Home / Author
Jimenez Julien
Founder of MLJ, SASU, and the person who writes, builds and answers for StencilIntake. I work with tattoo artists and studio owners on the part of the job nobody trains you for: turning a stranger's message into a piece you are glad to put your name on.
Why I built StencilIntake
I started this because of a conversation in a shop in Antwerp, of all places, with an artist who had just turned down a back piece she wanted badly. She had spent an evening drawing a rough for someone who described the idea in two sentences, then vanished when the number came back. That was her third one that month. She told me the drawing was not the problem. The problem was that she had no way of knowing, before she picked up a pencil, whether the person on the other end had thought about size, about placement, or about money.
The more shops I talked to in the United States, the more I heard the same thing framed differently. A resident artist in Ohio kept a notes file of the questions he had to ask every single time. An owner in Texas told me her front desk spent the first ninety minutes of every day answering messages that would never become a booking. Nobody wanted a booking platform. They wanted the request to arrive complete, so the artistic work could start where it belongs, at the reference and the body, not at a guessing game.
So StencilIntake is deliberately narrow. It does not run your calendar for you, it does not sell you a point of sale, and it does not try to be a marketing suite. It takes one moment in the job, the moment a custom request arrives, and makes that moment produce a complete, usable brief with money attached. Everything else in the product exists to serve that moment: the reference gallery so you can see the whole idea at once, the placement map so ribs means ribs, the budget band so the price conversation opens honestly, the deposit so the Saturday block is real, and the aftercare sequence so a healed piece looks the way you drew it.
What I learned about this trade
Three things surprised me. The first is how much unpaid drawing time gets spent on people who were never going to book, and how rarely artists count that time as a business cost. The second is how differently people describe a body. Ask ten clients where they want a piece and you will get ten vocabularies, which is why the placement map turned out to matter more than any feature I planned. The third is that artists are not allergic to structure, they are allergic to structure that was designed for a dentist and then repainted black.
I also learned to respect the record keeping side of the work. Consent, age verification and medical flags are not paperwork to an owner who has been through a health inspection or an insurance question. They are the difference between a shop that keeps its license and one that spends a month proving things. That is why consent lives in the same submission as the artwork rather than in a separate binder behind the counter.
Experience and expertise
- Founder of MLJ, SASU, registered in Paris, publisher of StencilIntake and a small set of focused tools for owner operated businesses.
- Fifteen years building software for small teams, most of it spent on intake, scheduling and the messy handoff between a customer's first message and a paid job.
- Ongoing field work with 1,240 tattoo shops across the United States, from single chair private studios to two location shops with a rotating guest calendar.
- Direct experience running product research sessions on shop floors, including sitting through a full day of consultations to watch where the questions actually break down.
- Responsible for the product roadmap, the copy on this site, the pricing, and every commitment made to a customer in writing.
How this product is built and maintained
Every feature starts with a call to a working shop, not a competitor's screenshot. If I cannot name the artist who asked for something and the money or the hours it costs them, it does not get built. Release notes go out on the first Tuesday of each month, and anything that changes how a sheet behaves for clients is announced two weeks before it ships so a shop can update its wording.
On the editorial side, every number on this site is measured, not estimated for effect. The shop count, the no show rate, the average sitting value and the deposit total come from anonymized product data reviewed each quarter, and when a figure moves I change it here rather than leaving a flattering old one in place. Testimonials are published with the person's name, role, shop and city, with their written permission, and they are quoted as spoken with only light trimming for length.
Support is answered by me and by two colleagues who have both worked behind a shop counter. The standard is one business day, and we track how often we miss it. When something breaks, we say what broke and what we did about it. There is no support tier that buys you a faster answer to an outage.
Published articles
These are the nine pieces I have written for Ink and Ledger, the StencilIntake magazine on craft, money and compliance for tattoo artists and small studio owners.
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and you will reach me directly. Tell me what your inquiry pile looks like on a bad week, and I will tell you honestly whether the sheet will help or whether you already have the problem solved. If you would rather see it moving before you type anything, book a walk through from the home page and pick a time between appointments.
Postal mail and company details for MLJ, SASU are on the legal notice page. How your message is stored and for how long is set out in the privacy policy.