'Climb that mountain' and 'go surfing!' says poster art CEO to her staff

There’s no time for bad vibes at the vintage poster business that its Cornish-Scottish co-founder Williams has poured her heart and soul into.

Stick No Bills® is on a mission to preserve and uphold the best of 160 years of place and event-centric graphic art with their kaleidoscopic collections of original poster artworks and licensed fine art prints thereof.

When Williams founded her business fourteen years ago alongside her husband, Philip James Baber, they knew from the outset that they wanted to ensure attested authors´ rights - that remained extant pertaining to the vintage poster collections they were building - were always honoured. They also foresaw how each and every licensed image could serve as fundraising tools for impactful conservation, humanitarian, sporting and sustainability oriented projects underway in the destinations, promoted by the posters themselves.

For example, the poster artworks they created which depict Galle Fort, Sri Lanka, fundraise for the Galle Heritage Foundation; the Rio-centric artworks they have been licensed to revive by Pan Am, Pan American Grace Airways, Lufthansa and British Airways fundraise for the World Land Trust in REGUWA in Rio province to support long established efforts underway to conserve, recover and extend Atlantic rainforest territories in an area of outstanding natural beauty just 80 km north of Rio de Janeiro.

In an era of exponentially increasing AI-generated graphic content wherein piracy is rife, Stick No Bills® is determined to continue to be a real place created and staffed by real people who are passionate about their project. Their original flagship gallery in Galle Fort, open seven days a week since 2011, is a place of tranquil beauty with high rafters, dark wooden counters and antique rattan furniture and vast white walls exhibiting strikingly framed collections of posters that together offer a panoramic storyboard depicting what was then called Ceylon, right up to today’s modern Sri Lanka. It’s a place you may stumble upon and pinch yourself that you did so, as you look around and feel your hope in humanity being restored. The compulsion to pause for an analogue moment to write an old fashioned postcard and post it home has never been stronger.

A ‘wild card’ status played out for Williams

I meet Williams, the unflappable founder of Stick No Bills® as she patches in from her design studio in Palma de Mallorca which, off the back of nine years of relatively speaking ‘micro-level’ business development in the Balearic archipelago, is surrounded by 35 certified points of sale spread on Mallorca alone.

It’s a stormy day and she is fresh from sunrise yoga on the beach. She is today one half of the original story of Stick No Bills® – there is a sadness to her tale. Her beloved late husband and co-founder, Philip is the other, who sadly passed away in October 2023 after an epic five year fight with cancer.

Williams is moving in her clarity about the bold creative eye Phil gave their now flourishing business.