Pirate Cigarettes Wills Bristol and London Tobacco Sticker (TL48)

I found this little box in my very favourite shop in Stone Town, Zanzibar.  Zanzibar is a short 2 hour speed ferry ride from the African coast where we live.  It’s full of absolutely magnificent wooden doorways and tiny cobblestone streets.  The shop owner and I have a love–hate relationship because his costs are very high and I’m a very aggressive bargainer, but in the end we both get what we want.  The curio shop is the perfect kind — three stories tall and literally jam packed to overflow with all of the oldest stuff coming out of a very old port city whose main trade was of course human trade.  Because of the money made in human trafficking was enormous, Zanzibar is and remains a particularly affluent city.  I love this box because it celebrates pirates, and the pirate flag was early on incorporated into my GypsyFaith logo — I used to put a complex drawing I did of a pirate flag in the form of a stamp on every package we mailed.  I don’t do that anymore, but I might resume printing that pirate image I hand drew when I was first sketching out the heart and soul of GypsyFaith – this must have been 20 years ago now.  So some British sailor once set foot on the tiny little island of Zanzibar with this packet of smokes in his pocket.  It must have been a sailor, I’m sure it was!

The cool backstory to Pirate Cigarettes is that the British owners were the first to mass produce cigarettes, and, further, the first to use “cigarette” cards to market their products.  They quickly broached the Chinese market, seeking to expand their brand, and the Chinese loved Pirate cigarettes.  Wills and Bristol were clever, so they made special Chinese cigarette cards to market the brand in China, depicting Chinese scenes, but, despite their efforts, the people smoking the cigarettes in China could not read the word “pirate”, so in China these cigarettes were called “Old Sword” in Chinese because of the sword on the label.

The image you see is exactly what we use to produce your bespoke sticker.  All stickers are custom made.  (We include 1 free GypsyFaith sticker per order.)

All GypsyFaith die-cut vinyl stickers are printed on glossy, premium, extra thick vinyl.  We then seal the image in clear laminate so that it will be particularly resistant to fading or tearing.  We will only sell the absolute top end of any particular product on our site.  Our intention, as we developed this product, was to make it as durable and valuable as our magnet products.

Images used to make our stickers are scanned at 9600dpi resolution, reduced to 960dpi for production.

SIZE:  This sticker is exactly 3.164 x 3.851 inches OR 8.035 x 9.782 cm.

It ships in a photo-type mailer to prevent bending.

*We require a minimum purchase of $10 for sticker orders.  We ship First Class US Mail for our customers domestic and international; for domestic orders the ship time is approximately 7 days.  We do not expedite shipping.  Cost for shipping, as well as tax, is calculated at checkout.

$1.60