Panini (stickers)

Panini is the brand name of an Italian firm which produces collectable stickers. The company is based in Modena and named after the Panini brothers, who founded it in 1961. It also publishes comics and magazines under the imprint Panini Comics.

It became famous in the 1960s for its football (soccer) collections, which soon became objects of wide interest and are now considered a juvenile cultural phenomenon of the following decades. Rare stickers ("figurine") can reach very high prices on the collectors' market. Some popular games were invented which used stickers as playing cards. The slogan "Stick with Panini" could once be heard in a jingle following the television advertisements that Panini aired during children's programming.

Giuseppe Panini, the eldest brother and the founder of this business, and a collector himself, financed the creation of the "Raccolte Fotografiche Modenesi" (Modena's photographic collections), a precious archive containing more than 300,000 photographs and a similar number of postcards, describing the life of the town and the evolution of photographic art.

In 2006, Panini partnered with The Coca-Cola Company and Tokenzone to produce the first ever Virtual Sticker Album for the World Cup.

In World Cup Sticker Albums, Panini always have the names of the countries in their own languages (e.g. Germany as Deutschland, England as England, Poland as Polska, Italy as Italia and Spain as España, etc.).

External links

* [http://www.paninigroup.com/ Corporate website]
* [http://www.panini.co.uk/ UK website]