If you run pull-planning sessions on a jobsite, you already know the drill: get every trade partner in a room (or on a video call), work backward from your milestone, and fill a wall with sticky notes until the whole sequence is visible at a glance. It's a core part of Lean Construction's Last Planner System, and it's still usually run the old-fashioned way — one sticky note per task, color by trade, stuck to a board.
That's exactly where we get a lot of our construction orders. A general contractor needs enough pads to run the session — often several hundred to a few thousand sheets — and they need a different color for each trade on the wall: one color for electrical, another for plumbing, another for drywall, and so on. The question we hear most is simple: which pad do I actually order to get that?
The short answer
Stik2it doesn't sell pre-dyed colored paper in construction-friendly quantities. Instead, every color you see on a pull-planning board from us comes from full-color digital printing — we call a solid-color background a “floodcoat” — on plain white paper. You get the color (or colors) you want by choosing one of two product lines:
- Full Color Post-it® Notes — any color, 1 pad minimum, scales up to 5,000 pads. Regular adhesive.
- 3M Super Sticky Post-it® Notes — any color, 500 pad minimum, scales up to 10,000 pads. Reinforced adhesive built for hard-to-stick surfaces.
Both print in full color at no extra charge for a solid background — the choice between them comes down to adhesive strength and order size, not color options.
Why you need more than one color
A pull-planning wall only works if everyone can tell trades apart at a glance. Most teams solve this the same way: pick a color per trade partner — say, yellow for framing, blue for electrical, green for plumbing — and order a separate pad in each color. That's why a single pull-planning order to us is rarely “one pad of one color.” It's usually a handful of different colors, each printed to match a trade, ordered together or across a project's lifecycle.
Since neither of our product lines has a fixed set of paper colors to choose from, this isn't a limitation — it's actually more flexible. You're not stuck with whatever 8 colors a catalog offers. Tell us the exact color for each trade (a hex code, a Pantone reference, or just “safety orange”) and we'll print it as a full-bleed background on the pad.
Full Color Pads: the flexible, low-minimum option
Our Full Color Post-it® Notes line is built for exactly this kind of job. Because the minimum order is just 1 pad, you can order a small batch in each trade's color without committing to hundreds of pads you don't need — useful if your crew list is short, or if you're testing colors before a bigger multi-project order. Order sizes scale all the way up to 5,000 pads, with pad sizes from 3"x3" up to 10"x6" and either 25 or 50 sheets per pad.
If your planning wall is a whiteboard, a table, foam board, or anything with a reasonably smooth surface, Full Color's regular adhesive holds sticky notes the way you'd expect.
Super Sticky Pads: when the wall itself fights you
Jobsite planning walls aren't always a clean whiteboard. Plywood, rough-sawn studs, corrugated trailer walls, windows, rebar, pipe — these are the surfaces where ordinary sticky notes let go. Our 3M Super Sticky Post-it® Notes line uses 3M's reinforced adhesive, designed to hold on vertical and hard-to-stick-to spots. Like Full Color, you can order full-color printing — the order form includes a Full Color ink option alongside 1-color and 2-color — so the same per-trade color coding works here too.
The trade-off is minimum order size: Super Sticky starts at 500 pads and scales up to 10,000, with pad sizes from 3"x3" up to 8"x6". That's a good fit if you're ordering in bulk for a long-running project, multiple sites, or a GC that wants to standardize colors across every pull-planning session they run this year — but it's not the right choice if you just need a couple hundred sheets in one trade's color for a single session.
Not sure if Super Sticky is worth it for your situation? Our Super Sticky vs. Regular Post-it Notes comparison breaks down exactly where the stronger adhesive earns its keep.
So which should you order?
| Full Color Pads | Super Sticky Pads | |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum order | 1 pad | 500 pads |
| Max order | 5,000 pads | 10,000 pads |
| Color options | Any color, full-color print | Any color, full-color print |
| Adhesive | Regular | Reinforced, for hard-to-stick/vertical surfaces |
| Best for | Smaller trade-color batches, whiteboards/tables/foam board, testing colors first | Large standing orders, rough or vertical planning walls, multi-project standardization |
If your planning wall is a whiteboard or table and you only need a modest batch per trade, Full Color Pads get you there starting at 1 pad. If you're ordering in bulk, running sessions on walls or surfaces that are rough or vertical, or want one standard set of trade colors across every project this year, Super Sticky Pads are built for exactly that.
Either way, the color comes from the print, not the paper — so tell us your trade colors and we'll match them.