Expedia for the Inked

With about a quarter of all adults now having a tattoo in the U.S. and the U.K., one Swedish startup intends to become the Expedia for getting inked.

Fredrik Glimskär, a heavily tattooed Swede with a financial education and a career in digital advertising, launched online comparison and booking service Inkbay in 2016, after receiving 1.5 million Swedish kroner (US$173,000) from Swedish VC firm Zenith. After linking to tattoo studios in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo, he now has additional four million kroner in financing to expand to London this summer, with the U.S. and Berlin to follow.

In the U.S., tattoos are estimated to be a US$1 billion industry, according to research house IBIS World. The U.S. market grew 13 per cent between 2011 and 2016. A Harris poll published in 2016 concluded that three in every 10 U.S. adults have at least one tattoo — as have nearly half of all American millennials.

Although the tattoo industry is lucrative, it remains fragmented, with customers seeking out tattoo parlours via personal recommendations, and increasingly, social media. Inkbay’s platform invites studios to centralize their designs, where customers can then book via a flat fee, rather than the more typical hourly rate studios charge in person. The average price paid for a tattoo on the site is about US$322. Inkbay takes a 15 per cent cut of this, payable with credit cards — something uncommon to the predominantly cash-only ethos of most studios.

“The tattoo industry has always been a word-of-mouth sort of thing,” said Glimskär. “There’s a bunch of customers making good things for the industry, huge blogs, tattoo directories. But no-one is tapping into the actual transaction.”

Matt Lodder, a lecturer in contemporary art and visual culture at the University of Essex who studies the tattoo industry, believes the market may be too conservative to adopt a disruptive business model.

“Tattoo studios haven’t changed a huge amount since the late-1980s,” Lodder said. “Most tattooists don’t take credit cards; it’s still very much a cash-in-hand business. So I’d be really surprised if anyone seized on this.”

The internet has had a major effect on the tattoo industry though, he says. As bricks-and-mortar stores increasingly vacate premises to sell online, opportunities for a physical presence have increased for businesses who simply cannot conduct business online, such as tattooists.

“It’s the same reason we’ve got this influx of barber shops and hairdressers,” Lodder says. “It’s one of those things you can’t buy on the internet.”

Inkbay, which currently has 60 Swedish studios on its platform, currently has 40,000 monthly visitors for its Swedish studio listings. The company plans a Series A round of funding later this year. Fredrik Glimskar.