UnixStickers Review: Where to Fulfill Your Geeky Needs

I don’t tend to be a person who spends a lot of money on decorative things, even if the decoration is on a piece of clothing that I’m going to be buying anyway. Because of that, I was slightly hesitant when unixstickers.com contacted me and asked me to do a review. I decided to do it anyway, and that’s what you’re going to see from me today. Full Disclosure: they are not paying me to right this review, but I did receive some items for free in order to review them.

Whatcha Got?

The first thing to discuss is what they sell. If we’re talking about merchandise types, then they have stickers of many sizes, t-shirt, hoodies, mugs, 50x70 cm posters, and pins. That list will satisfy most people looking for a bit of merchandise to show off their love for their geeky passion. But which passions do they support? I really don’t want to write them all out here, so here’s a screen shot of their “Browse By Passion” section at the bottom of their site:

That’s getting there, and they’ll be adding more soon, which is good because this is by no means a full representation of all geek passions, right? If you want to have some input into what they have on the site, go to their Trello board and make a request or vote for your favorites.

Get $5 off your UnixStickers.com purchase

For a Cause

They don’t just sell you this stuff in order to earn a pretty penny for themselves, they also give some of their earnings away to open source projects! Straight from their donations page:

We decided to donate a significant part of our revenues to supporting FOSS projects

This is the most important decision we made since the day Unixstickers got started.

Being developers and fans of open source and free software is what motivated us to start this adventure in the first place, and we would have never got this far without passion.

We also recognize that our job, our business, and that of most of you would never exist without the existence of those very projects, foundations, organizations and individuals that make open source and free software possible.

How does it work?

At each purchase, you’ll be able to view from your cart how much we’ll donate, with the detail of what will be donated to whom. A significant part will be donated to the projects referring to your cart’s items, while the rest will be donated to a different initiative each month.

At the time of this writing, they’ve given away over $5000 FOSS projects, and they’ve only been doing this for about 2 and half months! So if you want to more than wear a logo on your chest in support of your favorite project, this is a great place to go!

How Does It Hold Up?

Now comes the important question: is their stuff worth buying? I asked them for a t-shirt to test because I didn’t think that reviewing stickers would be very useful. Well, along with the t-shirt I requested, they also sent a myriad of stickers and pins, so I have a few things to talk about.

The t-shirt has a bit of mixed review, but that’s mostly due to my size and the sizes they have available. The shirt itself is a very soft fabric, even after the first washing (so far I’ve only washed it once). In addition, it doesn’t feel terribly thin, so it doesn’t seem like it’ll tear after just a few weeks or anything (I cannot be held responsible if you tear your shirt). The one issue is that the max size they sell is 2XL (just XL for many shirts). This wouldn’t be terrible, but the 2XL that I received felt like an XL; in fact, according to the size charts on each site, UnixSticker’s 2XL t-shirts are smaller than the XL t-shirts on Tee Public. So, I would order a shirt size larger than you normally would. I wish now that I had also asked for a hoodie so I could give you an honest review about them as well, because I think t-shirts would at least stretch better than a hoodie.

The stickers I received, despite my original thinking that stickers wouldn’t be worth reviewing, really beat my expectations. They’re not like the stickers play with that come with an activity book or anything. These stickers are “printed from a sheet vinyl, covered by a layer of top quality transparent film to protect the ink and improve durability and beauty, then finely cut to follow the shape.” These suckers are heavy duty! They won’t tear without some serious effort, and they won’t fall off most surfaces. The nice thing about their sturdiness and materials is the fact they won’t leave a thin layer of paper if you try to peel them off, but they may still leave some adhesive. They also have what they call “Badge Stickers”. These are tiny stickers (.67in x 1.02in or 1.7cm x 2.6cm) that are meant to be placed on a laptop near the keyboard (like where you normally get stickers that say which OS and CPU come with your PC).

Finally we come to the pins. There is nothing spectacular about them, but I can tell you that I’ve definitely seen pins of worse quality, so we can at least buy from UnixStickers knowing that you’re not getting the worst pins! (I’m so helpful, right?)

Conclusion

UnixStickers seems like a great place to fulfill your geeky merchandise needs. So go fulfill them today! You can even use this link to unixstickers.com to get $5 off of your first purchase, as well as support me with a meager commission. I’m not recommending them because I want that commission. I’m recommending them because they’re a great company and the commission is just a nice bonus for those who trust and value my opinion. :)