Cute, adorable, and ambitious: Digital sticker firm PicoCandy preps for an Indonesian invasion

Chat apps like Line do well in Indonesia. This could partly be due to the irresistibly cute Brown and Cony stickers that portray emotions better than simple text. For Geraldine Yong, who’s the CEO of Singapore-based “stickers-as-a-service” firm PicoCandy, Indonesia represent a very important market.

PicoCandy will set up an Indonesian office during the first quarter of 2015. Yong plans to expand the company’s technology team, sales staff, and artist department. Regarding PicoCandy’s imminent storming of Jakarta’s sticker scene, Yong says, “Some of our partners such as Blackberry BBM have a large user base in Indonesia, and so we are powering their sticker store. This includes licensed stickers from famous iconic characters whom we have partnerships with, and also designer stickers which are localized in Bahasa Indonesia.”

The archipelago is one of the leading nations with regard to social media usage, and 25 percent of the time local users spend on their mobile phones are devoted to chat apps like Line or Blackberry Messenger (BBM), says Yong.

See: Now you can create your own sticker sets on Line, and earn money from them too

PicoCandy furnishes mobile apps with their own inventory of adorable stickers which include licensed, designer-made, branded, and localized content. “Stickers can be used to express oneself better than words and it can be used as a way brands can engage and communicate better with their customers,” explains Yong. According to her, PicoCandy’s mission is to become the largest digital stickers distribution company in the world, providing stickers-as-a-service to any mobile app that wishes to monetize its product via digital stickers.

In late 2013, PicoCandy raised US$1 million in funding from a group of angel investors and venture capital firms, including Ardent Capital and Wavemaker Pacific. It has secured partnerships with messaging apps, social networks, mobile applications, and telcos. Forbes says the global market for digital stickers is growing, and could become a US$2 billion industry by the end of this year.