Your clients keep some of their most important thoughts on sticky notes, which makes them a great promo product – as long as those sticky notes stay stuck.
You don’t want your logo and their idea for an award-winning movie/the dream they had last night/their list of passwords to end up lost on the floor: that would defeat the point. So to make sure your logo sticks it out, we tested sticky notes to see how well they can stick under the force of a desk fan and our unwavering scrutiny. Let’s get stuck in.
How Sticky Notes Work
Sticky note adhesive is not your regular adhesive. It’s formulated to be strong enough to hold up the paper when you’ve pressed it onto the wall, but weak enough that you can easily pull it off when you want to move the sticky note. By the way, the guy who invented this adhesive was actually trying to make a super strong adhesive for airplanes. Hopefully he stuck to the notes instead.
This adhesive works through something called Van der Waal’s forces. Life’s too short to explain them in detail, but they’re basically temporary forces that form between molecules in close proximity to one another, that you can easily break by creating distance between the molecules. It’s similar to moving a magnet on and off a fridge – but don’t tell physicists I said that because technically magnetism is different and I don’t want mean comments.
Importantly (yes, this is important), the adhesive is applied not as a long streak, but as lots of small spheres. When you press the sticky note down onto the wall, you flatten the spheres, creating a bigger surface area. More adhesive molecules can now bond with more wall molecules, so you get that ideal strong-but-not-unmovable stickiness.
Method
We wanted to test how well our sticky notes stuck to different surfaces (stickiness duration) and also if they could be stuck and unstuck multiple times yet still retain their stickiness.
(Prepare to lose all grasp on the words “stuck,” “stick,” and “sticky” before this is over.)
The surfaces we tested were drywall, a plastic monitor, wood, metal, and glass.
We tested three different brands of sticky note: Koozie, Post-it, and a generic.
Each brand came in three different sizes: small (approx 3” x 3”), medium (approx 4” x 3”), and large (approx 4” x 6”). So that’s 9 different types of sticky notes. We tested all three sticky notes of the same size at the same time.
For those who lost track three lines ago, we tested 3 groups of sticky notes (small, medium, and large) on 5 surfaces, for 15 tests total. That’s right: we committed.
Here’s the technique:
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1
Stuck, unstuck, and restuck each sticky note onto surface 10 times total.
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2
Positioned tower fan 3 feet away at a 45 degree angle from the surface. Put it on the highest setting.
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3
Every 30 minutes, we took the sticky notes that were still holding on and stuck and restuck them 10 times each.
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4
Continued for a max of 1.5 hours on each surface and recorded when they flew off, or if they stuck for the whole 90 minutes.
Videos
Small Sticky Note Test (3” x 3”)
Medium Sticky Note Test (4” x 3”)
Large Sticky Note Test (4” x 6”)
Key Learnings
Size Doesn’t Matter
As noted (sorry), we divided our sticky notes into sizes for our tests: but there doesn’t seem to be a clear correlation between sticky note size and duration of stickiness.
For example, let’s look at the large Post-it. It had a shorter average stickiness duration than the small and medium Post-its. However, it lasted longer than both on the metal and glass. And on some surfaces, it lasted less time than the small and medium Koozie and generic sticky notes, but lasted longer on others. That’s what you call mixed results – all of which suggests that size is not as big (lol) a factor as other variants.
Don’t Stick Your Sticky Notes on Wood*
If there’s one thing you take away from this experiment (and hopefully we can do better than that), it’s don’t stick your sticky notes on wood.* For reasons probably having to do with molecules and electrons and things of that nature, 5 out of 9 of our sticky notes fell off wood the quickest. Four fell off the wood within under a minute.
*However, there was a notable exception to this rule, which was the medium Post-it. This one stuck to the wooden surface for the full 90 minutes – one of only two times a sticky note stayed stuck for the whole experiment. (The other one was the small Post-it on the monitor, since you asked.)
Stick Your Sticky Notes on Your Monitor
There are two contenders for the best surface for sticky notes: metal and the monitor. Three out of 9 sticky notes had their best result on metal, and 3 out of 9 had their best result on the monitor.
However, I am Team Monitor. (Except when it comes to lizards: Team Chameleon all the way!) The monitor saw the longest average stickiness duration, of 30 minutes 54 seconds, compared to metal in second place with 26 minutes 34 seconds. Also, metal was the worst surface for one of the sticky notes, and had the lowest average stickiness duration for the medium sticky notes (only 1 minute 30 seconds.) In contrast, the monitor wasn’t the worst surface for any of the sticky notes.
TL;DR: I’ll be sticking my sticky notes on my monitor.
Sticking and Resticking Didn’t Make Them Come Unstuck
Remember how we were testing how unsticking and resticking the sticky notes would impact their stickiness? Well, as far as we can tell, it may have impacted at least one third of the results in our test.
To calculate this, I counted how many sticky notes fell off within one minute, since that could have been caused by our 10 initial sticks/unsticks. That was nine.
I then counted how many fell off within 30 to 35 minutes, and 60 to 65 minutes, since that would put the fall shortly after our second and third sticks/unsticks, thus implicating them in the sticky note’s failure. That added another six, for a total of 15 out of 45 sticky notes that appear to have been directly affected by being stuck down and unstuck. And that’s not counting others that could have also been affected, but took a longer time for the impact to show.
The Sticky Note Awards
Please prepare your polite applause face: We’re about to give out our top prizes.
Best Brand
The OG of sticky notes (that’s original glue, obviously), Post-it-brand sticky notes came top in 11 out of the 15 tests.
The average stickiness durations of our three Post-it notes across all five surfaces was 41 minutes 39 seconds. That’s nearly 4x the generic notes’ average of 11 minutes 15 seconds, and more than double the Koozie notes’ average of 13 minutes 44 seconds.
By the way, while I’m writing about Post-its, did you know they hold a rare trademark for a color? Specifically, for the Canary Yellow on their sticky notes. You can find out more about how color trademarks work in this blog post.
Best Overall
Unsurprisingly given the previous award, the intense battle to be crowned Best Overall Sticky Note came down to two Post-its. (There are no crowns, these awards are purely theoretical.)
Both the small and medium Post-its managed to cling to one surface for the entire 90 minutes (wood and the monitor respectively). However, one performed more consistently across the other surfaces.
The medium Post-it had an impressive average stickiness duration of 44 minutes 41 seconds, boosted by three results of over 60 minutes each. Unfortunately, it was let down by poor performances on metal (lasting less than three minutes) and glass (5 minutes 44 seconds).
This gave the small Post-it the opportunity to eke out a lead, with the longest average stickiness duration in our entire test, at 46 minutes 35 seconds. It only struggled on wood (ironically the surface its rival dominated), and even on that surface it managed over 15 minutes, significantly longer than all but two of the other sticky notes.
TL;DR: If you’re sticking your sticky note on drywall or wood, go for the medium Post-it. If you haven’t planned that far in advance (you wild thing), choose the small Post-it.
Best Sticky Note for Each Surface
For those who have meticulously planned the kind of surface they will be sticking their sticky notes to, here’s what our results recommend:
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Drywall
Medium Post-It (Q34831)
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Monitor
Small Post-It (Q67015)
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Wood
Medium Post-It (Q34831)
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Metal
Large Post-It (Q34851)
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Glass
Large Post-It (Q34851)
The Bottom Line
Your two main factors when it comes to sticky note shopping are brand and intended surface. For the brand, our results recommend that you stick with Post-it. For the surface, you can look at our handy results right above this paragraph to find out which one to go with. And if you’re the kind of spontaneous person who doesn’t know what they’re going to stick a sticky note on, go with our best all-rounder, the small Post-it.
| Size | Brand | Q# | Image + Clip | Average Stickiness Duration | VIEW PRODUCT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small (3″x3″) | Koozie® | Q780 |
|
10m 59s | View Product |
| Small (3″x3″) | Post-it® | Q67015 |
|
46m 35s | View Product |
| Small (3″x3″) | Generic |
|
10m 03s | ||
| Medium (4″ x 3″) | Koozie® | Q788 |
|
17m 51s | View Product |
| Medium (4″ x 3″) | Post-it® | Q34831 |
|
44m 41s | View Product |
| Medium (4″ x 3″) | Generic |
|
7m 40s | ||
| Large (4″ x 6″) | Koozie® | Q794 |
|
12m 22s | View Product |
| Large (4″ x 6″) | Post-it® | Q34851 |
|
27m 41s | View Product |
| Large (4″ x 6″) | Generic |
|
16m 03s |
Natasha Lavender
Natasha is an experienced writer and editor who has covered topics including technology, health and safety, business, and pop culture. Her work has been published by Good Housekeeping magazine, Forbes, Success, and more.
