Say "cheese!"
Or maybe it's "cheesy." Got a cute little picture of Fifi? Maybe your adorable newborn? Vacation photos, or that nutty picture of you with the bad case of red eye that you thought was soooo funny? Don't put it into a shoebox anymore. Put it on a stamp.
In a pact with the United States Postal Service, Internet postage leader Stamps.com (NASDAQ:STMP) is giving customers the chance to adorn official U.S. postage stamps with their favorite photo. You can send in any digital image over the Internet and assign a value to it from $0.23 to $3.85. In a week or two, you'll receive your personalized stamps from Stamps.com. For the less technically proficient, Stamps.com lets you tape a photo to an order form and mail it in.
But keep it clean. Stamps.com's censors will be scouring the pictures to keep out nudity, violence, and politically incorrect images.
It's the company's second foray into personalized postage. Two years ago, Stamps.com participated in a program to let users print out their own stamps on their own computer. Using specially watermarked paper and special software from Stamps.com, the NetStamps program let people print stamps for any amount for any class of mail, including international mail. The company, which was founded in 1996 and went public in 1999, has had a rocky go of it, though management is determined to turn things around.
PhotoStamps ain't exactly cheap, but it's tough to put a price on creativity. A minimum order is one sheet of 20 stamps. For typical $0.37 postage, that one sheet will cost you $16.99, plus shipping and handling -- more than double the $7.40 face value for the usual flag or bird stamp.
While the service has been fairly popular since it began last week -- more than 2,000 sheets were ordered in the first two days -- it's only a trial program running through Sept. 30. Stamps.com expects that the strong customer response it has received thus far will convince the Postal Service to extend the program beyond that date.
What has been the most popular picture so far? Babies, followed by pictures of family members and the pet pooch. It's not Ansel Adams, to be sure, but then maybe Junior's first steps are just as inspiring as Yosemite National Park.
Fool contributor Rich Duprey does not own any of the stocks mentioned in this article.
