Tattoo, Inc., a low-profile San Francisco marketing firm, has amassed an impressive group of blue-chip clients with its uncanny ability to define the essence of a brand and generate buzz about it.
Odds are, you've never heard of this little marketing firm in San Francisco, but among the folks at Martha Stewart, Giorgio Armani, and Mother Jones magazine, Tattoo has the buzz
I wanted to understand how buzz works. That's the whole reason I set out to find a very small, very cool, ultra-low-profile marketing-services agency I'd heard was doing a thriving business somewhere in San Francisco. Virtually no details about the agency have been published, except its name: Tattoo. That tidbit came from Anita (the Body Shop) Roddick, who, I'd heard, really grooves on Tattoo's work. With such primo insider buzz going for me, not to mention ready access to the good old yellow pages, how hard could it be to locate one little company? Although I finally found Tattoo, it took me a while. My sedulous search was sidetracked while I checked out every Tattoo in the San Francisco phone book, including Ed Hardy's Tattoo City and (my favorite) Fuzzy's Tattoo Studio (where a man's voice on an answering machine cordially asked me to leave a message about the particular tattoo I had in mind, an invitation I considered only briefly). Those establishments did have a jones for branding, but any further similarity to Tattoo--the one Roddick liked--was merely homophonic.
Tattoo is a stealth firm, quiet and almost feline. Unless you've been clued in, you might blunder into Fuzzy's by mistake and emerge with an eagle etched into your forearm. "Oh, yeah, we get that a lot," I was quickly reassured by Tony Gilbreath, one of Tattoo's 15 associates. (They all call themselves "Tattools," an old name that stuck.) For journalistic purposes, I thought it wise to make absolutely sure that this Tattoo was indeed the marketing-services firm whose special domain is understanding, analyzing, and beefing up brands. No permanent skin stains involved--although the company name was in fact chosen to suggest the idea of an indelible brand. "That's us," Gilbreath says. Hot diggety dog, I'm in.
In this, its eighth year, Tattoo has overgrown three funky floors of office space on Battery Street. The company's "hive," as the associates call it, is more This Old House than Martha Stewart Living. It is a buzzy place, though, teeming with Tattools who seem to go full throttle all the time. Wide staircases that link all three floors like giant drainpipes amplify the hubbub, but the unflagging up-and-down transfer of people promotes fertile conversation and probably above-average cardiovascular health.
Desks jut out everywhere, some partially fenced off from the rest by partitions that are patchworked from old, peeling, industrial-looking windows, galvanized sheet metal, and door parts. The effect is clubhouse chic; it's casual, a shade shabby, but not unplanned. I'm crazy about Tattoo's table lamps--authentic, mint-condition 1950s ceramic jobs in that era's ultraswoopy style. It all works: nothing tries too hard. Somebody here has a seriously great eye for design, and I make it my business to find out his name (Hans Gallas, a longtime Tattool: artist, set designer, and past director of the Illinois Art Council).
You can sense a presence behind the scenes, someone guiding things. It's Tattoo's founder, Vishwa Marwah. The Bombay-born Marwah is a flat-out charmer who's smart as a whip. ("He's eerie-smart," proclaims Jeffrey Klein, editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, for which Tattoo does some pro bono work and on whose board Roddick sits.) Marwah, who's about 38, I'd guess, is a world-class listener, solid as they come, confident, and calm at his core. He's one of the few people I've ever met who doesn't mind eye contact. And he's no show-off. He doesn't feel the need to bludgeon you with every little thing he knows.
About a year ago, to raise Tattoo's profile in brand consulting, Marwah bought out his more research-oriented cofounder. Now Tattoo earns a living mainly on its considerable consulting talent, and its reputation in that area is growing like mad.
Founded in 1990, Tattoo broke $1 million in revenues after its first two years and hit $2 million by 1994. When it kicked into heavy consulting mode, it took off, and today sales are closing in on $5 million, "generous for a company our size," Marwah notes. A typical project is priced between $150,000 and $350,000, an amount that's billed over four or five months. Last year about 60% of Tattoo's billings came from projects outside the United States, a trend Marwah expects to continue. The company has made money every year.
Strong word of mouth (and absolutely no advertising) has served as Tattoo's own private undertow, netting it a series of profoundly blue-chip clients like Sears, the Gap, Jim Beam Brands, Campbell Soup, Nabisco, and Monsanto. The clients are all daisy-chained together by referral and recommendation. Multiple projects with Molson Breweries helped the firm land Purina, for instance, and Martha Stewart was referred by Time Inc., Stewart's onetime partner and a Tattoo client. How interesting that a company so skilled at attracting some of the world's most famous brand names has up until now kept itself pretty much a secret. That paradox--call it the Peek of Enchantment--is the first key to understanding Tattoo's magnetic personality and decoding its appeal to star-studded clients. The Peek of Enchantment holds that if you want to create buzz, you should make yourself rare. Cultivate exclusivity. Keep waiting lists. That kind of thing.
