Our First Booking: The Honest Truth about Sticker Vending Machines at a Kids' Birthday Party

I'll cut to the chase: our very first booking wasn't a client. It was my son's first birthday.. and that's okay!

Held at a community center in Hopewell Junction this past June, it was low stakes in theory — my own kid, my own party, no one to disappoint but us. In practice, it was the most nervous I've been about anything Stick Around related, before or since.

Months of Stress Over a Machine

I'm working on being less of a helicopter parent. I'm not there yet. So in the weeks leading up to the party, my brain ran through every version of this going wrong: kids grabbing fistfuls of quarters, someone jamming the mechanism, my kids not caring at all about the thing their dad had poured months into. I pictured people politely nodding at the machine and then never mentioning it again. I pictured my wife looking at the sticker designs I'd spent hours on and gently suggesting we go a different direction. None of that is rational. All of it felt very real at 11pm the night before.

Then the Party Actually Happened

I set the machine off to the side on purpose — I didn't want it to feel like the main event, or like anyone was being pressured to go interact with it. That turned out to be unnecessary. The glowing sign did the work on its own. Kids found it. Parents found it. Nobody needed convincing.

The kids were fantastic with it — genuinely better behaved around the mechanism than I expected from myself, if I'm honest. And once the stickers started coming out, they went everywhere: on shirts, on water bottles, on backpacks, on each other. One of the designs was our birthday boy's face photoshopped onto a football player's body, and it got exactly the reaction you'd hope for.

Here's the part that humbled me a little: the designs I was most proud of were not the crowd favorites. The ones I considered to be more just close family favorites, got the biggest laughs and the most love. The MORE personal they were, the better.

More than one adult had the same reaction, some version of "I haven't seen one of these since I was at Pizza Hut when I was thirteen with my mom." That nostalgia hit — gets me every time.

Proof It Was Real

My wife's friend posted the whole thing to her Instagram story that night — the machine, the stickers, a quick explanation of what Stick Around actually was. That one share did more for my confidence than any pitch deck or business plan ever could have. It meant this wasn't just something happening inside my own head. Other people saw it, got it, and wanted to tell their friends about it.

The people who didn't get it? They didn't get in my head. Not because I'm especially thick-skinned — I'm really not — but because there were enough people who did get it.

The Sticker That Went to Europe

Months later, my wife's uncle sent us a photo from a trip abroad: he was using the football-jersey sticker with my son's name on the back as a bookmark, somewhere across the globe. A sticker from a first birthday party in Hopewell Junction, pictured in Europe.

That's the moment it stopped feeling like a nice party favor and started feeling like proof of concept. Not a gag gift, but a real project that could extend the life of the celebration beyond the event. A real thing, with a reach I hadn't expected and couldn't have predicted.

We've booked plenty of events since that first one. But that community center in Hopewell Junction is still where it started — nerves, self-doubt, a one-year-old who had no idea any of this was happening, and a machine that turned out to do exactly what I hoped it would, even when I wasn't sure I believed it myself.

If you're planning a birthday party, wedding, or event anywhere in the Hudson Valley and want to give your guests something they'll actually hold onto, we'd love to talk about bringing Stick Around to your celebration.