We were lucky to catch up with Geoff and Jessica Decrucq recently and have shared our conversation below.
Geoff and Jessica, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.
We love having our family business, we feel like we care immensely be aide we hope to leave our legacy to our children if they want it. Our oldest daughter does cosmetic tattooing at our studio and our younger daughters are so proud to say they own a studio. We’ve been open for nearly a year and I can honestly say I wouldn’t have it any other way
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
We are a family owned private tattoo studio in upstate New York. I started tattooing in 1995 in LA by going into biker tattoo shops with my drawings while getting turned down repeatedly. But I kept showing up and hanging out while soaking up as much as I could. I hung out on the boardwalk in Venice beach doing sharpie tatts. I felt the hunger for it and haven’t stopped since then. I pride myself in making sure each drawing is perfect and each tattoo fits well and flows with the body part so it doesn’t look like a sticker was slapped on. I love seeing tattoos evolve as we make progress. My wife runs the business end of things and speaks with our clients first and is very welcoming. Our clients always say how comfortable they feel, she contacts them after the appointment to make sure they’re feeling good and if they have any questions. We genuinely care about our clients. I like to work with our clients for design ideas and I explain what works, what doesn’t and why. I’m proud of my work and our studio. I’m proud our oldest is working in the studio and it makes us so happy when our younger daughters talk highly of our studio
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
I think what helped build our brand is the quality of work we do. Everything fits well on our clients body and we make sure they’re confident in the piece before we start. We are also very welcoming. We know it can be scary to get tattooed, talk about ideas or even just coming in to a tattoo shop. We stop that at the door or with the first phone call or email
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
My wife, partner, cofounder and I met in Portland, Oregon in 1998. She owned a tattoo shop at the time and I was part of her first crew. We immediately connected and spent a lot of time together and here we are still going strong
Contact Info:
- Website: www.Kumotattoostudio.com
- Instagram: @kumotattoostudio
- Facebook: Kumo Tattoo Studio