Stories & Ink has raised $1.6 million in funding to support its next phase of growth.
The funding is from a mix of new and existing investors, including The Emerson Group, a retail distributor with Crown Laboratories, L’Oréal and Yellow Wood Partners on its client roster. Aimed at drawing the nearly 40% of American women with tattoos and those without them who expect to get inked in the future, the tattoo care brand will use it to drive retail, marketing and product development efforts with the goal of increasing sales from a projected roughly $2.5 million this year to $5 million in 18 months.
“Generation tattoo is here to stay, and we have a unique opportunity to pioneer this category,” says Stu Jolley, founder of Stories & Ink, which has a customer base that’s 65% female. “It’s our job to pave the way and to champion the female consumer, and we are hell bent on blurring the category between beauty and tattoo.”
Stories & Ink recently landed at around 600 Superdrug stores and 800 Target stores, where it has three products—$19.99 Tattoo Daily Moisturizer, $21.99 Tattoo Vibrancy Serum and $21.99 Tattoo Aftercare Cream, its bestseller—in hand and body sections. Its complete arsenal of six products is sold on Target’s website. In October, the brand will be implementing merchandise trays at Target to highlight the tattoo care category in the hand and body sections and emphasize its products’ key benefits.
Stories & Ink’s story has had a number of twists and turns. Jolley started the British brand in 2017 as Electric Ink with Simon Forster, founder and executive creative director at Robot Food, a branding agency that was looking to branch into beauty and personal care. Electric Ink extended to some 2,000 retail doors at Urban Outfitters, Selfridges, Boots and elsewhere, but had to change its name because of a trademark issue in the United States and pivoted from retail to direct-to-consumer distribution.
“We are hell bent on blurring the category between beauty and tattoo.”
Forster has injected capital into Stories & Ink, and Robot Food continues to assist the brand. In total, Stories & Ink has raised about $2.6 million in funding, according to Jolley. Noel Mack, chief brand officer of athletic apparel brand Gymshark, is a previous backer. In 2020, the brand received $400,000 from e-commerce companies, most notably Pharmapacks, and prepared to cultivate its U.S. business via DTC and Amazon. However, Pharmapacks liquidated in 2022, and Stories & Ink went back to the distribution drawing board.
Today, Jolley views DTC as a secondary distribution channel for Stories & Ink, and the brand is leaning into brick-and-mortar retail and Amazon. “It’s become increasingly difficult to scale brands with a [DTC] strategy,” he says. “With DTC being secondary to the other two, our job is to create a tattoo universe that our customer can scale with.” Stories & Ink will soon introduce a digital magazine.
The brand is also leaning into experiential marketing to lift awareness. Later this month, it will have an Airstream at Camp VC, an outdoor adventure festival in North Wales, and anticipates putting more conventions and festivals on its marketing docket. In addition, it envisions brand collaborations, is slated to launch a wheatpasting campaign in areas in the U.S. such as Brooklyn known as tattoo hubs and will be geotargeting tattoo parlors within a five-mile radius of the Target stores it’s stocked in for sampling purposes.
“Long gone are the days when you could scale on Facebook ads alone,” says Jolley. “Being multichannel, we have had to run separate P&Ls for each channel and are making sure we are doing enough to invest in brand. Actually investing in brand will set you up longer term.”
“Brands very much have to stand on their own two feet.”
Stories & Ink has six full-time employees and five part-time employees. It has a tattoo studio in English coastal town Falmouth, the brand’s home base. In the U.S., the brand is interested in eventually opening select tattoo studios. For now, though, it plans to strike partnerships with tattoo parlors. “We are not building a sales team with hundreds of people to go knock on doors of tattoo parlors,” says Jolley. “We see it more as relationship building with artists and making sure we can add value.”
Although Stories & Ink was the first tattoo care specialist to break into Target, it’s hardly the only brand in the category. Among its competitors are People of Substance, Hustle Butter and Mad Rabbit, a Walmart entrant. As it enlarges its assortment to distinguish itself from them, Stories & Ink is drilling into targeted tattoo care solutions. Sun care and priming products are in the pipeline.
Timed with Stories & Ink’s March debut at Target, Jolley told Beauty Independent it was pursuing $2.5 million in seed funding. In the ensuing months, he concluded the brand was too early for institutional investment, particularly as caution persists in the venture capital world. “We thought there was a better opportunity to bring in strategic angels,” says Jolley. “We can achieve the impact we want to make with this working capital.”
Jolley spots upsides in the challenging market for fundraising. “The one thing it forces you to do is to not only achieve your goals, but to really make the capital last as long as possible,” he says. “In business in general and beauty in particular, the viewpoint is that brands very much have to stand on their own two feet.”
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