22 stycznia 2025
Why is there a crisis in the tattoo?
Why is there a crisis in the tattoo industry? All over the world. I will share my conclusions with you.
Interestingly, skyquestt, fortunebusinessisiogts and cognitivemarketresearch have analyzed the future of tattooing and according to them, we will continue to grow. Not much, about 10% in the next 10 years, but it shows a fairly stable situation.
Okay, but what symptoms of this crisis do I see? The basic one, based on my companies and contacts with other tattoo parlor owners, is that we have revenue declines from several to several dozen percent. Margins have fallen due to increased costs and lowering prices by the grey economy. As a result, every day you hear about someone who stops tattooing or closes their studio.
How did this happen in Poland?
How did this happen in Poland, although interestingly, it is similar in Western Europe, Asia and America? It is easier for me to write about our country, where I have been associated with tattooing almost from the very beginning.
I will start with how subjectively I see history. The 90s (then the first tattoos appeared on my body and I attended the first international tattoo convention, and my wife was already working in one of the few tattoo parlors, Joker in Krakow), was when tattooing in Poland was just beginning. It started to crawl. Then 2000-2010 was the birth of artistic tattooing. Then a greater number of everything appeared: tattoo artists, tattoo studios, conventions, magazines and the driving force for everyone was to be better than Western Europe. Already flooded with bad tattoo artists and tattoos themselves. We very quickly achieved a high technical level and most tattoo artists in Poland wanted to have their own style.
This resulted in us achieving a fantastic technical and artistic level in the years 2010-2015. Many great tattoos were seen on the streets. Tattooing came out of the underground, became generally acceptable. It entered the mainstream and flourished, flourished exponentially, making up for the years. Development lost during the communist era, when it was unacceptable. With all these increases, tattoo studios and tattoo artists began to grow to meet the demand. We were already talking in the industry in 2018/2019. There were too many tattoo artists and their quality was too low. But everything was still working well enough that no one reacted. The industry was growing.
And so it began.
And so it began. The pandemic. On the one hand, panic, closed studios, information chaos, a significant part went “underground”, some covered the windows in their salons with newspapers and continued to operate, some, like many entrepreneurs, took advantage of the printing of money and survived. However, I have the impression that everyone treated this two-year period as a crisis, after which it could not get any worse. A symptom that the worst was ahead of us was a clear increase in people wanting to learn tattooing again. Young people were looking for a free, independent profession that would give them a sense of independence from everything they had no influence on, such as the pandemic.
And the war broke out in Ukraine. Again, the situation, to put it mildly, was not very comfortable. Will the Russians run through our neighbors and stop at Warsaw or maybe Berlin? How is that even possible? Fortunately, this did not happen, but we found ourselves in a situation in which several million guests appeared in our country. Needless to say, artists are not the type to take up arms and sit in their boots in a trench. In addition, repression in Belarus intensified at that time and most of the young, rebellious tattoo artists fled, mainly to Poland.
Why is there a crisis in the tattoo industry?
I estimate that around 20%-30% of tattoo artists joined our industry. It was already packed to the brim at that time. Result of the war. In addition to those who already knew how to tattoo, many young people from the East, unable to find work, started doing so. Thanks to the huge amount of cash that appeared on the market after the pandemic, 2023 was still bearable and the declines were incidental. On the other hand, in 2024 a new wave of young people had already learned to hold a machine. In their hand and were massively cutting their friends and “thrifty”. We, on the other hand, felt the shock of inflation.
Another wave…
Another wave of costs and the inability to raise prices by lowering them in the grey zone. had grown exponentially. Price war with competitors who are in trouble. Generally, the vast majority of the industry did not foresee this and did not prepare for it. That is why we have the closure of salons that have been operating for a dozen or more years. I have also observed projects that are the other extreme, built on a grand scale, irrationally scaled. It was without reflection, which probably leads to human tragedies.
Just to clarify.
Just to clarify. The tattoo industry in Poland, although very extensive, wide and deep, is very young. It is based mainly on people with the soul of an artist, not entrepreneurs or businessmen. They sometimes focus on analyzing their progress and predicting their development path (read: prosperity) and not on business analyses.
That is why I hope that thanks to the crisis we are having, about 20,000 tattoo artists will remain in Poland out of 30,000. The industry will gain awareness. It will become even more professional. And above all, those who got into it only and exclusively because of money or a lack of an idea for themselves will leave it. This situation will reveal who gets a tattoo from the inside, from the heart, passion and who gets it from external reasons. And everything will be fine again!
By the way. I know myself how much progress I have made in terms of awareness of running a company over the last two years with over twenty years of experience. I also see what a positive impact it has on the operation of Sztorm. We are not disappearing. And what about others?