I figured it was now time to write about the real me. The person behind InkedWith and what I'm doing. I made some initial attempts at doing this in the below posts:
These were in fact my initial and failed attempts. I'll start by saying that my name is Scott Algatt. Feel free to find the real me on LinkedIn. If you look at my profile on LinkedIn, I appear to be a handsome blonde?
If you look over my career history, I've spent many of my years in the Information Security world. For this reason, I've spent most of my time trying to STAY offline and hide who I am. I'm 40 something years old (my wife wasn't around while I was writing this to remind me of my real age).
If you dig a little further, you'll also notice that I started to dabble in being online with my initial tech blog, My Battles With Technology. I mainly use this blog to try and document random technical challenges I've run into. I do this so that I can keep track of what I did when I found that challenge and I'm trying to share what I've learned with others.
Getting Back to the Handsome Blonde
Yes, that handsome blonde aka a yellow lab named Quinn is NOT me. Quinn was one of the best dogs I've ever had the pleasure of having in our house. He was the first dog that I personally had and probably the best one. I've used him as my profile picture since the day I took that picture about 15 yrs ago. I also use that same picture for my profile picture at my "day job". I almost had to change that recently since LinkedIn flagged me for having a "not accurate likeness of yourself".
What Does This All Have to Do with InkedWith?
Great question! I thought it was important for anyone coming to InkedWith to actually know me. I think it's more important to know that there's a single person behind the keyboard on the daily trying to run this as a side gig.
Much of what I've put together here is an attempt at a new challenge. If you checkout the tech blog, you'll see that I've dabbled in all kinds of different technology. I've also always wanted to try and operate a business on the side just to see what happens. I figured the best way to merge these two was to dabble in a print on demand business.
It's no secret, if you look deep enough, that InkedWith is a print on demand company. I wanted to try my hand at something low cost to entry and I found it.
That's Great But Now What?
I'm also a geek. I'm NOT a marketing person and I'm certainly NOT an artist. I started InkedWith because I have a passion for a few things tattoos, my family, Disney and dogs (mostly dachshunds of late as you can tell by the above post).
I'm not sure how I would sell a business that focused around my family. That would probably have to more of a TV series and I'm afraid it might not be too interesting.
As we all know, Disney is off limits due to their extensive intellectual property rights and copyrights and marks and trademarks (this would be a good spot to try and do keyword optimization).
This leaves me with tattoos and dachshunds as my subject matter.
Where do the Designs Come From?
These are all great questions! I'm glad I'm asking them. This brings me to my next reason for telling you some background. I'm a geek ( I mentioned this some where). This means that I've been dabbling in the whole artificial intelligence craze. Some of my very initial designs, like the Abstract Phoenix Flame Short Sleeve Tee, are purely generated straight from an AI prompt without much effort.
I've been upping my game a little since that design with something like the Custom Tattoo-Inspired Lotus Flower Mandala Bella Canvas Tshirt. This was a little better design. I generated the design and then did a little cleanup to improve it's original quality.
I've recently attempted some of my own designs with the Tattoo-Inspired Watercolor Feather Design with Inspirational Saying on Shirt. I tried creating this one from the ground up and I think it's better but I'm sure there's room for improvement.
I've tried to make sure that all of my designs have a basis as a tattoo style such as Traditional, Neo-Traditional, Japanese, Blackwork...etc..This helps me make sure I'm keeping true to my love of tattoos.
In addition to AI and self generated designs, I've been working with tattoo artists to get some of their designs onto our products. You can find an example of that in the Eagle Snake Short Sleeve Tee.
InkedWith Pops Up in a Few Places
The Stores
Yes it does! I started my store here on Shopify and I do plan to continue to use this platform. I like the blog feature and the ability to run various discounts and more. My store front here, store.inkedwith.com, will remain for as long as I continued InkedWith.
In addition to this Shopify store, I've started an Etsy store. I'm using both to try and figure out the best way to approach this online storefront game. I'm also using this store to experiment with different designs and product types before bringing them into Shopify.
The Social Media
That's easy! I've been messing around with a few social media management tools. I'm sure I could write a tech blog post about this. Below would be all of the InkedWith specific social media links:
I've been dabbling a little with social media marketing as well. That surely has been its own little slice of heaven as well.
Putting It All Together
There you go! Now you know the real me mostly. If I was able to keep your attention span this long, then I'll explain why I did all of this. As I'm continuing this path of trying to get this business off the ground, I wanted to start feeling comfortable with people knowing the real me. I wanted folks to know who is behind InkedWith (This is probably useful for the currently generic About Us page?).
Next up, I plan to continue my tattoo journey with you and show you the rest of my ink in future blog posts and social media posts so stay tuned there.
Finally, if you are a tattoo artist that is interested in getting their work featured on our products, please reach out! Hit me up on the Contact Us page or on one of the social media types above. This wouldn't be a fire and forget type of engagement. I plan to work provide a commission on every item sold to the artist that provided it until we stop selling products with the design. Hit me up to learn more!