Peace, Love & Psychedelicsย ๐
Hi, Kim here. This store is named after Howard โ the Vari-Vue King.
When Vari-Vue went out of business in 1986, Howard bought up much of what remained: uncut sheets, salesman samples, factory stock that never made it to a store shelf. He spent decades as keeper of the collection, and when he passed, he left it to me. Now it's my joy (and my spare room's burden) to find these strange, wonderful, wiggling little things new homes.
Nearly everything here is NOS โ new old stock โ meaning it's original, unused, and exactly as it left the factory decades ago. When you see "uncut sheet" or "salesman sample" in a listing, you're looking at something that came straight from the source.
What is Vari-Vue?
Vari-Vue was the pioneer of the lenticular image โ those magic pictures that move, wink, flicker, or jump between two scenes as you tilt them. Long before holograms, Vari-Vue's "flickers" were everywhere in postwar America:
- Winking eyes and kissing lips on pins, rings, and cards
- Political campaign buttons that flipped between candidates and slogans
- Cereal box prizes and gumball-machine rings โ Beatles rings, cartoon flickers, and premiums of every kind
- The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request โ the famous 3D album cover
- Advertising signs and displays for brands from Pepsi to Ford
- Psychedelic swirls and hypnotic discs that made the 1960s look the way the 1960s felt
The technology is beautifully analog: a finely ridged plastic lens laid over an interlaced printed image. No batteries, no screen โ just optics doing something delightful. Every one of these was made by machines and hands that stopped running in 1986, which is why original Vari-Vue pieces keep finding their way into collections, art projects, jackets, gallery walls, and music videos.
Why buy here?
Because this is the deep end of the pool. With hundreds of original pieces โ many one-of-a-kind, most straight from the factory's final inventory โ this is one of the largest collections of original Vari-Vue material anywhere. I've been selling online since 2002 (7,000+ sales, 99.7% positive) and I pack everything like it's going to a museum, because sometimes it is.
If you're hunting for something specific, ask โ I might have it in a box Howard labeled in 1987.
Peace, Love & Psychedelics,
Kimย ๐๐๏ธ