Apply sold stickers. That was the whole product.
I had spent years working on software, data, subscriptions, and mobile products. Most of that work was hard for a customer to see. Apply was different. We made a small physical thing. You could hold it, look at the print, check the cut, and decide right away whether it was good.
Apply started taking shape in 2020 as a New York design studio making officially licensed sticker art. I was still working full time at Aaptiv, so Apply fit around the rest of the week. It was not a clean new job with a clean start. One day might include an Aaptiv meeting, a licensing question, a customer email, and a problem with an Apply order.
The product was small. The list of things required to sell it was not.
We needed art that worked at sticker size. We needed permission to use it. A manufacturer needed a production file. The material, color, cut, and packaging all had to be right. We had to keep track of inventory, take orders, ship them, and answer customers when something went wrong.
If an order did not arrive, the customer did not care which vendor or software connection caused the problem. They bought a sticker and did not get it. We had to fix it.
Licensing added another full set of work. Having a good idea was not enough. Recognizable art could involve an artist, a museum, an estate, or another partner. Each relationship came with approvals, files, terms, reporting, and royalties. We could not print first and sort it out later.
That work created a lot of email. The Apply archive has thousands of small exchanges about orders, production, licenses, accounting, customer questions, and basic administration. Most messages are not interesting by themselves. Together they show what it took to keep the business running while I was doing another job.
I liked being able to inspect the result. With software, a large release can disappear behind a screen. With a sticker, mistakes are sitting in front of you. The color is off. The edge is wrong. The package does not fit. The print looks good on a monitor and bad on the material. There is not much room to argue with it.
Around the same time, I was also considering whether to buy or build a business and how I wanted ownership to work. A note from 2020 records that question. The opportunity and the financial details are private, and they are not needed here. What matters is that Apply gave me a small, real version of the same issue.
The decisions were close to us. So were the consequences. If we picked the wrong product, ordered too much, handled a license badly, or missed a customer problem, it was ours to deal with. There was no separate department to hand it to.
I did not know in 2020 how long Apply would run or what it would become. Later, the company would report royalties paid to artists and partners beginning in 2021, along with donations to nonprofit partners. The MoMA Design Store would carry an Andy Warhol sticker set. None of that was guaranteed at the start.
At the start, we had art, licenses, production questions, orders, and a lot of work squeezed around everything else.
The work did not arrive in a predictable order. A customer question could expose a shipping problem. A new design could wait on a rights approval. A print could look different from the file. Packaging could change the cost or the way a product reached the customer. We had to move between creative work, ecommerce, production, fulfillment, and accounting without treating any of them as somebody else's problem.
That was new for me even though many of the individual parts were familiar. I knew software and operations. Apply made the physical handoffs impossible to ignore. A file became a print. A print became inventory. Inventory became an order. The order had to reach a real address in good condition.
Apply kept going while I moved from Aaptiv to TRX and then Wahoo. It stayed on the calendar because there was always something specific that needed attention: an approval, a print, a shipment, a customer, or the next product.