If you attended our 2025 conference, I hope you had a wonderful time and that you’re now settled back into your studio with new knowledge and ideas. 

This year, the board made the decision to share our quarterly updates on our journal as well as emailing them to our members, in order to spread updates on the organisation’s work more widely.

2025 Conference

We have recently returned from our annual conference, which was an excellent event! We had around 200 attendees – this is based on the number of ticket sales, and therefore does not include vendors, speakers or volunteers, meaning that the final number was likely around 350 altogether. This is almost exactly the same as last year, which feels like a real success in the current economic climate. And excitingly, almost half of the ticket holders were brand new attendees! This felt particularly important as it was the organisation’s 10th anniversary and it was so wonderful to see brand new faces alongside those that have been around since the very beginning. 

There were 51 classes in all, 29 of which had never been presented before at the UKAPP event. Others that had been presented at the event previously had been updated for 2025 with new information and content. 

We also had 25 vendors – 6 of them attending the UKAPP conference for the first time, alongside longer standing attendee favourites. 

There were also parties hosted by two of our vendors during the event. Neilmed very kindly hosted a small opening party for attendees who had arrived early on the Saturday evening ahead of the conference, and the closing party at The Alchemist was hosted by Junipurr Jewelry, ProBodyArt and BooksOpen. We sincerely thank all of these companies for their hard work and generosity in putting these events together. 

Of course, it takes a village to make a conference happen and alongside saying a huge thank you to our speakers and vendors for all of their hard work, we also want to thank our incredible volunteer team for helping things to run so smoothly. 

Sister Organisations

As you may know, the UKAPP is a ‘Sister Organisation’ to the Association of Professional Piercers (APP) and there are a number of other sister organisations around the world. In our last update, we mentioned that some board members were travelling to the APP conference in Las Vegas for the Sister Orgs Symposium. During this event (and indeed throughout the APP conference), the UKAPP learned from the APP and other sister organisations about how to improve all aspects of how we work. Classes and workshops included a range of subjects, such as: Communications and Record Keeping, Membership, Public Outreach, Conference, Managing Adversity, and Implementing Change. The board came away with a range of ideas for how to improve a great deal of how the organisation runs behind the scenes to free up time to meet other aspects of our mission statement. 

During the UKAPP conference, the UKAPP board also had the opportunity to meet with the APP board to discuss goals, challenges, and next steps for the organisation. In addition to this, we also held a meeting with board members from the APP, APPE and LBP to all learn from each other and improve our conference offerings. The board came away with some incredible ideas and we want to extend an enormous thank you to those sister org board members who shared their time and expertise with us. Other sister organisations had been invited to the event to attend this meeting, but were unable to join us due to their own busy schedules and workloads. However, we hope to continue these meetings at future events. 

Public Outreach

It is the UKAPP’s goal to disseminate health and safety information around safe piercing practices to both piercing industry professionals and the general public. In order to increase the organisation’s ways of accessing piercers that don’t attend current industry events and be able to reach out to the general public, the board voted to begin exhibiting at tattoo conventions. 

The first one of these took place at the Big London Tattoo Show the week before our conference. Emma Regan attended for the full three days, with Beth Meakings joining her on the Sunday. The UKAPP had a booth with information about the organisation and two sets of flyers – one set intended for piercers, and the other for the general public. During the event, our board members met a lot of piercers who had never previously engaged with the organisation and had misconceptions about things like UKAPP membership requirements. It was wonderful to be able to have conversations with these fellow industry professionals and encourage them to come to future UKAPP events and apply for membership. The general public were also very receptive to the organisation’s information. Many were learning about the UKAPP for the first time and were excited to learn more and access things like our member’s map to find UKAPP members close to them. 

The event certainly achieved the goals we were hoping for, and it is the board’s intention to continue to attend conventions throughout the year in order to continue to disseminate information and reach out to more piercers and members of the public who may not yet have heard about what we do. 

Volunteering

The UKAPP is run solely by volunteers and with this in mind, we always welcome volunteers to help with our projects. If you have any skills that you think would be helpful to the organisation, please let us know! 

We hope this offers a brief update on the organisation’s work throughout the last quarter. If you attended our recent conference, remember to check your emails for the conference feedback forms. Please do take the time to fill them in – they are such an important part of how we improve things going forward.