Barth began traveling to the United States in the early 1990s, staying in Ponca, Nebraska (population: 1,046), where his father owned a screen-printing company. The location, surprisingly, was a good one for a budding tattooist--a manageable drive from almost any tattoo show in the country. Barth would hit the road on a Thursday, rent a booth in Kansas City, or Reno, or wherever the show was that weekend. He'd tattoo dozens of people, talk to the magazine writers, and enter the tattoo competitions, which do not award cash prizes but are essential for young artists who hope to gain a following and get hired by a good shop. His drives took him to the Grand Canyon, to Red Rocks, and to New York City's Lower East Side. He won nearly every award at the National Tattoo Association's conventions--the Oscars of tattooing--from 1991 to 1994. He left Austria for good in 1995.
After a brief stint at a studio outside of Detroit, Barth opened his first American shop, Starlight Tattoo, in Miami's South Beach. Tattoo enthusiasts soon were flying to Miami to get inked. They were drawn by Barth's distinctive style, characterized by fine lines and a willingness to put bright colors right next to one another, rather than separating them with bold black lines. "There had been this idea in tattooing: 'If it's bold it will hold.' Barth broke that tradition," says Jean-Chris Miller, creative director of Art & Ink, publisher of the magazines Skin Art, Tattoos for Men, and Tattoo Revue.
Barth liked Florida, and probably would have stayed there forever had it not been for a chance encounter on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1997. He was at a gas station, sipping a Sunny Delight, when he met Carol Cirignano. She was blond, curvy, and tattooed. He asked her to dinner, and at the end of the evening, invited her to come home to live with him. "Here's the deal," Barth recalls saying. "I'm going to Florida tomorrow and if you want to come down, I'll send you a ticket." Three days later, one-way ticket in hand, Cirignano flew to Miami and moved in. (They married in 2001.) Barth was just as impetuous when Cirignano asked him to move back to New Jersey with her, a mere six months after they met. He obliged, quickly opening a shop in Fairlawn, near Cirignano's mother's house. The store was styled as an outpost where clients could scope out designs before flying to Miami to get inked--a ruse designed to get around a local ban on tattoo shops. (Barth convinced the town council to overturn the law and began tattooing clients in Fairlawn several months later.)
Barth assumed that he could operate the two shops simultaneously. But the Miami store struggled. Rather than relying on foot traffic, it was a destination shop, with Barth as the draw. The tattooists he employed were unreliable. And they had little if any incentive to behave differently.
Tattoo artists are traditionally paid strictly on commission--generally 40 percent of the tattoo's price tag. Benefits like health insurance are unheard of. With no formal training mechanism, young tattooists are at the mercy of a closed society of masters. There are far more aspiring apprentices than there are apprenticeships, which are either unpaid or require the apprentices to pay for the privilege.
Even employers who want to be more conscientious have a tough time. Most shop owners have a full schedule of appointments in addition to their managerial duties. Michelle Myles, who owns two of New York City's best-known studios, DareDevil and FunCity, spends 30 hours a week tattooing and employs no professional managers. The only nontattooists in the shop work the cash register and sweep the floors--and even these kids are doing it in the hope that she may one day agree to apprentice them. "Artists don't like working for people who don't tattoo," says Myles. "It's not like a hair salon--it's not like anything else. Your business depends on these people who don't want to do anything but tattooing. And if they're unhappy, they can just walk around the corner and work somewhere else."
As Barth struggled to be in two places at once, he became convinced that the Miami studio was more trouble than it was worth. In 1998, he shut it down and convinced his three artists to move up to New Jersey. Unfortunately, the Jersey shop was too small for four full-time artists, leaving Barth with the unpleasant choice of laying someone off or cutting back everyone's hours. (He chose the latter.) He was happy to be in New Jersey, excited about building a life with Carol. But he couldn't help but feel that he was treading water as a businessman. He hated the fact that after luring his artists north, he couldn't provide them with full-time work. At the same time, he was tired of the hassles of managing artists. If he ever hoped to turn his art into a real business, he'd need tattooists who didn't require constant supervision.
Suddenly, Barth recognized that the problems were connected. "I thought," he says, "Why don't I train them to think like owners?"
Most entrepreneurs and management experts would consider this a no-brainer. Yet in the proudly backward world that is the tattoo industry, the notion of asking artists to worry about something as obvious as customer service--or showing up on time--seems like insanity. Despite the ubiquity of tattoos, the tattoo industry is still dominated by individual shops with one or two artists. And no one has had the appetite or the ability to pull a Howard Schultz and successfully consolidate. Most tattooists will talk your ear off about tattooing as art, but when you ask them about the business, they get cagey. Chris Nuñez, who co-owns the shop that serves as the setting for the TLC reality television show Miami Ink, says he doesn't think of himself as a boss. His partner on the show, Ami James, says, "I hate the corporate world more than anybody." That's strange talk from two guys who star in a reality TV show and who have subsequently opened a bar, a custom motorcycle shop, and a clothing line. Indeed, ask anyone in the industry if mainstream business practices could be brought to bear on tattooing, and they'll say the same things: No way. Never gonna happen. "That'll be the end of it," says Nuñez.
