The only idea
Ironwood opened in 2014 in twelve hundred square feet on Northeast Alberta. The idea then, and it has not been improved on since, was a custom-only studio where the artist sets the schedule, the client gets a real consult, and the work is built to outlast both of them.
Twelve years later: four resident artists, four booths, zero flash-only days. There is no second location, we do not take conventions, and we do not run guest spots. Four hands, on Alberta, working slow.
What “custom only” actually costs us
It is not a stylistic position. It is a business decision with a real price attached, and it is worth being plain about what that price is.
Flash days are profitable. A shop can run eight small pieces in a day off a pre-drawn sheet at a fixed rate, and clients love them. We do not, because a flash piece is drawn for nobody and then applied to somebody, and the gap between those two things is exactly where twenty-year regret lives.
Walk-ins are the other one. A locked door between sessions costs us most of the foot traffic on one of the busiest retail streets in Portland. In exchange, nobody in this shop is ever making a permanent decision about their body in the fifteen minutes between deciding to and doing it.
What we are not
Not a private studio, and not precious about it. The room is open, the artists talk to each other, and the consult happens in the shop rather than over email. Not a collective either: everybody here is resident, on the same schedule, under the same rules.