Building a brand can be a daunting task. At minimum, you have to come up with a good name for your business, create a logo, define your mission, 
use your mission to create a solid tagline for your business, and make sure that all of your advertising materials consistently convey a cohesive message that prospective clients can instantly associate with your business.
As an independent body modification artist, the first step in brand building is easy. YOU are your brand. If you’re starting a tattoo and piercing shop, though, you have to get a little more creative with your business name.
Choosing a Business Name
There are a few things you should keep in mind when choosing your business name:
- It’s okay to bounce ideas for business names off of other people, but you should make the final decision yourself. Getting group buy-in on a business name can cause you to lose focus and end up with an unsatisfactory name.
- The name should be easy to spell and pronounce. People remember simple names much more easily than Kreative Spellingz.
- Your business name should either describe the business, evoke the feelings you want people to associate with your business, or be fun and whimsical, and therefore memorable. For instance, “Joe’s Tattoo Shop” is descriptive, “Good Vibrations” is evocative, and “Tatters” is more whimsical, yet still somewhat descriptive.
- You should choose a name that pairs up with an available website domain name. If Joestattooshop.com is taken, you can be a little creative and try Joestattoostudio.com or Joestattooparlor.com, but you don’t want to make the domain name too different from the business name or people may have trouble finding you online.
- Make sure the name you’ve chosen hasn’t already been trademarked by someone else. To protect your business, you should trademark your name, logo and tagline as soon as you’ve nailed them down.
Developing Your Logo
If you’re a tattoo artist, designing a logo may be a cake walk for you. However, even the most talented artists sometimes need a hand with design work at this level. This is the symbol for your brand after all, and you want it to be memorable and relevant to your business. If you’re struggling to come up with a design concept or just don’t have time to devote to creating a logo, we can help! Through our Limitless Print & Design Center, we offer tattoo artists and shop owners the opportunity to utilize our in-house design resources for an hourly fee. Our graphic designers are available to help you flesh out a logo, create designs for signage, and more. If you’d like us to help you create a bold, beautiful logo for your business, just visit our Hourly Rate page.
Before you start designing your logo or contract us to design one for you, you should think about the key elements you want integrated into the design. Do you want it to include your full business name, to just be a symbol, or to be a symbol paired with your full business name or an abbreviation? Are there any specific graphics you want to include, like a coil tattoo machine or one of your actual tattoo designs? Thinking about the elements you want integrated into your logo will give you a good foundation for creating a solid design yourself or with our help.
Creating a Tagline
Do you like to “Have it Your Way” at Burger King? “Are You in Good Hands?” or do you use an insurance provider other than Allstate? If someone says, “Don’t Leave Home Without It”, do you instantly think of American Express? Does the saying “Reach Out & Touch Someone” scream AT&T to you?
Those are just a few examples of the many catchy taglines you’ve heard a thousand times–taglines that tell you something about a top-name brand and trigger an instant association with that brand. They’re effective taglines, so use them as guidance for creating one of your own that will tell people what you have to offer in just a few words. The task sounds much easier than it actually is, but it isn’t impossible to create a tagline for your shop that will evoke an instant association with your business when people regularly see it on your advertising materials. The key is to choose a relevant phrase and deliver it consistently throughout all of your marketing efforts. That’s where Limitless can provide the most support to you as you create and build your brand–by providing you with an array of custom marketing materials, signs, displays, and custom merchandise that drive home to prospective clients why you’re the shop they should turn to for their body modification needs.
Promoting Your Brand
Our Limitless Print & Design Center offers you practically infinite ways to creatively advertise your tattoo and piercing shop or yourself as an independent body modification artist. We can help you take your business to the next level by creating custom signs, displays, advertisements, print marketing materials, and even custom merchandise for you that will deliver a consistent, cohesive message about your brand to prospective clients. To get started, all you need to do is nail down your company name, logo and tagline. After that, the sky’s the limit! You can use Limitless products to start spreading the word about what your business has to offer.
Take a closer look at how you can put Limitless custom products to work for your body modification business in the sections below. You’ll find information about the different custom products we offer as well as ideas for how to use these tools to build your brand.
Custom Print Marketing Materials
Print marketing materials are the basic building blocks needed to start promoting your body mod brand–things like custom business cards, flyers, brochures, stationary, and postcards. Choose the products you want to use to start advertising your business, and we’ll do the heavy lifting for you. We can design your print marketing materials for an hourly fee, or you can create your own designs using our product templates and send them to us to print for you. If you’re not sure which products you should order, start by thinking about how you’d use each option. Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
- Have custom business cards printed with your logo, tagline, shop name, address, phone number, website address, and other pertinent information, like your social media handles. Set some on the front counter of your shop, hand them out to anyone you talk to who wants to know what you do for a living, pass them out at tattoo and piercing conventions, and give them to every new person you meet who might be interested in your services.
Turn our custom magnets into magnetic business cards. Have them printed with the same info on your primary business cards, and then attach one to every car in the parking lots surrounding your shop during a series of gorilla marketing blitzes. Send out a mailer to a targeted local mailing list purchased through USPS.com that includes a custom flyer and one of your magnetic business cards. Most people will hang onto the magnets even if they toss the flyers, because magnets are useful, which means your shop will stay top of mind when those people are in need of your services.
- Go door-to-door in the neighborhoods surrounding your shop and flyer houses. Roll up custom flyers, stick them between people’s front door handles and doorjambs, and let them unfurl until they stay in place.
- Print up custom brochures that feature artwork by the tattoo artists your shop employs. Include snippets of info about the styles of work each artist specializes in, your shop’s contact info, prices, and other relevant information. Mail the brochures out to a targeted mailing list, keep a stack in your shop for prospective clients to take, and ask other business owners in the area if you can set some out in their shops.
- Sign up for a booth at a community event. Cover your table with a custom table cover, and set out your print marketing materials. You can even sell custom merchandise like decals, pendants, belt buckles, artist papers featuring your artists’ work, and more. Talk to interested community members who approach your booth, and send everyone away with a brochure, custom magnet, and/or business card.
Custom Signs & Displays
Continue to build your business by branding all of your signage and displays. Our Limitless line includes a plethora of custom sign and display options that will help you reinforce your brand image, like indoor and outdoor signs, back-lit signs, banners, perforated window film, acrylic table top signs, and engraved jewelry display blocks. To help you figure out which sign and display tools are best for your business, here are some ideas for ways you can use these custom products to promote your brand:
- If your shop has a nice-sized front window, use it to your advantage! Fill it with a sheet of custom perforated window film featuring bold tattoo art, your logo and your tagline, or other attention-grabbing imagery. Passersby will be drawn by the graphics and curious to see what’s inside your shop, and you’ll still be able to see outside and have light filter in through the window.
- Set a custom A-frame sign on the sidewalk outside of your shop. Use the dry erase board side to promote your current specials, and brand the sign side with a colorful advertisement for your shop that includes your logo, tagline and phone number.
- If your shop is off the beaten path, place a vertical outdoor sign stand near the road to draw the attention of people driving by and let them know your tattoo and piercing shop is there and ready to serve them.
- Hang a custom banner from the roof of your shop that makes your shop name more visible to people passing by. It should be colorful and attention-grabbing, so consider incorporating some of your artists’ tattoo artwork into the banner design.
- Hang a back-lit sign on a wall inside your shop, and use it to list tattoo and/or piercing prices or special offers. A back-lit sign will jump out to people who pop in and want to quickly see what your shop has to offer.
- Use our custom acrylic frames to call attention to product displays in the front of your shop. Include prices on your signage so you don’t have to label each individual product with a price tag.
- If you sell body jewelry in your shop, our laser-engraved jewelry display blocks are a superior way to display it. You can brand the blocks with your logo to further reinforce your brand image.
- Use custom poster stands to promote special offers, events and featured products/services inside your shop. You can also use our poster stands, banner stands and custom table covers to promote your booth at body mod conventions.
Custom Merchandise
Our personalized products offer a really unique way to continue building your brand while supplementing the revenue your body modification services generate. For instance, we offer custom canvas prints, artist papers and posters on which you can have your tattoo artists’ best works of art printed. You can then hang some of the prints as wall decorations in your shop and sell them along with posters and artist papers to fans of your artists’ work and your shop patrons.
We also offer custom plugs, fake plugs, belt buckles, pendants, phone cases, stickers, magnets, decals, greeting cards, and envelopes that you can personalize with your tattoo artists’ work, your logo, or designs from our extensive library of graphics. Those who visit your shop without any intention of getting a tattoo, piercing or other body mod may be tempted by your unique product offerings, and fans of your tattoo artists’ work will most certainly be drawn to custom products featuring their art. You can also sell custom merchandise at tattoo and piercing conventions and community events to generate more revenue for your shop.
More Brand Building Ideas
If you like the ideas we’ve presented here for creating and building your brand, be sure to check out our other Print & Design Center articles. They’re full of helpful tips for designing different types of custom products, understanding critical print elements like image sizes, marketing yourself and your shop, and more.
When you’re ready to order your first Limitless custom products, download the appropriate templates on our Product Templates page so you can create print-ready designs. Alternatively, you can hire us to design custom products for you. If you create your own artwork, check out our How to Send Us Your Files article for instructions on sending us your graphics files after placing your order. Please allow us up to one week to create your custom products for you and ship them to you.
