Poster Pop — The Art of Poster Artists on Pop Merchandise

Jul 11

Poster Pop Brief History

Poster Pop produces art stickers and other art merchandise from the unique art and designs from a great group of 1990s and 2000’s concert poster artists.

Started in 1997, Poster Pop worked with underground concert poster artists, Frank Kozik, Coop, SHAG, The Pizz, Tara McPherson, and more, and turned their Poster Art into well loved Stickers, T-Shirts, and Pop merchandise…

With founding partners, Larry Finn, Matt Getz based Poster Pop on Matt’s existing Poster, Sticker and T-Shirt company and applied the company Matt created for his own art - to the amazing concert poster art of Frank Kozik and Coop.

All the production, sales channels were in place. Poster Pop took off worldwide. Stores and people bought, and then bought more when new designs came out. Poster Pop quickly added artists Alan Forbes, SHAG, The Pizz, Marco Almera , Von Franco. Within a few years, we added fellow artists Tara McPherson, BigToe, Aaron Marshall, Gustavo Rimada, Vince Ray and more.

Poster Pop set up booths at the big International trade shows in Vegas, NYC, and San Diego. We did the original San Diego Comic-Con, ASR, MAGIC, Viva Las Vegas, and other local So Cal Car and Tiki Shows.

Poster Pop had both retail stores and retail customers around the world, buying directly through our catalogs, and the web at posterpop.com. We continued to expand our reach through high quality products, magazine ads, shows and catalog mailings.

Change in Retail and Modern Culture

Somewhere in the mid 2000’s, it became apparent that everything in retail was changing. The Amazon & Walmart effect of centralized bar coded, bulk priced retail sales literally “boxed” out all the cool mom and pop stores. Even record stores in every small to medium to large town that loved and featured our stickers and shirts, were falling away..

The big wholesale shows, like MAGIC in Las Vegas, ceased to be vital, becoming even obsolete. We knew the internet was taking over, but there was more going on here. It’s not really my place to expound on the real world, economic effects going on here, but our big wholesale sales rapidly dwindle as stores and their traffic and even their existence changed almost overnight.

Everybody thought web sales would take off, replacing the need for stores, but that was being replaced by people spending all their time on their Phones, and Facebook. I knew it was over when people at San Diego Comic-Con and even Disneyland turned their attention on their phones.

Poster Pop survived, and even thrived, but everything had changed…

What was underground, returned to being underground. Physical Stickers and Shirts remained… underground… For Poster Pop (and a lot of similar companies), it didn’t seem like a big deal as there was a lot going on with our art and artists.

Now, in 2025

In January of 2025, Poster Pop made the decision to stop production of all the stickers, t-shirts and other merchandise.

We did a series of emails announcing the sell off. We shipped more orders, to our appreciative fans more than we had done since our hey day in the mid 2000’s. The best part of the sell off was hearing the praise in phone calls and emails and love from our fans!

The selloff was definitely nice moment, doing business at a high level again, but as time goes, everything suddenly ended as planned cut off dates were reached. In early June, 2025, all the T-Shirts and Stickers, Fridge Magnets - 90% of everything were pulled from the website and sold off to our distributors.

New Poster Pop Website and Blog Posts

So as mentioned in our new Poster Pop’s 1st PPOP Blog post, the focused effort of re-creating the PosterPop.com website, its categories, and SEO tagging of each item, led to a ton of Poster Pop blog post ideas. Capturing ideas as we tagged each item was great! Our plan is to make upcoming blog posts based on these ideas, and explore each interesting aspect that make up Poster Pop, it’s artists, It’s history, industry, production, influence and reach.

We are excited to tell you that these blog posts are to be the basis for the text and content for the upcoming already approved for production, Poster Pop Art Book.

Our goal beneath all this, is to have our Poster Pop Blog and the resulting Poster Pop Art book become a practical benefit to a lot of people including: artists, merchandisers, fans and customers.

We are very excited to address each of these topics in the upcoming weeks and months in our Blog.

So keep Tuned.

In upcoming blog posts, we will go through all the things that comprised Poster Pop, It’s story, it’s artists, art, posters, prints, merchandise, and culture. Our next post will be about our 1st two Poster Pop artists, Kozik and Coop.

Stick around, leave a comment, and don’t forget to go to PosterPop.com to get free stickers in the mail!

Matt Getz