13 years of Turtle’s Soup: a tale of nationwide popularity for this Tucson sticker brand

Turtle's Soup is in 2,500 stores across the U.S. and Canada, but the magic starts in Tucson

In the last 13 years, Turtle's Soup has grown into a full-blown sticker and stationery brand. 📸: courtesy Turtle's Soup

Turtle’s Soup started as a New Year’s resolution — a way to be more creative in 2013.

What began as an Etsy shop featuring hand-painted cards has turned into a full-blown sticker and stationery brand employing 15 people with products in 2,500 stores across the United States and Canada.

You’ve without a doubt seen Turtle’s Soup in Tucson — playful bumper stickers stuck to the car in front of you, 2-inch vibrant stickers sitting at the checkout booth of Bookmans, cartoon coyotes that wrap the Sun Link streetcar. 

You might stumble upon Turtle’s Soup hair claws in Meow Wolf or Turtle’s Soup bookmarks in the largest bookstore in Canada, but the magic happens right here in Tucson.

A tiny apartment, a consumer printer and 6,000 cards

Technically, Melanie Hein and Chris Moklak started Turtle’s Soup in the very late hours of Dec. 31, 2012.

“One of her aunts was telling her about Etsy and that’s where we got our start. She was like, ‘You should start an Etsy. You’re a talented artist,’” Chris says.

Turtle’s Soup is in stores across the U.S. and Canada, but the magic happens in Tucson. 📸: courtesy Turtle’s Soup

Melanie listed her hand-painted greeting cards on Etsy under the moniker Turtle’s Soup, a username Chris had used on different platforms. Less than two months later came Valentine’s Day. It’s not necessarily the holiday that made that month special, but a viral moment that happened after Vsauce, a YouTuber once known for posting pop culture reviews, posted one of Melanie’s cards. 

“All of a sudden, we had 100 orders and every single one was hand-painted,” Melanie says. “There was no way I could keep doing it that way so we used up what little money we had to buy our first printer.”

Melanie and Chris headed to Best Buy with a flash drive in hand to test every display in the sea of printers. They purchased the HP Envy 120 — and during those early years of Turtle’s Soup when demand started to pick up, they bought at least a dozen more.

“We burned them to the ground every time,” Melanie says.

Turtle’s Soup is known for their bubbly, playful and colorful designs. 📸: courtesy Turtle’s Soup

Turtle’s Soup now sells items in stores across the country, but Tucson-born Bookmans was the first. 

“That really helped us get things moving. That was our first time ever getting a really big order and we were able to reinvest that into our growing business,” Melanie says. 

Melanie and Chris remember bringing their designs to the bookstore and starting a conversation with Danielle Garcia, the person on the other side of the buying counter. The two would make a day of driving to every Bookmans location in Tucson to hand-deliver the sticker orders. A staff member would announce over the intercom, “Turtle’s Soup is here!” and they’d stick around to chat with the employees.

About a year after that viral YouTube video, Urban Outfitters ordered Melanie’s greeting cards in bulk.

“This was done out of our little apartment. On a typical day, we’d wake up and see the Etsy orders and make 20-30 cards — and then we’d see 6,000 staring at us in the face,” Chris says. “We didn’t know what to do but we knew we had to do it. We realized we might have something here. Maybe this was bigger than a hobby.”

Hoping to keep up the momentum, Melanie and Chris started to debut items beyond cards. They added felt keychains and earrings to the mix — and then came the sticker craze in 2016.

“We were doing a lot of cards but saw a little stall,” Chris says. “We were like, ‘We need to introduce something.’ We started with a little Cricut for stickers.”

“Stickers weren’t really trendy at that point and we didn’t know about lamination,” Melanie says of what’s now a standard to weather-proof stickers. “We were shipping the grungiest stickers you can imagine until one of our customers was like, ‘We need these laminated.’”

All of Turtle’s Soup’s designs are colorful and playful. 📸: courtesy Turtle’s Soup

Since starting the business 13 years ago, Turtle’s Soup has created somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 individual designs that now adorn stickers, bookmarks, hair claws, notepads, air fresheners and more. Every design is colorful, bubbly and very cutesy. Most are centered around positivity. (Melanie’s favorite design is of a family of screaming opossums. Chris’ favorite is of a dreamy desert scene.)

“This is spreading joy and positivity when we’re living in an era where there’s a lot of negativity,” Melanie says. “Having colorful positive art is a reminder that things are good. It’s a reminder of positivity. We have our fair share of chaos and self-deprecating designs but I like to lean more into the positivity.”

“Color is everything — that’s at the core of what we do,” Chris says. “Even if we’re making a design that’s sort of self-deprecating, it still has to be cute.”

The team, the fans, the community

As you can only imagine, the Turtle’s Soup headquarters are colorful. A mural is painted on one wall and a ledge on the other side of the room is camouflaged in stickers. A whiteboard is covered in drawings from “The Vampire Diaries” and a bulletin board is filled with fan mail. 

Stickers are organized in tiny acrylic boxes. Bookmarks, notepads and hair claws are stacked neatly on shelves. 

“You look at the office now and it looks pretty organized. But when we first started doing stickers, I would say we had 50-60 designs and they were all in plastic see-through containers. If we ran out of a design, we were digging through these containers,” Chris says. “The stickers kept selling and selling and selling and we kept adding and adding and adding to the point where we had a couple hundred designs. We were shipping, we were doing wholesale. We were thinking, ‘Maybe we need an office.’” 

In 2019, Chris and Melanie moved Turtle’s Soup out of their home and into a warehouse. That’s also the year when they hired their first employee.

“It was six years of working out of our apartment and our house, trying to keep it organized, trying to keep customers happy,” Chris says. “In 2019, we leased our first warehouse studio and it was grungy. It had evaporative cooling which meant summers were a challenge. The first year, we were like, ‘Cool, we’re working out of a warehouse. This is a dream.’ And then our team started to grow.”

With a space that was 20% office area and 80% warehouse, the team that quickly grew to 12 people simply couldn’t work comfortably in a tiny space with no A/C.

Their current office on Tucson’s east side now has space for all 15 team members, most of Turtle’s Soup inventory and two giant printers that nearly fill an entire room. Even now, though, Chris and Melanie struggle with a lack of storage for the projects they wish they could take on.

Beyond the stickers, Turtle’s Soup now offers hair claws, air fresheners and more. 📸: courtesy Turtle’s Soup

Through it all, from the sleepless nights packing orders in a tiny apartment to a monsoon flood in an already sticky warehouse, Melanie and Chris are nothing but grateful for all that Turtle’s Soup has become.

Melanie has wanted to be an artist for as long as she can remember — all you have to do is flip through her kindergarten yearbook for proof. Now she’s creating massive designs that wrap the streetcar — the first time she saw the finished product, she was setting up for the Fourth Avenue Street Fair and ran after the tram. Now she’s working with big names like Meow Wolf and Indigo, which is basically the Barnes & Noble of Canada. 

Just this month, the Turtle’s Soup team packed 20,000 bookmarks for Books-A-Million, a bookstore chain with more than 250 locations in the country.

“It feels unreal. I never would’ve imagined this in a million years. It’s awesome and we’re so proud,” Melanie says. “That order for Books-A-Million was the largest we had ever seen. When we got the order in our inboxes, we looked at each other and our jaws just dropped. We truly wouldn’t be where we are without our team. You can’t run a kitchen with just a chef. It’s a team effort all the way around.”

“I think on any given day or week or month, it’s almost hard to digest. It’s hard to sit down and think about how crazy this has become,” Chris says. “And not to be cliche, but one of the most rewarding things is watching our team grow with us. We have an incredible team. Every Friday night — every night actually — we gush about our team.”

I sat with Melanie and Chris for two hours and lost count of how many times they praised their team. They have a whole lot of love for their supporters, too.

“When we do the street fair or Tucson Comic-Con or any event, we do them because we want to be out there with everyone,” Chris says. “We love the community and we love that we’re feeling more and more ingrained in the Tucson scene.”

Books-A-Million recently ordered 20,000 bookmarks from Turtle’s Soup. 📸: courtesy Turtle’s Soup

During this year’s Tucson Festival of Books, Melanie and Chris were putting the final touches on their booth when a girl patiently stood by with her grandpa. 

“He said, ‘She’s got a list.’ And when we opened, she started methodically picking out bookmarks,” Chris says. “She was like, ‘OK, I’m done. My collection is complete.’ We were like, ‘What do you mean?’ and she was like, ‘I collect your bookmarks.’”

“She got there first thing Saturday morning for the bookmarks and then came back Sunday morning to show us a photo of her collection displayed,” Melanie says.

The very first time they set up at a market was in 2013 during Roosevelt Row‘s First Friday, a street fest that Melanie grew up visiting as a Phoenix native. This past summer, the couple set up in The Valley again, this time for Phoenix Fan Fusion. 

“Someone came to our booth at Fan Fusion and said she found us at First Friday more than 10 years ago when she was in high school,” Chris says. “When she told us, we were both like, ‘Bring it in.’ That’s what this is all about.” 

Melanie and Chris remember the first time they ever saw a Turtle’s Soup design in the wild. It was 2018, five years after Turtle’s Soup began, when they were flying out of Tucson to head to San Diego for the weekend. There it was — a sticker on someone’s water bottle just a few seats down.

Now it’s hard to not run into Turtle’s Soup. They see their work on a car parked at Beyond Bread when they visit the Tucson bakery every Saturday morning. They see their bumper stickers when they’re walking through a parking lot in a random town in Georgia during a trade show.

“In the beginning, people would always ask if we’re a restaurant because of the name Turtle’s Soup. ‘Is this a kitchen?’” Melanie says. “I embrace it now because we are a kitchen. Everything is from scratch and we make art. It’s real. It’s human made.”

Just a few of the shops to find Turtle’s Soup in Tucson — and some of Melanie and Chris’ favorite places:

🐢 For more information or to shop online, visit Turtle’s Soup’s website. 🎨

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