Import Stickers

When complex country specific packaging was finally abandoned in Europe in favour of the Trilogo design, certain countries were already heavily relying on imported Star Wars figures and toys from other companies.  Many of those products had stickers placed on them by the importer once they arrived in their country with the companies name, address and other important information. 

The majority of the imported figures distributed around Europe were packaged on Palitoy and Trilogo cards but American ROTJ Kenner cards were also imported for distribution in Europe  too (usually 65 backs, 77 backs and 79 backs).

Due to their design, Trilogo products were already that much easier to distribute in other countries due to the amount of different languages on the packaging so it’s perhaps no surprise that they can be found with almost all of the import stickers used in Europe.

Import stickers found on Vintage products have offered up vital information in tracking the distribution of figures in Europe and they are definitely seen as important to a certain type of collector but for the majority they are probably no different than similar stickers placed on products imported nowadays. As such they are often overlooked by collectors who perhaps do not know what they are or aren’t interested enough to find out!

So, on with the guide! I have broken this down into different Countries for easier viewing.

Enjoy!

Belgium/Netherlands

Clipper Benelux imported a lot of Kenner and Palitoy figures and often used stickers to keep their mail away promotions active. The use of the “Swirl” logo (seen below) seems to show that they also wanted to put their own name back on the packaging in some small way too (seen below). 

The next sticker is called a “Starburst” for obvious reasons, the direct translation of the text on the sticker is “new premiums”.

Both Clipper stickers can be found on Trilogos, the starburst logo is the more common sticker of the two but can still be hard to find on certain figures.

The most common Clipper “sticker” found on Trilogo packaging was actually more of a mini catalogue attached to the back of the cards. It’s purpose was to provide parents and children a catalogue of items that they usually had to send away for through the various mail away promotions.

Here are some shots of the catalogue on a Trilogo card.

Close up of the mini catalogue:

The following Clipper offer is referred to as a “wrap around” (although on this example the wrap around part is missing).

Wrap around Clipper offer stickers are extremely uncommon on Trilogo cards and are usually only seen on earlier Palitoy & Kenner Return of the Jedi figures.

To date this particular sticker has only been documented on a few R5-D4 Trilogos as well as the Wicket above.

Italy

In Italy, a company called Edilio Parodi were importing Star Wars toys. 

Product imported by Edilio Parodi can be identified by a small rectangular white sticker. It’s probable that at some point General Mills Europe took control of importing products for Italy as there is a second Italian import sticker with the GM company information on it.

This first picture is of the Edilio Parodi import sticker:

And this is the larger sized sticker which lists General Mills as the importer:

The GM import stickers are predominantly found on Trilogos (although not exclusively) which would indicate a later period of distribution than the Edilio Parodi stickers.

Spain

Spain primarily produced figures for themselves but they also produced for other countries as well. During the ROTJ period, Spain even produced some of the cantina aliens (Hammerhead, Walrusman & Snaggletooth) for Kenner US.

On the French/Meccano Trilogo cards you can sometimes see “Fabrique en Espagne” COO stickers (Made in Spain) which would indicate that at some point in time the Spanish company PBP produced and exported figures to France and perhaps other countries.

The following figure may well be another example of a Spanish export. This is a PBP Luke X-Wing Trilogo with a “Made In Spain” sticker attached to the card.

Unlike the French COO stickers, the “Made in Spain” sticker on the Luke above is in English which may well indicate that at some point (or for a limited period of time) Spain supplied the UK with some Trilogo figures.

Sweden

Swedish sold products can also be found with stickers attached although they are more like translation stickers than import stickers (Translating English text like “Action figures not included” to Swedish etc).

While none have been found on figures, they can be seen on boxed Trilogo items.

For reference, here are some typical Swedish stickers on various boxed toys.

 

Denmark

What’s the next best thing to an import sticker? A price sticker of course!

Bending the rules here slightly to include price stickers on this page but as Danish importers rarely used import stickers, they can only really be identified by their price stickers/store tags.

As well as a host of different Palitoy produced products, French Meccano figures have also been reported to have been sold in Denmark.

This is a typical Danish price sticker with the “Chokpris” text on a Princess Leia Hoth Trilogo card  (also take note of the white price sticker with blue and red – another common Danish price sticker)


You can view a huge gallery of Vintage Star Wars toys that were sold in Denmark here, the site is run and maintained by Lars Rosenqvist Sørensen.

And finally..

The last Import sticker seen here is an interesting one for two reasons. It looks very similar to the Italian Edilio Parodi sticker in terms of size and text content but this is actually a Portuguese import sticker and if that wasn’t interesting enough, there’s more..

The letters “C E” seen on the bottom right of each import sticker is called the C E “mark” and it indicates that the product complies with EU legislation (health, saftey and environmental protection requirements) C E stands for “European Community”.

What’s interesting about this is that the C E mark wasn’t widely used until the early 90’s which may mean that the Portuguese importer “SOC. REP. CONCENTRA, LDA.” were importing overstock from previous years.

This is a really fun little import sticker and rarely shows up. There are only a handful known to exist, most of which are on Trilogo MOC figures. It gives an extra glimpse into European distribution and that’s why stickers are so damn cool!



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