the Internet, it was difficult to verify the veracity of this claim. However, coupled with what was known of Anthony Constantino himself, this was seen by some critics as another extension of his (and the company’s) conservatism.

From my perspective, this was more likely a genuine error and not a purposeful dig at the user. The print-to-order market is littered with such mistakes, and Sticker Mule has mixed results with customer satisfaction. They come highly regarded on sites like Yelp, but the company has received a 2.67 out of 5 rating, or an F, from the Better Business Bureau. For context, competitor Zazzle fairs much higher with a 4.66, and the comments in the BBB allude to sketchy business practices from Sticker Mule. As one user puts it:

“Garbage quality. The worst customer service. Ripped off and left with a defective product This is the worst custom t shirt experience I have ever had. I ordered a proof t shirt before placing a bulk order for my team. The shirt arrived defective due to a sewing error on the sleeve. The shirt also runs small. Almost an entire size small.”

And so, again, the idea that such a mixup might happen in the case of the "Liberal Moron" example is not unbelievable. I wouldn't attribute it to malice, where textbook corporate incompetence can suffice.

This remains true for another major criticism concerning IP usage. Some online commenters have asserted that Sticker Mule's Terms of Service are different from other print-to-order services, allowing the company to modify and sublicense a user's image without their ongoing consent.

However, such open-ended agreements are pretty standard for print-to-order companies. Zazzle, for example, has a ToS that states that: "Each collaborator hereby grants to [Zazzle] a nonexclusive, perpetual, worldwide, sublicensable, and transferable right and license to use, copy, reproduce, prepare derivative works of, modify, publicly display, perform, and distribute assets as contained in the collaborative content on the site."

The ability for one of these sites to use your content without telling you for things like promotion is quite common. It seems doubtful that Sticker Mule is maliciously trying to steal everyone's content, and much more likely that this company that memed its way to success is just using the same tactics every other company does. Constantino started Sticker Mule without a business plan. Why would his site's Terms of Service be any different?

You'll notice that there is no "smoking gun" to this story: no sexy tidbit that condemns the CEO and his efforts. If Constantino has truly abhorrent thoughts, he has kept them to himself, channeling the meme culture of the Internet more for profit than outrage. If Sticker Mule has conducted union-busting or has some problems with its supply chain, I could not find it.

Constantino may be an Internet Troll, but he isn't a fool, and he seems to have every intention of riding his success to the end.

A sticky conclusion

From a bird's eye view of Anthony Constantino's career, I see a man who created a successful brand using the cheeky humor of the Internet for fun and profit. He started out as a privileged person who inherited and then crashed into the ground a family-owned business before starting up a new one that remains to this day.

It's not that Constantino is a saint — though the amount he has given to the community of Amsterdam, New York, may cause many to sing his praises. A regular fan of Elon Musk and hustle culture, he remains a profoundly conservative man, but again, his public persona seems, as of right now, relatively clean.

Maybe he will pivot soon to being more outwardly bigoted, as that tends to be what many conservatives do nowadays to increase the public’s awareness of their personal brands. Maybe not. People are multifaceted, and they do change, so I am not going to make any definitive statements on what his future will be.

The Internet's most kickass brand may not have much more than an edgy sense of humor behind it, but for some, that's enough to keep talking about it.