Letter From the Team
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Letter From the Team
Built by Tattooers, For Tattooers: Why Artist-Driven Design Beats a Spec Sheet
We opened Alliance in 2018. This September marks eight years. That number only exists because tattooers keep choosing us. You have options; plenty of them, some cheaper, most of them a click away. Every time you put an order in with us instead, you're making a call that keeps the lights on and lets two tattooers keep building tools instead of going back to somebody else's catalog.
Ask any tattooer about their setup, and you'll get a list of workarounds. The power supply with the knob that drifts halfway through a session. The stencil product that either doesn't hold or won't come off. The cartridge that's technically the right configuration but has a taper that fights you on soft grey.
Most of the time, artists just adapt. You learn the quirks, you compensate, you build muscle memory around a tool's shortcomings and stop noticing you're doing it. That's a bad deal. You're spending focus on equipment management that should be going into the tattoo.
Those workarounds are our product roadmap. When we hear the same complaint from three different artists in three different shops, that's not a preference; that's a gap in the market.
Every product we put our name on starts the same way: with a tattooer telling us what's wrong with what they've got. Not a focus group. Not a trend report. Somebody mid-session, cursing at a piece of equipment that almost works. Sometimes that somebody is one of our own artists on the pro team. Sometimes it's an owner.
Alliance has two owners, Fred Pinckard and Josh Autrey, and both of them are tattoo artists. Not investors who hired a tattooer as a consultant, but two people who have each spent 25-plus years in the industry, behind a machine, in a shop, dealing with the same equipment we now sell. Fifty years of combined time in the chair, and Alliance built on top of it since 2018. That's the whole difference. When we develop a product in-house, the person making the call on a taper or a voltage curve has personally been let down by a bad version of that same tool.
There's a version of the tattoo supply business that works like this: a factory sends over a catalog, a distributor slaps a logo on it, and it shows up in your mailbox with a name somebody's marketing department picked out of a hat. It's cheap, it's fast, and it's why so much of what's on the market today feels interchangeable. That's not how we do it at Alliance.
Why does this matter for your shop?
- The tool matches the technique.
- Fewer workarounds.
- You have a line to us.
Every product we develop goes into working artists' hands before it goes into production, and we expect blunt feedback. (And it usually is.)
Being the company artists rely on is what we're proudest of, and it's why we won't put our name on something we wouldn't run ourselves.
So: thank you. Genuinely. Eight years, and we're still here because you kept picking us. Celebrate with us while we run a few giveaways, post flashbacks, and snag a gift with purchase.
What's next?
We've got more in development: needles, merch, and even gloves, to name a few. And if you're a tattooer with a complaint about your gear, or an idea for something that should exist and doesn't, reach out. We want to hear from you. That conversation is where every product on this page started.
— FRED & JOSH