To solve this kind of question, the app and social media community Tattoodo has launched a digital platform that will allow users to find an artist all over the world directly and book an appointment.
“Until recently the entire tattoo industry was based on word of mouth,” says Ami James, the star of Miami Ink and co-founder of Tattoodo.
You had the top tattooers and shops all over the world and basically, those guys decided which artists and shops were legit. If you didn’t know anyone from the community, you would probably end up in a shop that didn’t make sense for you, then you would have a bad experience and you wouldn’t want to keep getting tattoos.
Tattoodo's digital platform can play an important part in educating people about tattoo culture and artists, James adds. "What we’re trying to do now is show them the quality artists in their area and the studios keeping the traditions of our culture alive, while giving people the means to access all of that in a convenient way".
In the five years since it launched, the Danish company has invested heavily in its website and social media presence, becoming the largest social community dedicated to tattoo culture, with 45m social followers. In May 2016, it launched an app, which was re-designed in January along with the site. Since then, the number of app users has grown by 40% a month to over 4.2m registered.
After five rounds of investment finance, Tattoodo has yet to report a profit, although its losses fell between 2016 and 2017. Victor Chateaubriand, Tattoodo's Chief Growth Officer, believes that with the help of monthly revenues from subscriptions for the new platform, Tattoodo will become cash positive on operations by end of 2019.
Big Business
The tattoo industry is big business, generating an estimated $50bn in revenue according to IBIS World. Some 36% of millennials now have a tattoo, while in the U.S., about 21% of the population has one.
Tattoodo’s own analysis predicts that there are more than 200m Facebook users worldwide (excluding China) engaging with tattoo content on Facebook. It thinks it can win more and more of them onto its own platform.
With the western world’s tattoo industry still growing at around 7% a year, growth is unlikely to stop. In Asia, the potential is considerable, but China has restricted other social media platforms like Facebook and Google, says Chateaubriand. So Tattoodo has translated the app into Chinese (Mandarin) and established strong presences on local social media platforms, such as Weibo. It’s done something similar in Brazil and Russia as well.
The tattoo industry has been late to digitize. Last year, Inkbay, a digital tattoo booking and reviewing platform, launched its digital booking site in Sweden and the U.K. Now Tattoodo intends to disrupt the industry further.
“We want to make it easier to get a good quality tattoo,” says Caspar Hogh, Chief Operating Officer of Tattoodo. “We want to open up the industry and make it less intimidating to get a tattoo.”
