Flash and event requests

When someone books off your flash page rather than describing an idea from scratch, the request still lands in the same inbox and still works the same way. You quote it, take a deposit and schedule it exactly as you would a custom piece. What changes is the label.

On the request row you get a Flash design chip, and hovering it says the booking came from a flash design. Open the request and the client's name carries Flash Booking underneath it, and the Booking For tile reads Flash Piece instead of Custom Design.

That label is the whole difference. There is no separate flash approval flow and no shortcut around pricing. You set the price and the deposit in the quote builder, same as always, because what you charge for a piece often depends on size, placement and skin.

Because a flash booking usually means someone has already decided, Maelo treats it as its own kind of news. The email you get is headed New Flash Booking rather than the usual new request, and it has its own toggle in your notification settings under Flash Bookings.

Turn that one on and leave general request alerts off if flash is the work you want to jump on. It is the one notification worth being noisy about, because a claimed design that sits for three days is a client who books someone else.

A design's availability is yours to set, in Flash Manager. Maelo does not flip it for you when a request arrives or when you approve one, and that is on purpose: plenty of artists repeat a design, and plenty more want to see the placement before deciding.

So after you approve a one off piece, go and switch it off yourself. On your public page an unavailable design shows as sold rather than disappearing, which does more for you than hiding it would.

When you run a guest spot, a convention or a residency, that event becomes a bookable location on your booking form for as long as it is open. A client choosing it is telling you they want to be tattooed in that city, on those dates.

On the request, the event shows up as the Location. Filter your inbox by Event from the Filter & Sort panel to see just that work, which is how you build a schedule for a trip rather than picking it out of a mixed list.

Which events appear, and whether they take general bookings, flash bookings or both, is controlled per event under Settings, Scheduling. See creating a guest spot or convention.

This is where an event request genuinely behaves differently. When you open the quote builder on a request tied to an event, the calendar in the Scheduling section stops using your normal weekly hours and uses the event's own hours and timezone instead.

That matters more than it sounds. A guest spot in another country runs on local time and the shop's opening hours, not yours, and it is very easy to offer someone a nine in the morning that turns out to be three in the afternoon. Letting the event drive the calendar removes that entirely.

• •Times you offer come from the event's working hours, on the event's dates.
• •Blocks you created for that event apply. Blocks tied to a different location do not.
• •Days outside the event are still clickable, so a one off exception remains possible.

Plenty of enquiries arrive before you announce a trip, or from someone who did not realise you were travelling. You do not have to make them start again.

The location pill in the top right of the quote builder lists your studios and your events together. Pick the event and the whole quote retargets onto it, calendar included, so the dates you offer come from the trip rather than from home. Pick a studio again to move the request back.