CTD flows right into temporary ink space
“Lee Roller is flying,” says Bruce Croxon, head of Round13 Capital investment firm. The former dragon should know. He is now almost an equal shareholder with Roller, founder of Custom Tattoo Design, in the e-commerce tattoo business he pitched in 2014 on Season 8 of Dragons’ Den. (Jim Treliving was part of the original deal, but Roller and Croxon have bought him out.)
“We’re busy growing aggressively,” he said.
CTD, a website connecting consumers with tattoo artists to create one-of-a-kind tattoos, has grown from 10 to 100 artists. It also enjoys double-digit month-over-month revenue growth. “We’ve just hired a full-time recruiter to hire artists,” Roller said. “Artists can be anywhere in the world and choose their own projects. We are the only site in the world that has its own in-house artists.”
This unique advantage has led to the launch of a second, complementary business, which Roller expects to be five times larger than CTD within a year. After a year of preparation, Roller recently moved into the temporary tattoo space with the launch of www.temporary.ink through Shopify.
“There is a lot of competition in the temporary space — even Beyoncé has a line of temporary tattoos — but we have our own niche and we have hundreds of thousands of our clients on the Custom Tattoo Design side we can cross market to,” Roller said.
Croxon is excited about the potential for Temporary Ink. “It’s natural to go to temporary tattoos. People may not be comfortable walking into a tattoo parlour. This allows them to see how it looks for a couple of weeks, first,” he said.
THEN AND NOW
When Roller appeared on the Den, CTD was a one-man show bringing in revenue of between $7,500 and $10,000 a month. Today, there are 10 full-time staff and revenue is “more than six figures a month,” he said.
“We can’t get more specific because we’re looking at a new round of investing, worth more than $1 million.” Though he did say that last month sales grew a little more than 20 per cent over the previous month.
It wasn’t until after he’d been approached by three or four temporary tattoo companies who wanted to partner to access CTD’s pool of artists that he decided to move into temporary tattoos. “With CTD we can only grow as fast as we hire artists. We can scale the temporary side as fast as we want.”
WHAT’S NEXT
“We want to be a $55-million company in three years,” Roller said.
“In the past 18 months, we’ve proven that there is a market. Now it’s about scaling. Temporary Ink is already promising to be substantially bigger than CTD. And we’re planning to launch a third company that will be 10 times bigger than CTD and Temporary Ink. We’re taking big steps now.”