Deposits
Going into the busy season we want to give a little reminder about how deposits work and maybe a bit of why. If you’re a regular tattoo client anywhere you’re familiar with dropping a deposit to book a tattoo, but this is just a little reminder or for anyone new to the tattoo scene. At our shop 90% of deposits we take are worth approximately 1 hour of tattoo time, these are used to book either a full or half day. If your tattoo is fairly small or simple we take a smaller deposit because it may only take an hour (or less) to finish.
We are very particular about how we tell people about the deposits so that everything is very clear and we don’t leave any grey area. Deposits are non-refundable ALWAYS. When you pay for hours ahead of time they are non-refundable. Gift tattoos, gift cards, deposits on a flash piece, even if you haven’t booked a date yet, are non-refundable.
If you can’t make your appointment we ask that you give us 48 hours notice and we will still keep the deposit (because they’re non refundable) but we can move the appointment. If you do not give us 48 hours notice, no matter why, the deposit is revoked. This can rarely be situational if something drastic happens but the general rule is with short notice, the deposit is revoked. Now, many people have called me angry about this even though we are very clear before you pay the deposit that you can’t get it back. I understand why this could be frustrating but when you break it down, you may have lost that hour deposit but the artist lost an entire day of work. Cancelling last minute can cost the artist around $1000 worth of time that others are eagerly waiting for. Especially day of or no show cancellations. So everyone is losing in this situation.
The 48 hours notice gives us time to fill the spot and then no one loses money. We have cancellation lists for the artists and with enough notice we can find someone to fill it, but on the day of it’s harder to find available people even if they are on the cancellation list.
If you book a walk in for a few hours in the future we still take a deposit. Unfortunately people can be unreliable and the same kind of situation can happen if we don’t take a deposit for a same day walk in. If you put down the deposit we can turn away other walk-ins and be confident that you are coming and you are going to use that time. Otherwise we will be turning away other walk-ins just to be no showed and again lose money even when there were people asking about the spot. So really it boils down to ensuring that you’re as committed to coming in as we are committed to giving you the best tattoo possible.
Thankfully our clients are very understanding and we don’t usually have issues with deposits but in the summer we tend to have an influx of new people that aren’t as aware of deposit policy so we just wanted to put out a little refresher.
I also want to take this chance to let you know how deposits work during lockdown. How it works is that we keep the deposits on file (yes, still non-refundable) and call everyone the minute we know we can reopen and find everyone a new spot in as soon as we can.
