back to CONTENT
Introduction
Collecting of fruit stickers / labels is a fairly common hobby. It simply doesn’t cost us anything: the stickers are carefully removed from the already purchased fruits, then accurately pasted-in onto sheets of paper, which are finally placed into a paper holders using transparent files. That's it then, the album is prepared.
The size of the collection is increasing rapidly, and it become more and more difficult to manage it. New coming stickers may already be in collection, i.e. they may be repeated. You'll have to scroll through dozens of pages of albums in searches and comparisons. It is obvious the collection should be arranged somehow. But in what way gathered stickers could be (or should be) arranged on albums pages?
Nowadays collector starts to look for appropriate information in the space of the World Wide Web (WWW). It is getting clear just immediately that there are a good many fruit label collectors in the world, and all of them arrange collected stickers according the principle "what fruit the label removed from", i.e. apple stickers are pasted in on pages of "apple'" album, banana's labels are pasted in "banana" album pages and etc. On the appropriate album's pages stickers are arranged both randomly (in order of coming into collection) or alphabetically according to captions on the stickers.
Such an approach arisen by natural way when 25-30 years ago began form of most biggest modern collections of fruit labels. It was epoch when the WWW was not widely spread yet and was not used everywhere. Practically not any fruit company had in those years own websites or even small web-pages in Internet space. It was senseless at that time to attempt to find albeit any information about fruit companies. Only the sticker itself was a single source of information with inscriptions and not always understandable images on it.
The collector only needs to remember or find out somewhere the name of the fruit, which the sticker was removed from, in order to identify the corresponding album and place the sticker there alphabetically in accordance with the text inscriptions on label. Everything is simple, natural and understandable. In fact, it was the most rational and the only way to organize the labels in the collection for many years, until the Internet appeared.
Indeed, today impossible to deal with business without making traces of their activities in Internet space. Websites, databases (DB) of registered trademarks (TM) and brands, network super- and hypermarkets, transcontinental and transoceanic / overseas shipments and appropriate documents like a consignments notes and customs declarations, booklets and prospects of advertising and PR agencies, international annual exhibitions of fruit growers and wholesalers, web pages in social networks, portfolios of web-designers and many-many others sources of information provide us with giant flow of information allowing completely identify just any participant of fruit market and any fruit company. All companies are trying to advertise by all possible ways their own logotypes as a main brand of their products. Sometimes they present, as a rule in addition to main brand, several other brands as their specific own trademarks. All of this was quite impossible even twenty or thirty years ago. But now it is absolutely obvious that thanks to lot of information steadily circulating in Internet space any company that issued fruit sticker / label could be rather easily identified even in those cases when the label has nothing except graphic image without any inscription and other textual information.
In other words, for organizing a collection of fruit stickers, a collector can use an alternative to the fruit-based approach, which is to place labels in albums not according to its belonging to one or another type of fruit, but according to the principle of belonging brands and stickers to a particular company / firm. How can such an approach be implemented in practice?
First of all, it is necessary to find in Internet space information about a company (or firm) which probably issued the label have fall into the scope of a collector attention. After company's identification it must be discover, again in Internet, all available information about all other brands possibly owned by found company, though sometimes the company may have a single brand in all. Finally it is necessary to find labels confirming each brand graphically or textually. All found labels become a content of album page of appropriate fruit company.
Such an approach appears as a quite effective one, and I already have identified using this method more then two thousands of worldwide companies, which own about 4,5 thousands own brands and have issued approximately 36 thousands of appropriate labels. This impressive statistics objectively confirms that in collecting of fruit labels can be used a quite new approach alternative to "fruit" approach. As to me it is very promising method of organizing collection material.
Obvious bonus of such an approach is identification of country where fruit company is localized and therefore all albums are easily arranged by countries in a very natural way.
Descriptions of identified companies become, for good and all, a catalog entries (see COBRAS Catalog in site menu) involving name and logo of companies, their postal and websites addresses, description of their own brands and, finally, images of stickers confirming of every brands existence. In fact, COBRAS Catalog is the main part of my website.
Now any collector of fruit stickers, using my catalog, can organize and paste up their collection of stickers not by fruit, but by firms. As a result, each item in the collection turns out to be characterized and described in much more details. The pictures and texts on the labels become more understandable, and the information which fruit the stickers have been removed from becomes no longer necessary. However, this information can also be found in the catalog on the web resources of the company of interest to the collector.
back to CONTENT |