This is my story. Where I come from as the creator of Stab Lab Designs. What brought me to a sudden career change from a Paramedic and how I came to design these products.

Exploring new 3D modeling skills with a recently acquired tablet, while resting up from injuries at home. There is a romanticized narrative in the startup world about the "hustle." We are told that success requires relentless, daily execution—that if you aren’t pushing your business forward every single day, keeping up with the algorithm, and creating daily, you aren't dedicated enough. Now, try layering that advice on top of recovering from surgery, navigating a long-term in

Learning styles are different for every person and as such, training options should also be varied. The Amazon, AliExpress, and drop-shipped skins have their place. When you're first starting out as a tattoo artist, you get your first affordable machine and set of needles and inks and some cheap fake skins and that's how you find out if tattooing is even something you want to do. You learn if you have the patience and the creativity to make your own designs. These skins aren'

If you have ever knocked over a display and spent the next twenty minutes hunting for gold ends on the shop floor, or if your studio is cluttered with dozens of displays just to accommodate different gauges—the Lab has been working on a solution for you. At Stab Lab Designs, we realized piercing displays haven’t changed in decades. Most are unweighted, fragile, and only work for one specific gauge. We decided to strip the concept down and re-engineer it from the ground up. Th

When you’re over-engineering a product in a lab, it’s easy to get lost in the specs. You can calculate shore hardness and material density all day, but none of it matters until a professional artist or piercer actually puts a needle to the material. At Stab Lab Designs, the "Lab" isn't just my 3D printing and silicone setup—it’s the studios where these prototypes are put through their paces. The "Destruction" Phase Before a product reaches the shop, it goes through a rigorous

I didn't set out to make tattoo skins. Stab Lab Designs actually started with a focus on piercing—specifically, solving the problem of jewelry scattering across the floor from "simple" plastic displays. But as I spent months in my recovery prototyping self-healing silicone pads to hold those gauges, I realized the material I was developing had more applications than just jewelry displays. The "Field Data": Merging Two Worlds I’m lucky to have a direct line to the industry—my

This is the origin story of Stab Lab Designs. What got me started down this path to design these products.