The corollary, of course, is that you have to be worth the wait or else playing hard to get is pointless. And if you keep people waiting too long, their impression may have gone soft around the edges--one of the best ways I know to drain the life out of buzz. So keep in mind the Keep Your Shirt On provision, which states that people must be chomping at the bit, sweating it out--they've got to be hungry for what you've got. The more hung up they are on your product or service or reputation, the longer they'll wait for it, which explains why some of Tattoo's clients have been willing to cool their heels for a year or even two.
In other words, Tattoo is something special. People wait (and pay premium prices) for special; ordinary slips right by. And I've noticed, too, that once clients finally get to Tattoo, they hate, they just hate, to let anybody else in on it.
The book on Tattoo is that no company knows its way around a brand the way it does, so maybe it's no wonder that clients would just as soon keep Tattoo out of the yellow pages. John Hansen was, until recently, the CEO of ThermoLase Corp., a technology company in San Diego that markets SoftLight, a laser-based hair-removal process, through its chain of plush skin-care salons and network of physicians. ThermoLase has what every brand wants these days: a standout position in customers' minds. When I ask Hansen about Tattoo, he actually groans. "Oh, no," he says with a sigh, and I catch a whiff of dread in his voice. "If they get any better known, we won't get any of their time. And Tattoo is one of the very best resources available to us to think carefully and strategically about our brand."
Back in 1993, tattoo made a conscious decision to stick its neck out a little by really working its grapevine, which, then as now, was alive with pro-Tattoo buzz. To capitalize on those good vibes, Tattoo renewed contacts with about 20 hot prospects, companies that knew Tattoo by reputation and jumped at the chance to get better acquainted. The mailings produced a binge of new projects, and Tattoo simply had more work than it could handle. Quality suffered. It was a hole that took a couple of years to climb out of. "We're in a position now to choose what we work on," Marwah says. "I'd like us to grow some, but I don't envision a really big organization. This is where the fun is."
Today Tattoo lets its first-rate reputation oonch it from project to project. You get the sense that it will never have to beat the bushes to find work. For one thing, Tattoo has always gotten a raft of repeat business. (About 80% of its work comes from clients who return again and again.) For another, it has a very handsome backlog of would-be clients waiting to grab an opening in its roster.
But for now, they all have to keep their shirts on. Tattoo, currently at 15 employees, frowns on hiring anybody with a typical market-research background--the clipboards, the freelance focus-group moderators, the polynomials, the stale techniques--because those people so often have such trouble getting used to the company's fluid, intuitive, utterly engaged way of doing things. The same goes for people who are looking for logical structure and crystal-clear roles and responsibilities. If you're into titles or other similar trappings of formal authority, Tattoo's not going to be the employer of your dreams.
Which explains why Sterling Lanier, a very smart young (25-ish) guy who joined the company about a year and a half ago, was the perfect new hire. Shortly after he graduated from Duke University, in Durham, N.C., Lanier and two of his buddies opened Cosmic Cantina, a California-style burrito joint, in a converted warehouse. The trio did all the construction themselves, except for the plumbing and electrical work. "I still don't know how we did it," Lanier says. "It was an industry I knew nothing about." After a successful year in the burrito biz (one partner stayed in it and has since opened another cantina), Lanier headed to California for real.
Lanier, as usual, was in a hurry. He talked his way into a news-wire job in San Francisco, where he happily worked the graveyard shift because nobody was around to bug him. One slow Monday morning, around 1 a.m., he ran across a Tattoo job listing, and that was that. "I always had a thing for brands," Lanier says.
It figures that what Lanier likes best about working at Tattoo is the "channeled craziness" that lets him use his creativity--and his survival skills. He tells a story about the time he interviewed a farmer for a client way up in the hills of northern Sumatra, where it was pouring rain. All the villagers were crammed into a little hut, and Lanier was the first Westerner they had ever laid eyes on. As he was doing his interview, "this huge rat fell from the ceiling, wham, and landed right in front of me. And, I mean, this was a big sucker. All the villagers were cracking up." The rat scurried under Lanier's table, so "for the rest of the hour I sat with my legs up in the air because I was so freaked out about that rat," Lanier says, laughing. "It was memorable. For me, it was like going to class every day." For bravery under ratfall and top-notch work in general, Sterling was voted Tattool of the Year in 1997.
Without hard-and-fast rules or a predictable career path, matching people up with projects is a matter of assessing their talent and temperament, and it's usually Marwah's call. "You want to give people something they know, where they have some piece of themselves already invested," he says. "But you also want to give them something that will stretch them." It would be so easy, he thinks, to assign projects along gender lines, the way some firms do. ("She loves fashion but won't like chemicals.") So at Tattoo, things don't work that way. Everybody does everything, including answering the phones.
