I think we both work about 100 hours a week.
A lot of people always think, they're like, "Oh, Hawaii.
Just blue skies, sunshine all day." And that's definitely one aspect of it.
But yeah, because it's so expensive to live here, operate a business here, we feel like we have to
work as hard as we do.
My name is Hannah Maruyama.
I'm 26 years old, and I'm a business analyst.
My name is Ryan Maruyama.
I'm 29 years old, and I'm a firefighter for the city and county of Honolulu.
We are both medical tattoo practitioners.
Our business tattooing people's heads brings in $100,000 a year.
It's very difficult to balance our main jobs and then also running this tattoo studio
here. When we're not working our regular jobs, we're either in this studio taking
clients or we're at home trying to do the house work, whether that's marketing or accounting
or anything that needs to get done.
Work life balance doesn't really exist with us right now.
Ryan and I met about six years ago when we were working at a restaurant together.
Ryan was bartending, and I was waitressing.
Ryan actually bought me my first drink.
We got engaged six months after we met.
If you're going to run a business with your significant other, there has to be a team captain.
The reason for that is because if there's two team captains, there's going to be no peace in
your house and there's going to be no peace in your business.
And so in our relationship, it's Ryan.
The reason for that is because over over time, his larger scale decisions
have just proved to work out.
Scalp micro pigmentation is a very simple process.
It's using a digital tattoo machine, it looks kind of like a cigar shape, and it's a digital
rotary machine. So you put a cartridge that has needles into this small machine and you use type
of ink that's specifically designed for scalp micro pigmentation, which is modified according to
the client's skin tone and their undertones as well.
And then you just tattoo thousands of tiny dots on their head.
Those are four hour sessions and typically clients get at least three in order to achieve a
complete result.
The overhead, the variable costs, are pretty low per treatment.
We're really just talking about the electricity to run this place and then also the needles and
the pigment, which per client is pretty negligible.
Our bills to run this studio per year are about $30,000.
We chose this service because it is a high dollar amount, and while it was just the two of us,
all we had to do was give it our time.
If we can get one client in the door a month, we're making money.
The path that led me to paramedical and restorative tattoo is I saw a documentary in high
school of a woman who did it in Saudi Arabia to help women who had been acid burned.
In the documentary, the thing that I think stood out the most was the fact that this woman was
restoring people to themselves.
I think that medical or paramedical tattoo is in a class of its own is because the goal
of it is different from traditional tattoo.
And there is something very, very, very special about being able to make someone
feel like themself again.
When we first started in 2018, we had no revenue.
We had no clients. We really had no idea what we were doing.
I think the first month that we really had a gangbuster month was probably in January of 2020.
In that specific month, I believe it was about $13,000 that we made in one month.
A good month for Yama Studios is anywhere from three to six clients a
month, seeing as how every client is about $3,000 plus.
So a good month is anywhere from $9,000 to $18,000 or more,
and a bad month is that we don't get any clients.
You know, the phone stops ringing.
Hasn't happened yet. One of the things that we did to make money during the lockdown was we started
doing Zoom hair loss coaching calls, and we started selling hair loss guides.
We just walk people through that process to help them find the the solution that's right for them.
Goals for the business in the immediate future, we want to get more people into the studio, obviously
get more clients, help the business grow, and then we want to scale the business.
We want to get more practitioners in here so that we can take more clients and help more people.
I really enjoy my business analyst work and helping people fix problems is pretty cool.
I have no plans on quitting being a fireman.
I love my job.
I love my crew.
I think that when you reach a certain level of business or of success, there's
many ways that we can do it.
And I think that just, Hannah and I, we don't want to quit our jobs in order to scale this
business. I think that we can do it in other ways.
Plus, he looks really good in that uniform, so.