Tyler Handley is in Buenos Aires to see how well his Spanish lessons are working. He’s been focusing more on himself since he left Inkbox, the semi-permanent tattoo company he co-founded, then sold to BIC for $65 million USD three years ago. Running Inkbox was an “all-consuming” experience, he said, but now he feels he has no choice but to come back and save it.
“To see it so flippantly shut down … is just something I can’t stand by and watch happen without taking some action.”
Tyler Handley,
Inkbox co-founder
Last month, BIC announced it was shutting down its Skin Creative businesses, which housed temporary tattoo brands like Inkbox and Tattly. The shutdown has spurred Tyler and his brother Braden, who started Inkbox as a Kickstarter campaign in 2015, to submit a bid to take it back, Tyler told BetaKit in an interview on Wednesday.
Inkbox tattoos are applied similarly to temporary tattoos, but according to the company’s FAQ page, its technology allows the ink to actually sink into the skin, so the images can last up to 10 days.
The brothers submitted their letter of intent in partnership with Jason Goldlist, the CEO of Toronto-based tattoo parlour booking app Venue.ink and co-founder of TechTO. The trio is now “in negotiations” with the same team at BIC that purchased the company from them in 2022.
“I just don’t want to see it not exist anymore,” Tyler said. “It is something I worked so extremely hard alongside not only my brother, but the whole team to build, to bring to market, to be [a] business that we are proud to have in Canada.
“To see it so flippantly shut down, though I do understand the reasons for it, is just something I can’t stand by and watch happen without taking some action.”
When BIC announced its intent to shutter Skin Creative alongside its Rocketbook division, CEO Rob Versloot said in a statement that the brands “did not deliver on their initial expectations,” as net sales and profitability declined since their acquisitions.
Tyler saw the writing on the wall a while ago, though he didn’t imagine Inkbox would be fully shut down. When he sold Inkbox in 2022, he was optimistic about former BIC CEO Gonzalve Bich’s ambition to grow via acquisitions. Then Versloot stepped in last June.
“One could put two and two together to understand the new CEO might not approve of the performance of the company,” Tyler said.
But Tyler still sees an opportunity with the brand that’s served millions of customers and holds a Walmart deal.
“If we got the company back, we would renew focus on it being an artist-driven platform,” Tyler said. “Especially in this age of AI, I think consumers are craving human content.”
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Tyler’s also not a first-time founder anymore, and can tackle Inkbox’s issues with a better grasp on how to “streamline” its operations, he said. He’s taking lessons from Olauto, the car fragrance company he started with Braden last year that has so far avoided venture funding.
“It’s challenging when a company is venture-backed and scale-focused to streamline, because often the incentives are misaligned,” Tyler said. “To streamline, you have to often reduce growth.”
Knowing this, he expects the hypothetical new Inkbox to be smaller in terms of gross revenue, but also more profitable. However, since Inkbox has “far too much” unique intellectual property and manufacturing trade secrets associated with it, Tyler cautioned that it would require some time to take the product back to market.
The Rocketbook and Skin Creative businesses are set to shut down in the spring, a BIC spokesperson told BetaKit in an email, affecting under 80 jobs in total. The spokesperson said those affected by the closure are being supported through severance packages, career transition support services, and, where appropriate, consideration for other opportunities at BIC.
The spokesperson did not specify how many Inkbox jobs are affected, but Tyler said he understands it to be approximately 50 people. In the midst of buyback negotiations, Tyler said he’s been sharing a list of affected employees with his extensive network of founders and investors to help them land job interviews.
“It’s about as much as I can do,” Tyler said.
Feature image courtesy Tyler Handley.