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This woman turned a crappy mommy daughter day into a hundred million dollar business and it's barely been five years. Her name is Louisa Schneider and she's the founder of Rowan. They're putting a brand new spin on ear piercing. That's right, piercing your ears. And I'm going to tell you exactly how it happened and why. This is a crazy good business and there was so much to learn from it. Welcome to the podcast Making it with Jon Davids. I am JD here. I want to thank you guys so much for sending us up the charts in every single country from the UAE to Turkey to Canada to the United States. Thank you so much. Welcome to all the new listeners. If you're liking the show, all I ask is that you hit subscribe, comment, leave a rating, leave a review wherever you're listening. Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and of course get my best stuff to your inbox@john davids.com get on that newsletter. Now let's get to the show you're listening to Making it with John Davids. So let's talk about Rowan. This story starts all the way back in 2018. Louisa, the founder, is at the mall with her seven year old ready to get her ears pierced. So they walk inside the store and it is gross. It's gross. The countertops are sticky, the mirrors are smudged. There's a fingerprint stained piercing gun in desperate need of a wipe down. This is not the kind of place that you want to have people poking and prodding and sticking things in your body. And unfortunately that's what happens at these ear piercing places. And it's just not hygienic. It's not a place that Louisa feels comfortable with her child having somebody do a medical procedure to her. Louisa's getting bad vibes and, and this should be a celebration, a fun milestone in her daughter's life. But instead, this place is depressing. So they leave. They call it a day. We are not getting any piercings today. But Louisa is about to overhaul this industry. So here's the big idea. She heads home and starts plotting her ideal ear piercing experience. So here's what she has in mind. Number one, this space should be clean and welcoming, not the cluttered corner of a thrift shop. Number two, piercings should be done by professionals, not part timers clocking in and out of a shift. And number three, safety and hygiene should be a priority, not an annoying afterthought. Hygiene before the procedure happens, during the procedure, and of course, after the procedure, the aftercare. Also, when you're getting Your ears pierced, a lot can go wrong. You want to make sure that after the procedure happens, things are gonna be okay. So Louisa quickly puts her ideas into action. She's running 50 pop up piercing events across New York City. So right away she does not hesitate. She goes ahead and does popups. She doesn't have her own facility, so obviously she can't go ahead and actually open for business and start piercing ears, but she can do pop ups. So already we have a workaround, we have a hack. No excuses. I'm gonna get this going. I'm gonna prove my minimum viable concept, my minimum viable product as fast as I can. She also does 100 at home services, so we'll come to you. What's the hack here? I don't have a physical facility, so I'm going to come to you. And you know what? A lot of people prefer that. So now after 150 plus actual piercings, all performed by licensed nurses, which I'll get back to in a second, she has her MVP down. Customers are loving it and it's time to go big. So now it's time to scale the concept. We're into 2019 now. Twelve months later, she raises $4 million. And then she starts hustling. She opens her first ear piercing studio on the Upper east side of New York City. It is fresh and inviting. On top of piercing, Louisa's offering hyperallergenic earrings, hoops, studs, charms, and a lot more. So you can also get your ears pierced and then buy a whole bunch of jewelry at the same time. It's all working. Within one year, they're rolling out more stores. Nashville, Austin, Chicago. Today, in 2024, there are over 60 locations with 1,000 in the works. So the big hack here is that the staff of the store, the people doing the piercings, are licensed nurses. We don't have part timers. We don't have a bunch of people who are working for minimum wage and piercing ears at the same time. They don't know what they're doing. There are nurses and there's a reason that nurses are available to do this. I'm gonna get back to this in more detail in a second, but think about the timing here. Think about 2018, 19, what happens in 2020, Covid happens. And then you have a whole population of nurses, this massive labor pool that all of a sudden are probably looking for alternatives. Cause a lot of those people didn't wanna stay in the hospitals, maybe. I know a lot of people became traveling nurses. They have different applications for the education that they have. So Louisa's tapping into a population here of people who are medically trained professionals. And now there's something else for them to do. Piercing ears. Now, behind this piercing party is a gold plated business model. Let's do some back of the napkin math here. So Rowan is on track, reportedly to do $100 million in sales this year. They also reportedly have 60 locations. That means each location is averaging $1.6 million a year. Now they've raised, I believe, over $30 million to fund expansion. So the focus is clearly on growth here. I'd be surprised, actually, if they were profitable. There probably are some very good gross margins here, but I'd imagine that profitability is not on the menu right now. They want growth, growth, growth. Dropping a studio in every city. But if they can maintain juicy margins and once they actually start to focus on profitability, I think they'll do just fine. Fine. This is one of those deviously simple businesses that I just love. It gives me chills. After all, 85% of women get piercings and 25% of men. This is a life milestone. People do this. It is a rite of passage. So even though it's not something you're thinking about every day, people aren't going and getting piercings day in, day out. They're doing it once in their life. 85% of women and a quarter of all men. Plus the nursing angle is brilliant. You found a supply and demand arbitrage here. We know that people want this and need this. We can offer a differentiated experience and we can have people performing the procedure where you're not gonna get it done anywhere else. A skilled workforce eager to do the job. There's plenty of room for growth. I'd say that turned out to be a pretty good mother daughter day after all. Quick break. So I can tell you about Toyota. And no, this is not a car commercial. This is a commercial for Influicity. That's the marketing agency I created in my apartment almost a decade ago. And man, have we outgrown my apartment. You can see how we help Toyota introduce their vehicles to a brand new generation of drivers. Check out the case study@influicity.com that's I N F L U I C I t y influicity.com so I want to go deeper into what I love about this business. First of all, it is a super simple service with an insane market penetration and a total addressable market. Because a lot of people get this done at some point in their life. How often do you think about ear piercing? I think about it never. I have two daughters, by the way, and a wife. And at some point I'm sure I will get that done a few times. It's not an often type of thing, but it's something that I'll get done probably once or twice or three or four times in my life. Now here's the interesting thing though. You can think about it also in what can you offer before and after. So it's not just the ear piercing that's obviously the anchor, that's the flagship, but you're selling jewelry, you're selling pre care, you're selling post care, you can do extensions. A lot of people get caught up when they're thinking about business as what is the frequency or repeatability or recurring revenue. We're all obsessed with ARR. Think about lifetime value and think about the massive population of people that can actually use your service. So the value of each customer and the enormous tam total addressable market that you have, that's very different from a business where you're targeting a very niche market and you need them to buy over and over and over again. If 8 out of every 10 human beings in the country or in the world practically are going to use your service at some point in their life, don't worry about repeatability, don't worry about recurring revenue. You will have some repeatability from some people. Multiple children, multiple piercings, frequent piercings, other products and services they can buy. But don't get obsessed and bogged down with the idea that, hey, if I can't sell this person for 20 years, it's not a good business. It can be a very good business. And there are so many applications to this, the rite of passage business. So think about comparables like driving exams, your lsat, college prep parenting classes, first aid, marriage prep, dog training, how to buy your first home. These are all things that people do once, at least once in their life. A lot of people, not everybody, but like, let's go to dog training. I don't know what the numbers are on this, but think about buying a dog. A lot of people have pets. A lot of people have dogs, cats. You're not going to buy training every single day, but when you buy that, animal training is something that you think about. When I had my first kid, we went to a class for how to take care of babies. I would never think about taking that class at any other time, but I'm sure a lot of parents take that class at that time. Driving exams, college prep. So all These things, rite of passage businesses are so, so cool. I have a buddy who actually has an education business and he teaches something that is a rite of passage type of thing. So it's something that a lot of people learn at some point in their life. It's based on an age milestone and a certain type of education milestone. And there's a certain period of learning and then there's an exam. And again, it's something that a lot of people do one time, one single time, but you have a constant flow of them. And then what you can do, you can have products for before they buy that thing and products for after they buy that thing. So in the case of an education business, yes, this is the main thing you're buying, but there's a whole bunch of preparatory work that you can do, which I can sell you. And there's a whole bunch of work afterwards post work that I can sell you. So again, it's all about landing and expanding. Don't worry about getting it perfect on day one. Figure it out and then you'll grow from there. The other big thing here is the labor pool. I talked about this a little bit, but the labor pool is such an important factor here. So many businesses and industries are built on new labor pools appearing in the world. I'll give you a great example. Think about businesses like Avon or Arbonne or Tupperware or Stella and dot. All these MLM, multilevel marketing type businesses. And they're not all MLMs. Some of them are franchises, some of them are, you can build your own business, we'll give you the tools to do it. But the idea that you have a population, in this case, it was like stay at home moms who don't have a full time job. Their job is taking care of the family. They're homemakers. You had a lot of these people coming into society in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and they want something to do. They want to be able to make their own money, they want to socialize. And that allowed companies like Avon, Tupperware, Arbonne, all these companies that sell anything from kitchenware, cosmetics, et cetera, to have jobs. And it enabled these companies to exist. Keep in mind, that was a labor force phenomenon that was by the labor force allowed these companies to exist. Think about trying to build a company where you have individuals as your workers who can work on their own time, who have a certain level of expertise that just didn't exist prior. And once it did exist, they were able to do it. Demographics are destiny. Remember those three Words, demographics are destiny. What that means is if you want to see where the world is going and what the opportunities are in business, just look at demographics. Look at who is living where and doing what. What are people doing in society? And there's no sense in fighting against it and fighting against the current and complaining, oh, I don't like how these people do this. Why are those people doing that? Instead of fighting it, Just ask yourself, why are they doing it and how can I capitalize on it? If you want to be a good business person, that's the question to ask, because demographics are destiny. And then think about what happened after COVID 19. And I know a bunch of nurses that were looking for career changes, but they had this set of skills. They were already trained medical professionals. So when Louisa went to these nurses and said, hey, do you want to take all those skills you have, but instead of caring for patients in hospitals, do you want to pierce people's ears? I don't know how many people went to nursing school to become people who pierce ears professionally. But you know what? It's a great job. I'm sure it pays well. It's fun. You get to interact with families. You get to work on, you know, reasonable hours. There's no ear piercing emergencies, I'd imagine. And there's no ear piercing where you're working the midnight to 7am shift. So here you have people who have a certain level of education and can apply it elsewhere. I'm seeing this in so many other places. You know, I'm seeing this, for example, with content creators. There are so many people who are obsessed, especially teenagers and people in their 20s who are obsessed with making content on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. And then you have people who are much older saying, ah, get a real job. You'll never make money doing that. Let me tell you something. I pay a lot of people a lot of money to make content. I pay people at Influicity to do that. I pay people who work as contractors for Influicity. We pay a lot of influencers. You can make a lot of money doing that. Now, I'm not suggesting that that's what you should do for a living. I'm just saying if you think about skills that you have and how you can apply them in other ways, you can do all kinds of things there. You know how many lawyers there are who go on to become entrepreneurs and CEOs. Some of the best and most accomplished entrepreneurs in the world have backgrounds in accounting. Right? You could be a medical professional and apply that to a medical type business. You can do all kinds of things taking skills that you have that aren't common in an industry and applying them there, science, medicine, pharmaceuticals, fitness. Right there is so much opportunity and I love the idea here, the arbitrage that you would take trained nurses and make them a workforce for ear piercing. It's just awesome. Simple product, simple service. Don't reinvent the wheel. Have a simple mvp, a minimum viable product so you can test your concept like Louisa did 150 times. Look at the demographics, look at what your customers want and look at what's possible in society and always find that arbitrage. Rowan's already $100 million revenue company and I think there is a lot of room to grow. I want to know what you guys think. Let me know in the comments. Get me@john davids.com get on the newsletter and I'll talk to you guys next.