BUCKHANNON – A local design business recently went viral after producing a “Do it for Baby Dog” sticker following a press conference hosted by West Virginia Governor Jim Justice.
Wonderfully Weird Designs developed and sold the stickers after Justice announced and outlined a vaccination sweepstakes called, “Do It For Babydog: Save a life, Change your life,” featuring Justice’s own English Bulldog, who is just over a year old.
“If you won’t do it for me, if you won’t do it for your family, you’ve got to get vaccinated for Babydog,” Justice said at the May 27 press conference as he announced a new initiative to convince hesitant West Virginians to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. “She wants you vaccinated so badly.”
Wonderfully Weird Designs is co-owned by Upshur County-based artists Courtney Page and Tyler St. Clair.
St. Clair said Page immediately wanted to create a sticker to commemorate the press conference.
“I was literally in and out of service, driving around random places, shooting pictures and Courtney texted me and said, ‘Can I please make a Babydog design?’” St. Clair recalled, “and I said yes, but if we do it, we have to do it today or tomorrow. Usually, we spend months going back and forth on designs because we want it to be perfect, but this was like a do it or die – we have to do it now.”
St. Clair said they offered a preorder options on their Etsy page, Wonderfully Weird Art, in order to gauge how many stickers they should make and to strike while the iron was hot.
“I knew if we waited until they came in, it could have been dead already. The internet is a constant stream of memes, so we needed to get it out,” St. Clair said. “We severely under-gauged how many we needed. I just ordered 50 because I thought, ‘Okay, we’ll do 50. It’ll be a short run, and we can do some online sales.’”
As of last week, the duo had sold about 550 Babydog stickers.
“We did 100 total sales last year, so we didn’t expect to do much … but we sold out of that before the order even went through,” St. Clair said.
Page said they hit 400 sales on Etsy in less than two weeks, and now they have sold about 550 stickers.
“We’re a small operation,” she said. “This all goes out of my guest bedroom and before a couple of months ago, we just had a box to carry around – we called it the business box – and it was just a little tote box that had all of our stickers or supplies. That was our business for the past year, and this just blew up,” Page said.
Wonderfully Weird Designs started last February when St. Clair and Page began selling various designs out of Stone Tower Brews on Main Street, where Page is the manager and St. Clair is a barista.
“We collaborated a lot with my own designs on shirts, and I think after we did that Buckhannon shirt with the huge bean on the back, the one that had a little taste of Buckhannon in the shape of the bean, that’s when we decided we wanted to do something local,” St. Clair said. “Whether it was going to be local to Buckhannon, we didn’t really know at the time, so we just did a small round of stickers, the series that we call ‘Cryptids and Coffee.’”
St. Clair said he and Page were happy to design something fun after the pandemic.
“I thought it was fun – entertaining and fun,” he said. “It put an interesting twist on, ‘go get vaccinated’ and ‘Do it for Babydog.’ After the year we just went through, it’s nice to have something fun to do and have funny moments and be able to make art out of that,” St. Clair said.
The Etsy page can be found at wonderfullyweirdart.etsy.com and their other work may also be purchased at Stone Tower Brews in Buckhannon. You can also find them on Instagram.
