Five years ago, Lloyd Rodgers and his wife, Kim, decided that they were tired of retail, so they turned to the market with the most disposable income: kids and teenagers. They got on the phone with Kirk Knapp, ordered an Entrepreneur System, and Toppers & Tats was born. For the past five years, they have traveled February through October throughout Idaho, Oregon, and Washington working at fairs, festivals, community and corporate events, fundraisers, and even some private parties.

Of all the designs he works with, Rodgers says he especially enjoys using the J.D. Crowe designs, since they serve as an outlet for his artistic nature, a nature which he uses selflessly:

While working a busy show in Washington, Rodgers was approached by a woman about a custom tattoo. Initially, he was hesitant since he couldn’t just indefinitely leave 30 customers in order to go make a stencil. However, when she showed him the design, he completely understood.

The woman had shown him a patch of the soldier’s cross for a group of American Gold Star Mothers. AGSM is an organization of mothers who have lost a son or daughter in service to America. After he finally closed down his booth at midnight, Rodgers went back to his trailer and began to work on the stencil. At 3AM, he finished. The next morning, when the woman finally returned to his booth, Rodgers applied her tat. He said, “It was funny to me; she kept on asking, ‘How much?’ And I would just smile.” As he finished, the woman began to cry. She asked him again how much, and he responded, “No charge.” The look on her face said all that needed saying.

The best advice he’s been given? “Be good to others, work hard for what you want, and never stop learning!”

To learn more about Rodgers, visit his website at www.toppersandtats.com.

If you would like to be featured in a Wednesday post, email ellyn@tatstore.com with “Wednesday Spotlight” in the subject line.

After a long break, I will have a quick photoshop tutorial coming later this week. Today though, I have a new blog feature to introduce, and that is the Wednesday Spotlight.

With this post each week we would like to highlight one of our outstanding Tat customers, and any interesting stories they might have. We would like to feature maybe a favorite picture of your work, any creative techniques you might have, or even how you got into the business.

If this sounds interesting to you please e-mail Ellyn@TatStore.com, or respond to this post and I will get a hold of you. I am confident that this piece will be very interesting, and also a great way for our customers to get to know each other in a bit of a different way than the forum. All TAT artists will be considered. I hope that we have our first one this week, but it may take until next week to put it all together.

Once again, make sure to e-mail if you are interested, and we’ll go from there.

I have been cleaning stencils in my spare time. These are the newly cut stencils designs that we cut here at the shop. It seems that we have something for everyone.

A few years ago, a friend was planning to do tats at a hunting and fishing show. I thought it would be nice if we had some sportsman oriented tats. Now I know we do. Check out the designs under the Original Collection. When you are at a show applying tats it is good to have a wide variety of stencil designs. You need something for everyone. You do not need to purchase an entire poster and the stencils that go with it; you may purchase just a few specific designs and spray the design on a plain piece of paper. Laminate or frame the designs and display them at your show.

I can pick out the designs I like and add them to my inventory. I will also choose some designs that I may not be crazy about, but I think my customers may like and add these to my inventory. Sometimes I will add designs that I think are ridiculous. But it never fails… some people go nuts over ridiculous tats. I don’t mean “Aww look at this, I’ll take one of these.” It’s like hyper spasm ga ga! Shrieking “Oh, I can’t believe it! Kathy, Look at this. I just gotta have it. Do you believe this?” ending with an ear piercing scream from Kathy.

Tats are personal statements. People want their design to reflect their personality, a belief, attitude, or to recall an event.

Who said you will never go broke underestimating the taste of the public?

Happy tatting!

Bonnie

One trap that is so easy to fall into, is that you just have too much content without any organization. For example, in a booth, it’s very important to have your stencils displayed so that your customers can easily window shop through them. This sounds less problematic than it can actually be. We at TatStore try to make it easy on you with our stencil display banners and laminated posters. Corina does a great job to make our flash nice and light feeling and easily scanned with the eye. A couple keys are the high contrast colors, and the ample white space. So if you have any of our Kits or Power Systems you are fine and ready to go right out of the box, but as your business continues to grow you are going to have some decisions to make. Will you buy individual stencils, or will you by them only in sets? How will you display them?

These choices that you make are very important to your overall business success and different customers of ours have some pretty good ideas. We can however notice that there are surely some awful ideas. For example, I hope no one would be tempted to lay out their stencils in a pile on a table and hope that their customers are motivated to look through them. Yet, it is somehow more tempting to do exactly this on your website. Just like in real life, you are going to benefit greatly from keeping your sales message and merchandise organized. For example, most sites have different sort by options for product lists which are large enough that customers might find them unwieldy. It’s even better if you can arrange your materials, such that they can be divided into some sort of categories. In the same way that posters can help ease the buying decision in brick and mortar locations, so too can smaller, more focused categories on the web.

For those of you who still love Windows as much as me, you may or may not be aware that Windows 7, the latest in the operating franchise, will be released later this year. According to Computerworld, Microsoft plans to release the greatly improved follow-up to Vista on October 22. If you’re like me and cannot wait that long, you’re in luck.

Microsoft recently released RC1, a release candidate for Windows 7. This free download lets you preview the Ultimate Version of the new OS until June 1, 2010 (However, it will begin shutting down every 2 hours as a warning starting in March of next year). Although the RC is deemed stable by Microsoft, it might still contain a few minor bugs. I have been using it for over a week now, and have yet to find a single flaw in this version. My favorite improvement is the new taskbar, which I discussed on this blog way-back-when. With loads of new features and a simple user interface, I highly recommend taking the RC for a test drive. Also, you can upgrade without hassle if you are currently running Windows Vista.

A final note: I don’t recommend trying it out on your main computer, but if you have an old or secondary one that meets these specifications, go ahead and give it a try. The Windows 7 Release Candidate can be downloaded here. Post any questions in the comments and I’d be happy to answer.

I am a Cancer survivor. It has been seven years since I was first diagnosed. Since that original diagnosis and my operation to eliminate the Cancer from my body, my yearly checkups have all been good news. I was lucky; my Cancer was detected in the early stages. Because of this, I did not need to undergo any chemotherapy treatments. During the past seven years, I have become somewhat of a health nut. I am an avid reader of any health book that catches my eye and I am easily hooked by any television show related to health. My diet has changed dramatically.

Here are some health related items I have learned that could be related to the tat business:

1. The largest organ of your body is your skin.
2. Never apply anything to your skin that you could not eat.
3. Just because you can purchase something over the counter at a grocery or drug store does not mean it is safe. Google “dangerous cosmetics list” and check it out.

I guess my point is; everything seems to boil down to choices. You probably will not experience any ill effects if you get a tat that is applied with alcohol based ink, you probably won’t experience any ill effects if you use a chemical based cleaner to clean your floor once or twice. But who knows what the cumulative effects will be to you over time with repeated exposure to these products. Getting a tat is one thing but what about you, the person who is applying tats repeatedly? When it comes to our health, people today are getting more sophisticated, thank Heaven! We are demanding safe “green” products to clean our homes. Even our local, small town, health food store now has a cosmetic counter. I do not know what the real cause of my Cancer was, but I do know my reaction to hearing the news in my doctor’s office. My first reaction was panic stricken fear; the next was how could I have prevented this? If, at that moment I could have gone back in time and changed all the dangerous behaviors that I thought, for one moment had contributed to my Cancer, I would have done it in a heart beat.

This brings me back to the Duratat ink. Duratat ink is safe, non toxic. It is water based ink and has all FDA approved ingredients. Although we do not recommend it, you could drink a bottle and not be harmed by doing so.

So in conclusion, be smart, be safe and start to take good care of yourself. Keep making small healthy changes in your life and eventually they will add up to big, life changing events. Your body will thank you with good health.

I am not asking you to switch to Duratat ink, but I do recommend it and I am pleased to be associated with a company that offers this awesome alternative to alcohol based ink.

Stay healthy!

Bonnie

PS. I must say, the new black Duratat ink we got in from the lab is a luxurious, deep, rich, black, the best I have ever seen! Awesome!

It is Google’s stated mission to digitize and index all information on the planet. They seem to get closer every day.

I’m not sure when this feature was released, but I just noticed today that you can now filter your Google image results by color. I apologize if I am way behind the times here, but that is pretty cool. Once upon a time, most of us thought that pictures were untouchable. Google and the other search engines had proximal tools like surrounding context and alt tags, but as far as the actual content of a picture was concerned, well, that was just too much to ask.

Now, I understand that mining color values from picture files is probably not the most groundbreaking adventure ever as flickr interfaces have been doing that for years, it’s the force behind the technology that makes me tingle. Google is trying harder than ever to actually index the information present in a picture directly. They will not settle, and it seems they will not sleep until it’s done. That means look for maybe a checkbox for “includes people” or what’s even more exciting: being able to search by uploading pictures. I know, sounds impossible, but I’m sure that’s where they want to be, and they will get there.

Yes, that’s still a long way off it seems technology wise, but I’m just saying it’s exciting. What does all this mean for us as tat artists and business owners? Well, you now have a new search criteria which might grab some traffic for your site. For example, it’s possible that an individual can now make a search for butterfly pictures, and filter to only see results containing a large amount of orange. Well, if you have a picture on your site that you think might be a great result for a search like “orange butterfly” but your picture is full of green grass in the background and is zoomed out so that the butterfly tat is very small, maybe you will miss that opportunity. So I guess all I am saying is two things. One, Google wishes that it could physically look at every picture in the world and know exactly what is in it so that they can point people at it. This includes video, sound files, pdfs, and every other kind of file on this planet or others. So remember that as you build your site. Two, make sure you take good pictures, because the better Google gets at the above goal, the more rewarded you will be for taking them. (Regardless of Google, please take good pictures. They pay for themselves in sales every time.)

PS: the picture for this article came from a orange filtered Google image search for “google.” There’s a little ff, a fun fact.

I JUST HAVE ONE QUICK NOTE THIS WEEK.

I HOPE YOU ARE PLANNING ON OFFERING YOUR CUSTOMERS THE SWAROVSKI CRYSTALS AS AN ADD ON TO THEIR TAT. $1 PER CRYSTAL CAN MAKE A NICE LITTLE ADDITION TO THE BOTTOM LINE… I HAVE BEEN WRITING ABOUT THIS IN MY BLOG FOR SOME TIME NOW.

MY INTENTION FOR MENTIONING IT AGAIN IS JUST TO LET YOU KNOW IF YOU NEED CRYSTALS, WE HAVE THEM ON SALE. THE SALE WILL EXPIRE FRIDAY, MAY 22, 2009. SO IF YOU NEED ANY CRYSTALS YOU CAN GET THEM ON SALE NOW. BUY ONE GET ONE FREE. WHAT A DEAL!!!!!!

I WOULD LIKE TO SAY A BIG THANK YOU TO ALL THE USA VETERANS WHO HAVE SERVED OUR COUNTRY, HATS OFF TO YOU, NOT ONLY THIS WEEKEND BUT EVERY DAY. ONE OF MY FAVORITE BUMPER STICKERS IS “LOVE YOUR FREEDOM? THANK A VET.”

HAVE A SAFE PROSPEROUS MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND.

Bonnie

It’s important to be able to update your website regularly. Most small business, especially those with no web division per se, simply change the live copy of their site. By that I mean, they try changing things on the actual site without testing it in any intermediate step. This can be a big deal or not depending on your skill level and also what you are trying to change.

It is possible to test your web pages before you upload them to your website through local copies. Local copies refer to the location of the file relative to you. Local, means either on your computer or computers directly connected to your computer without using the internet (aka LAN, or local area network). This is actually very easy to do for standard .html pages. All you need to do is open the file with any web browser you have like firefox, chrome, safari, opera, or [shudder] internet explorer.

Now one thing to remember with local copies is that file structure, that is, how files are arranged on your computer relative to each other is important. For example, if I have my homepage in a directory (folder) which also houses all of my required image files, then that needs to be how it will be on the server and visa versa. You can’t move those files or they will result in broken links. So, it’s just a good idea to take more than you need, usually, one huge files with all of your little sub-files included.

If you have a more complicated site which relies on PHP. Then take a look at WAMP. This is a program which allows a few files on your computer to act like a server and will compile your PHP. I’ve been using this for several months now with absolutely nothing but good things to say. A local server like WAMP is going to be required if your site is a wordpress blog for example, so keep that in mind.

Lastly, and easily just as importantly, local copies are critical for backups. You should always, always have backups of your site. All of it. And not only that, but optimally you will have several. Proper safety protocol calls for at least one good complete digital backup as frequently as possible, and an off-site copy that is updated regularly. That could mean burning your entire site to a dvd every two weeks and taking it home with you, or that could mean hosting it on a mirror server in five other continents on the globe. Whatever it is, make sure your bets are hedged and your site will be looked after in the case of something unforseen and unfortunate.

Yikes! You are at a show and your airbrush gun is leaking, I mean ink is streaming out the tip of the gun like a mini garden hose. This is a simple fix. Your needle has become loose. First turn your dial to the dead spot, remove the back of the airbrush gun, loosen the finger nut, pull the needle out and wipe it clean, gently reinsert the needle and push it forward until it stops, tighten the nut around the needle. This should solve your problem.

If the flow of ink is slow and spattering, then more than likely you have a crack in the nozzle of your airbrush gun or a damaged needle. This problem can only be solved by replacing the damaged nozzle or needle. The cracks in the nozzle and needle are very difficult to detect with the naked eye, so these components may look fine to you but in reality they are damaged. The only solution to this problem is to replace the components.

When you have ink bubbling out of the gun in the area of the trigger, you will need to readjust the seal. We have a video on our website that will show you how to do this procedure. On our home page scroll down to Free Training Video, under User Made Videos, click on How to Clean You Trigger by Franco. In this video you will see how to readjust the seal. Presto, problem solved!

After you have solved any of the issues regarding a leaky airbrush gun, it is always a good idea to clean the tip of your airbrush gun before resuming use of the gun.

It is always a wise idea to carry extra parts for your airbrush gun with you when you are at a show. It is also a good idea to have an extra gun with you. If you have a line of customers and a problem develops, you can easily switch guns as opposed to stopping in the middle of a tat and replacing a part. When your business slows down, then you can take the time to do any necessary repairs.

Keep yourself up and running by planning ahead. Expect the best, but prepare for the worst.

Happy tatting!

Bonnie