August 12th, 2004
Inverted Jenny, eat your heart out
In a move that could throw stamp collectors into a tizzy while delighting direct mail marketers, Stamps.com is testing a design-your-own-stamp service that allows people to put virtually any image on a real postage stamp. Order the stamps through Stamps.com’s Web site, and a sheet of them shows up in your snail-mail within a few business days.
"PhotoStamps offer parents, grandparents, pet lovers, travelers and anyone with a hobby a new way to share their favorite digital photos," Stamps.com CEO Ken McBride said in a statement. "From wedding invitations to birth announcements to holiday greeting cards, PhotoStamps are an ideal way for customers to express themselves with their mail. They are also an ideal tool for businesses that are looking for new ways to get their mail noticed or to create a customized identity." No word on what happens if you upload that picture of your one year-old with the naked bum-bum though. What’s next? Customized money from the U.S. Treasury? Or worse, knock-offs of one of the world’s most valuable stamps (the inverted Jenny, pictured left)?
