Tattoo Removal Firm Seeks to Capitalize on Millennial Regretters

Way of LifeFebruary 11, 2020

According to CNBC millennials have been a tattoo-minded generation, and the outlet says that half of them rock at least one.

Unfortunately, there’s a significant portion of this generation that regrets ever having inked their skin, and that’s where Soliton comes in.

A number of millennials regret getting inked

The company specializes in tattoo removal, capitalizing on the millennial regret. There always seems to be a business opportunity around the corner, right? You just have to have that entrepreneurial eye of perception.

For years, tattoo removal has remained the same old painful and expensive process. What’s more, experts and patients alike have never been 100% sure of an entirely successful outcome.

Modernizing the Process

However, Soliton, a medical devices firm based in Houston intends to modernize the process and they already have a device in the works, one which they hope will attract the millions of millennials wishing to get rid of their ink.

Wally Klemp, the company’s co-founder and CEO says that their target market consists of two distinct groups which they refer to as considerers and retreaters.

Naturally, regreaters are those who wish they never ever had the tattoo in the first place. Considerers, on the other hand, are individuals who don’t necessarily regret having the ink, but there’s just something about it that they don’t like anymore.

Klemp says that it could be the font, color, anything. And thus far, they’ve noticed that considerers tend to be much more than retreaters, although the latter are still a huge number.

Klemp founded Soliton back in 2012, with the help of Christopher Capelli as his co-founder. At the time, they both worked at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and it was here that they formed a strong working and business relationship.

The RAP

Their medical devices startup was a hit among investors, and particularly with Hunt Petroleum. With funding from the company, Klemp and Capelli invented the RAP, otherwise known as the Rapid Acoustic Pulse.

The RAP will speed up tattoo removal

With their device, these two inventors hope to reduce the number of trips clients have to take to have their tattoos removed. Ordinarily, removal takes up to 12 appointments spanning at least two years.

The more the number of visits, the more expensive it gets, with CNBC revealing that it can cost anywhere between $100-$400.

With the RAP, Soliton hopes to reduce the visits to a maximum of three, and won’t such a change in the industry effectively label them movers and shakers?

According to Klemp, tattoo removal is a billion-dollar industry. However, he estimated that of the over 10,000 clinics that offer laser treatment in the US, less than 1,000 of them offer tattoo removal.

The market is ripe for the game-changing device, especially after an online survey resulted in an increased number of people wishing to have their ink removed. Interestingly, they’re not all millennials. According to the survey, 1 in 4 tattoo owners in the United States regrets getting inked.

Soliton also did a survey of its own, inquiring why people who wished to have their tattoos removed were yet to act on it. As Klemp puts it, most were in consensus that current tattoo removal technology doesn’t do them any favors.

Most of these guys, he says, would rather stare at their poor decisions every single day than take the 10 trips to have their tattoos removed. With the RAP though, this will be ancient history.