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A year or so ago, not that many people had heard of Louisa Schneider's ear piercing brand, even those who'd actually gotten studded or hooped by its licensed nurses. But she pulled a dramatic move to change all that, and today if you have a tween (even a body part to bedeck), you likely know her company's name: Rowan. It's not just safe; it's the cool place to go.
Schneider punctured the market, so to speak, by treating piercing as a medical procedure. It was a novel idea in 2017, and perhaps obvious in retrospect, but it took failing and pivoting to find the right business model, one that would let her brand shine like the hypoallergenic jewelry it sells. Today, by all accounts Rowan has found its groove. With 400 employees, it's on track this year to have 65 stores and an annual run rate of $100 million in revenue. All of this made Schneider one of 20 finalists on our Entrepreneur of 2024 list of innovative leaders.
So you started Rowan in 2017 as a niche concierge piercing service in New York City, where nurses would go to people's homes and do the honors. How did the nurse thing come about?
I was working at a hedge fund, looking at retailers like piercing companies that were doing well in malls. Around that time my daughter was born and I thought, I'm not going to take her where I went as a 12-year-old. My parents were both doctors. My sister's an ob-gyn. All my aunts are nurses. And they said, "Oh, we pierce patients' ears all the time." That's when a light bulb went off and I realized that this is a medical procedure – and no surprise that a woman's health care issue hasn't been properly addressed yet. So I started really doing the research, and the rate of negative outcome was about 30%, if you can believe it, meaning an embedded earring back or an infection or a poor placement. And now we can reduce that rate to less than 1%.
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Fast forward to the end of 2022 when Rowan had kiosks in about 300 Target stores. What happened next?
Target gave us a tremendous amount of credibility where a nurse might be willing to forfeit a shift to come join Rowan and supplement her hospital work, which otherwise would have been a lot harder at the time. But our customers didn't realize they were getting a Rowan piercing, they thought they were getting a Target piercing by a nurse. And so for me, who was building a brand, it didn't work. I wasn't going to be able to develop a profitable business doing that. And so we stepped away.
Was that a difficult decision?
Very very hard. A lot of sleepless nights. As I said, it's really tough to build a branded experience in someone else's four walls. And that wasn't a shortcoming of Target. That was just the reality of the situation. It could have been anywhere. Target was a great partner. They've done beautifully bringing in well known, established fashion designers or even Starbucks, but in the case of a new company just starting, it's challenging. So while a Target growth opportunity looks really interesting to investors and in an Excel spreadsheet, that can oftentimes be very misleading when you talk to the human beings involved like your customers and employees. After I did that, I realized focusing on building Rowan's own studies made more sense.
So, starting in 2023, how did you grow your brand to 65 stores this year and an annual run rate of $100 million?
We already had a few Rowan studios that were performing well. And we were easily able to open in cities where we had a Target presence and already had trained nurses that wanted to work with Rowan. At this rate, we are pretty much growing 100% a year. It's just been a lot of pivoting.
Rowan sells earrings and after products too. Any new innovations there in the last year?
This is one I'm excited about. So many girls play sports and they get their ears pierced and hop on a soccer field and they have a big problem. So last year we introduced our sports studs — soft earrings that you can put in and you can play hard wearing them. Having spent a lot of time on fields myself, I know that it's a real pain point and when it happens, it's pretty traumatic.
Now that people know they're getting pierced at Rowan, how do you bring in more customers? What's your secret sauce?
When you go back to third grade with your ears pierced, everyone notices and they ask, "Where did you go?" So we make sure that every customer who leaves feels like they had a five-star experience. And that pays for itself in word of mouth marketing.
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