Welcome to Stick No Bills®
Stick No Bills was founded in Galle Fort, Sri Lanka, in 2011 by British entrepreneurs Philip James Baber and Meg Gage Williams to connect cultures and transcend borders by spearheading a renaissance in poster art.
Powered by a core team working across many time zones, Stick No Bills has grown to become market leaders in the curation, restoration, augmentation and authorised revival of antique posters drawn from legacy institutional archives. This conservation activity is concurrent with the brand’s creation and promulgation of stylish modern graphic artworks designed to promote venerated destinations, institutions and to commemorate major cultural and sporting events.
The legacy brands Stick No Bills works closely with are the custodians of a distinctive stylistic influence that perpetuates popular culture to this day, including the giants of the advent of jetset travel such as Pan American World Airways, Lufthansa, British Airways and Braniff International Airways.
Building on a formula first conceived at the poster specialist’s Asia Flagship Gallery in Galle Fort, Sri Lanka, Stick No Bills galleries around the world feature collections place-centric to their location. These regional headquarters now include the Middle East Flagship Gallery in Dubai (est. 2024), the Europe Flagship Gallery in Barcelona (est. 2024) and, test printing to perfection new works: the Stick No Bills Global Poster Gallery & Fine Art Printworks (est. 2021) at the Imprenta Nueva Balear in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, the oldest active printworks in the Western Mediterranean.
Stick No Bills also has permanent exhibitions open to the public in Skåne County, Sweden, courtesy of Nadjafi and Kristnesen since 2020, in New York, at the Cradle of Aviation courtesy of the Pan Am Museum Foundation since 2021 and, most recently, in central London courtesy of Iconic Images Gallery since November 2024.
OUR STORY
Our journey started when founders Meg and Philip were living in the jungle thirty minutes from the incredible UNESCO World Heritage City of Galle Fort, located on Sri Lanka's southwestern coast, running a surf hotel and raising their two little girls in this palm-fringed paradise.
Meg and Philip had already been avid collectors of vintage poster art as they worked and travelled around the world, Philip in advertising for the Financial Times Group and latterly as a professional photographer, and Meg as a counter-terrorist security risk analyst. But it was in Galle Fort where they saw a future for their poster art obsession that could inspire a new generation of travellers visiting Sri Lanka, while also giving back to their new-found home by using net proceeds from sales of the fine art prints they produced to fundraise for local humanitarian and conservation projects.
They set about celebrating Sri Lanka’s poster art, natural beauty and cultural heritage in their first Stick No Bills gallery; an old colonial-era Dutch merchant's townhouse situated close to the intersection of Pedlar Street and Church Street.
From this first gallery in Galle Fort, Stick No Bills has gone from strength to strength with fourteen years of e-commerce overarching the expansion of that original gallery into two larger mansion houses at 49 and 63 Pedlar Street and, in 2024, a satellite gallery at Hiriketiya Beach. The formula first refined in Sri Lanka has been replicated in a natural, organic way as Meg and Philip later relocated their family to Palma de Mallorca, in the Spanish Balearic Islands, creating the Stick No Bills® Global Poster Gallery at the Imprenta Nueva Balear and later launching the Europe Flagship in Barcelona alongside Group Managing Director Carlos Andreu Cantarell. 2024 also saw the launch of the Middle East Flagship in Dubai, and, to date the establishing of sixty-five certified points of sale in key luxury hotels, boutiques, museums, airports and book stores around the world.
Where the name Stick No Bills® comes from
In Meg’s words:
“Everywhere we looked, hunched into the back of tuk-tuks as we raced around seeding the formula for our poster art enterprise, we kept noticing that ‘Stick No Bills’ was stencil-sprayed onto the walls of all the banks, army and navy bases and hotels we were whizzing past in Sri Lanka and India. The intention? To stop people from pasting up posters. So late one night we jokingly played with the idea of trademarking the very string of words that for generations had become entrenched as a directive to NOT do exactly what we do".
Stick No Bills is a provocative name that sticks in your mind perhaps partly because all those power houses protecting themselves from poster adverts are inadvertently helping us create a global guerilla marketing campaign that really precedes our brand’s inception.
In 2014, initially for purely practical signage purposes the founders contracted an old-school typographer called Martyn Hodges (RIP) to physically cut the upper case ‘STICK NO BILLS’ font and digitise it. In 2015 a talented typographic design agency in Colombo approached Meg and Philip confirming that with their permission they had been offered funding from Google to develop STICK NO BILLS into an open source Google True Type Font in Latin, Tamil and Sinhala script thereby enabling the aviation style stencil lettering to be used by anyone - try it!
Galleries
Stick No Bills® Asia Flagship Gallery located in Galle Fort (est. 2011), Sri Lanka.
Stick No Bills® Middle East Flagship Gallery (est. 2023) brought to you by The Studio Dubai (est. 2001) and located in the Courtyard, in the Al Quoz art district.
Stick No Bills® Europe Flagship Gallery (est. 2024) in the El Born historic centre of Barcelona, opposite the Santa Caterina market.
Stick No Bills® Global Poster Gallery at the Imprenta Nueva Balear, located in the heart of Palma de Mallorca’s commercial district (est. 2021).
Wherever and however you first found us, we’re delighted to have you along for the ride.
Passion for place-centric poster art
Jack Rennert of Rennert’s Rare Poster Gallery in New York City so perfectly crystallised Stick No Bills raison d’être in a recent publication, that Meg asked Jack if we could quote him, and he kindly approved:
“There’s something perfect about the travel poster. What I mean is the idea, the gestalt of the travel poster. It solicits. You smile. There is no resistance. The wall is a window – and now a door. You’re not here anymore. You are there: even, almost, better than being there, is being in the idea of there: the essence of place, and the specificity of time as created by the artist. These places being advertised – you cannot go there today. None of us can. They are idealisations of the past, which is another country. But the sensation of place, in the artistic past: that you can own. That can be yours. That endures.”
Welcome to the Stick No Bills tour de force of officially licensed and authorised poster artworks and fine art prints, each and every one hand-illustrated by highly talented artists of their day and published using the latest generation non-toxic inks and fine art printing machines to ensure your art work lasts for generations to come.
