1. Focus On Educational Marketing: Tyler believes that customers see through sales-driven marketing. To capture and maintain people’s interest, incorporate education into marketing strategies.
2. Listen to Customers: Tyler maintains that listening to customers is critical for product innovation. By hearing requests and feedback, a brand can continue to offer new and valuable products to customers while growing its base.
3. Provide Value: When growing a brand, Tyler highlights the importance of providing value, whether monetary or integrity-driven, in both business and customer relationships.
4. Establish a Strong Online Ecosystem: To be successful in E-Commerce, Tyler stresses that an online business must have a strong ecosystem to engage customers and keep them connected to the brand.
5. Build a Customer-Centric Team: Tyler maintains that anyone working with customers must be approachable, have a good attitude, and be willing to put others before themselves.
In 2017, digital marketer Tyler Martina partnered with his artist friends to open Mr. Inkwells, a tattoo shop in Southern California. You’ll want to read how Tyler and Mr. Inkwells grew business to include a successful E-Commerce site while upholding key brand values focused on putting the customer first.
Meet Tyler Martina, Founder of Mr. Inkwells!
Established in 2017, Mr. Inkwells is a tattoo and piercing shop located in Los Alamitos, CA. In addition to in-shop body art services, Mr. Inkwells offers tattoo aftercare products and high-quality jewelry sold exclusively through its E-Commerce shop. As a customer-centric brand, Mr. Inkwells’ motto is “We make tattoos and piercings EASY!”
Tyler’s background is in marketing, and he single-handedly ran his own digital marketing agency. “When you are good at something, you show up to every appointment and do everything,” he recounts. The approach wasn’t sustainable (“I couldn’t scale myself”), so he began looking for holes in an art business sector he was very familiar with – tattoos.
Tattoo shops are a mainstay In Southern Coastal California where Tyler lives. “Most of them are run by tattoo artists, so there’s not a lot of digital marketing or marketing presence behind them at all,” he notes. He proposed the idea of opening a tattoo shop to his artist friends – if they do the tattoos then he would drive traffic and get the business off the ground. “Within a year, we were the highest reviewed tattoo shop in all Southern California,” Tyler says. “We’ve been around for 3 years now and have expanded into piercing and piercing and tattoo aftercare products. From a single shop, we bring in $3.2 million.”
The team at Mr. Inkwells is robust and follows a hybrid setup – tattoo and piercing artists work in shop while Tyler heads the marketing side of the business with the support of inhouse and remote members. Tyler highlights the dynamic structure, “I work with people around the world, in the Virgin Islands, India, China, Tokyo, Chicago, New York City, and the Bay area.”
“The tagline for Mr. Inkwells is ‘we make tattoos and piercings easy,’ and that’s exactly what we want to do for our customers,” Tyler says of the business’ approach to CX. Education is critical – Mr. Inkwells provides customers with information on how to care for their tattoo and what they should expect with the healing process, along with aftercare products. “For a lot of people, getting a tattoo is a new experience,” he points out. “So, we try to make the process for customers as easy as possible across the board.”
Tyler reveals that Mr. Inkwells’ CX philosophy is continually evolving because “the point of being a business owner is listening to your customers.” It didn’t take long for Tyler and his colleagues to realize their customers were unclear about the healing process of new tattoos. “We were getting calls all the time with people asking, ‘why does my tattoo look like this, what is going on?’ So, we decided to full-proof tattoo aftercare,” he says. Mr. Inkwells now offers tattoo aftercare washes, lotions, and numbing creams, which are available online and at the shop in Alamitos, CA. Educational videos provide further instructions for customers with fresh ink.
Absent from Mr. Inkwells’ original list of body art services, piercing was added due to customer demand. Discussing how the shift motivated the business to expand its products, Tyler notes, “We soon realized that titanium jewelry is the most body safe, but also the hardest to customize”. Mr. Inkwells has since partnered with a manufacturer to offer the largest line of titanium jewelry.
Continuing the topic of innovation, Tyler mentions one jewelry item in particular. After getting a new piercing, many customers wanted to leave the shop wearing a hoop, but professionals require a straight post to aid the aftercare process. Tyler explains how they innovated the product to meet demand, “we invented threadless hoops that click in with a straight pin, but still have the desired look while functioning to help the healing.”
While others in the industry favor a “salesy” approach to marketing, Tyler credits heavy traffic to Mr. Inkwells’ site (about 159,000 people a month) to the company’s education-focused content. They use Google Trends weekly as inspiration for articles or to create ‘Top 10’ lists. “It takes time, but emphasizing education has made us stand out,” he adds. Additionally, they use AdWords and have built out a strong SEO to make sure Mr. Inkwells’ tops search pages. “We have a good digital ecosystem too. When somebody hits the site, it drops a pixel so we can try to get their email and phone number to keep them involved,” he finishes.
When it comes to customer retention, Tyler says all the money, time, and effort he’s put into creating engaging content and strong SEO has paid off. He also credits the company’s solid digital ecosystem for keeping people interested in Mr. Inkwells’ products, services, and company culture. “We send out a regular newsletter along with emails. Last week, we sent out 202,000 emails and had an open rate of around 48%,” he says. “It narrows down to sending out good content.”
Mr. Inkwells only runs sales on Black Friday and every Friday the 13th (a big tattoo holiday) during the calendar year. A solid artist and staff support means they rarely need contractors to come in during busy periods. Friday the 13th sales are successful due to strong planning and preparation. “We offer $69 tattoos, and every staff member is working from 9 am to 9 pm. Artists are doing a tattoo every half hour while piercers are taking a new customer every 15 minutes,” Martin reveals.
Since opening in 2017, Mr. Inkwells built out its original shop space to accommodate growing business by taking over the property next door. They want to open more shop locations but have no plans to franchise – the model doesn’t align with the brand’s core values. “I don’t think we could give the experience that we want our customers to have,” Tyler adds. Additionally, Mr. Inkwells is prioritizing the expansion of its online jewelry market, continuing to offer a large selection of high-quality products.
Tyler’s key advice to anyone wanting to get a business idea off the ground is to “just get it started.” Recounting his own experience, he says, “I got trapped with all the minutiae starting my first business when I was younger…. I wanted everything to be perfect. But the way you make something perfect is you design it, go out there, push traffic, and then if something isn’t working, you adapt and fix it.”
Tyler finds E-Commerce exciting because it offers entrepreneurs like himself greater opportunities and the chance to fully own and scale a business. “There’s a ton of different channels to utilize and it’s easy to grow online and have control of it…if you have your own thing with your own ecosystem, you can really build on it,” he remarks.
Can’t Live Without Tool? My E-Commerce site. I use Shopify – they are simple, good-all-around, and have a lot of apps specifically designed for it. They make your job as an E-Commerce store owner a lot easier.
Key Hiring Trait? I look for people who are customer-centric – they want to help other people, not just themselves. Knowledge of the industry is great, but I feel like you can train anybody if they are cool and in a good mood. When we hire people, we have them come in – it’s very casual so we can get to know them. Then we do a paid trial for a few days. Next, we take them to dinner at the next-door restaurant and tell the server to mess up their order – their reaction is a key indicator on whether we hire them or not. For example, a tattoo artist candidate, who now works for us now, ordered a BLT and was served just dry, crunchy bacon on sourdough bread. I was eating a salad, so she just asked for some of my dressing to use as a dip. She didn’t complain at all and has been an awesome person to have at our shop.
Recent Book or Podcast? I’m big on audiobooks – right now I’m listening to “Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s about how we share information and gives a good amount of insight on why people do what they do. A good example the author makes is to imagine reading 120 pages of excel data, each page for 30 seconds over the course of 60 minutes. If I asked you what the data is about, you wouldn’t know. But if you read 120 pages of a book, 30 seconds over 60 minutes, you would know exactly what happened in the story. The point is that people understand stories, they don’t understand data. But if you could put a story with the data, people would remember it.
#1 Challenge as a Leader? If you’re a leader, you have to make sure everyone eats. And if you are going to work with people, you must bring value to that relationship, whether it’s monetary or making sure your plan has integrity and virtue. You want what they're doing to make them feel good, not only because they are making money, but because they feel like they are making a difference. You’re also a leader for your customers – you want them to have that same experience and provide that same value in the relationship.
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