But Barth found himself wondering whether that had to be the case. "The tattoo industry hasn't grown to a level where it understands business concepts--yet," Barth says. Beginning in 2000, he announced that any Starlight artist could get paid a small base salary plus a commission and join the payroll. It didn't go over well. Artists worried about reporting income to the IRS and chafed at the very idea of being anyone's employee. "Everybody is so used to this being a cash business," says Frank Mazzara, who nonetheless decided to take Barth's offer. His peers' skepticism changed several years later when Mazzara, now 40 and married with a 4-year-old son, was able to get a mortgage and buy a house. His colleagues, many of whom couldn't even qualify for an auto loan, were stunned.
By 2004, all of Barth's 10 employees were officially on the payroll. Barth then purchased health and vision insurance policies and established a 401(k) plan with a 4 percent match. Barth also instituted twice-monthly meetings to discuss Starlight's business practices and plans for the future. The meetings are held every other Saturday morning. Before each, Barth announces an unusual start time, say 8:47 a.m., in order to encourage timeliness and make the meeting harder to forget about. The gatherings are designed to help artists get a handle on the business, in the hope that they can one day run Starlight locations of their own as the company grows.
The goal of all this, of course, is retention. Like all employers, Barth wants to create an environment that will discourage people from going elsewhere. "Artists don't think of it as a real job," he says, "and if you keep it that way--if you just pay them a percentage and they have no health insurance or benefits or profit sharing--sooner or later they're going to make a misstep," like skipping town or using drugs. In other words, help the tattooists get mortgages and retirement plans--that is, give them an incentive to stay employed--and you'll take the biggest risk out of the business.
Even as he was transforming his business on the inside, Barth also was working to clean up tattooing's image among outsiders. Somewhat counterintuitively, he's done it by opening shops in municipalities where tattooing has been illegal and battling the town council when it seeks to shut him down. (Tattooing was banned throughout much of the United States during the 1960s, following a hepatitis scare.) "Being first in the town gives me an edge from the beginning," Barth says. "First, because you are the only person in the town, and second, because you gain a lot of credibility in the community by making your case." His argument boils down to an old-fashioned straw man: the specter of an underaged girl with a terrible tattoo and a hepatitis infection. "Listen," Barth will say, "if you ban tattooing, you push it underground and risk your kid's health. Why wouldn't you want it done where you have proper training, proper location, and proper recordkeeping?" It hasn't always worked: Barth was forced to shut down a studio in Newark in 1999 when the city invoked a 1961 law and rescinded his construction permit. (Barth appealed the decision and the law was eventually ruled unconstitutional by a state judge.) But over the next five years, he became the first tattooist in the townships of Paterson and Rochelle Park.
By early 2005, Barth had three profitable shops, 14 employees, and sales of $2.5 million. It was time to truly put his plan to the test. He purchased another shop--a studio in the small town of Pequonnok--and announced that he would be tattooing exclusively in Rochelle Park, leaving the other shops to run on their own. "I had been moving around to keep control," he says. "But if you restrict your people too much, you restrict their potential to grow."
Meanwhile, Barth started thinking about building an infrastructure that could sustain a much larger enterprise. He hired an IT consultant to create centralized appointment, inventory, and payroll systems. His last, and perhaps most dramatic, move involved ink. Like many artists Barth had long mixed his own pigments, but it occurred to him that he could apply the same marketing strategy that had helped him win over small town councils to the ink business. Lots of tattoo companies made ink that was safe, but no one marketed it that way. In the summer of 2005, he leased a warehouse in Hackensack, built a bottling plant, and began subjecting his inks to rigorous pathogen testing and sterilization. Intenze Inks--tag line: "Your safety is our priority"--is now a $3.8 million operation. Intenze Inks come in 54 colors and cost about the same as nonsterilized inks: A package containing a bottle of every color, including "dark chocolate," "Kool Aid," and "Mario's Blue," goes for $1,000; individual four-ounce bottles, which typically last a month or two, sell for roughly $20. They are packed on a tidy production line that consists of a half-dozen employees who hand-fill and pack 3,500 bottles a day for shipment all over the world. And Barth's studios are guaranteed a low-cost, reliable source of ink.
Barth's office is housed in a low-slung building in a gritty section of Hackensack. It has two windows, one looking onto the street, the other onto the floor of the bottling plant. He monitors the studios via webcam feeds on his computer monitor, and keeps tabs on the world at large with a giant plasma television that is perennially tuned to Bloomberg TV with the sound off. A typical day looks something like this: He arrives at Starlight's headquarters at 8 a.m., an hour before his staff does. He e-mails with suppliers and clients, watches the news, and plans his day. He's at the office until 12:30 p.m., when he leaves for the studio, where he inks clients until 6 or 7. He's back to the office by 7:30 and home by 9. After his wife and son are in bed, he'll often stay up until 3 working on his laptop. "I just don't need a lot of sleep," he says, as he sips black coffee from a Styrofoam cup that is refreshed periodically by an assistant.
