PhotoStamps: How They Got Started

Somewhere, someone had a very good idea: what if people could create personalized postage? This idea led to the creation of PhotoStamps®.

In my research for this website, I haven’t seen anything about who that person was, but custom postage did begin in Canada before it started in the United States. This was partly because in the United States there was a law from the nineteenth century which had to be repealed. It prohibited images of people from being on postage until the person had been dead for ten years. That wouldn’t allow for all the babies currently gracing PhotoStamps! Congress did repeal that law, and also allowed for advertising on stamps, which lets businesses put their logos on PhotoStamps.

In 2004, the first trial of PhotoStamps in the US began. It was a collaboration between the United States Postal Service and Stamps.com, the company that has pioneered the use of custom postage. (The word PhotoStamps is their registered trademark.)

This test ran for seven and a half weeks, and during it over 2,750,000 PhotoStamps were sold. Clearly, there was public interest in custom postage! There were a few snags to work out of the program, such as how to handle images with inappropriate or ill-advised images on them. A very few such things had snuck through the process during that first trial period.

With guidelines and procedures revised, PhotoStamps were again offered to the public in May 2005, and again the response was overwhelmingly positive. In just over a year, over 19 million personalized stamps were sold by stamps.com, in their collaboration with the US Postal Service.

As I surfed the net for information about this history, I came across part of a procedure manual for postal employees. It explained the program and instructed employees to handle postcards, letters, and parcels with PhotoStamp® on them in exactly the same manner as other items. This also meant that things with PhotoStamps on them should be processed just as quickly as other things.

In May of 2006, the PhotoStamp program was extended to allow businesses to print logos, images, and messages on the stamps.

So now the future of PhotoStamps looks very bright!