‘We’re still fun, but more grown-up fun’: How Studs is streamlining its brand look as it scales
Studs is looking to mature its brand and drop parts of its neon aesthetic as it continues its expansion into major markets and tourism hubs across the United States.
The piercing studio brand, which launched in 2019 as a destination for professional needle ear piercing with titanium and 14-carat jewelry, is changing both its style and its strategy as it approaches 40 stores. Its newest locations — including one in Florida’s Hyde Park Village — feature more monochrome design choices, curvier counters and fewer bright green accents.
Tom Walsh, svp of retail store development at Studs, said the company is responding to what it has learned about the age and style of its customers since its first few stores.
“We’ve learned that our customer is skewing a bit older and looking for a clean, sterile, and safe experience when they come in to get a piercing,” he said. “We’re still fun, but more grown-up fun.”
Studs, which has raised at least $30 million to fuel its expansion, has had an edgy vibe to its brand. Online orders and piercing care kits come with stickers and bright green vinyl pouches, and its studios are capable of doing advanced piercings beyond traditional lobe placements.
But as it scales, Studs is experiencing the same growing pains as other startup brands. Beyond the look and feel of the brand, Studs has to grapple with the ongoing question of how to pick winning markets and find prime — yet affordable — real estate. More stores also means having to have more piercers, a specialized type of work that isn’t necessarily easy to find in target markets that have varying licensing regulations.
Mejuri, another jewelry brand, has about 40 stores and plans to open another 11 this year. Courtney Hawkins, svp of global retail, said the company looks at e-commerce sales and total addressable markets to figure out where to go next. But it’s also honing in on the profiles and location data for its existing customers.
“Knowing the customer profiles and demographics has helped us choose really strong locations and know where we should go. Some of our locations we felt were off the beaten path because we weren’t clear who the customer is,” Hawkins said. “Now that we have the customer, the expansion is going really well because we’re targeting where she shops.”
At Studs, Walsh said customers are now leaning more into the late 20s and early 30s. Many of its customers already have ear piercings and are adding to their “stack” with additional, often asymmetrical, piercings. This has helped inform its strategy on where to go, bolstered by insights from its e-commerce customer base with demographic data, zip code analysis and external tools like Placer.ai for foot traffic trends. This helps target not just specific cities but akso specific locations, lifestyle centers or malls where it can find a suitable spot, Walsh said.
“The first year I was here, there was still a lot of [using] gut feeling [to choose] locations, which is normal when you’re early on,” Walsh said. “When you have zero to 10 stores and you think you know your consumer, it feels more straightforward. You go where you believe they are.”
But that shifted around the 20-store mark, he said, because the company was getting more feedback. It also changed up some of its own service models.
“At that point, you start getting a lot more input, including sales data and feedback from store teams, consumers, landlords and building groups,” he said. “That feedback loop becomes essential.”
Studs has also learned that tourist-heavy cities like Austin and Nashville are ripe for group bookings tied to events like birthdays or bachelorette trips. Walsh said these are high-performing stores are in markets where customers come in with intent, but also where they’re open to doing something spontaneous and memorable. If appointments are available, Studs can accommodate walk-ins, which may be an hour or 90 minutes after someone walks in. This can become a bargaining chip in negotiations with landlords, who know that those customers may hang around and shop elsewhere while they wait.
“When we started going to malls, we started realizing that there’s a lot more contact,” he said. “You don’t want to push somebody away. And whether it’s with food and beverage or other shopping, you’re having an engaged, qualified consumer coming through the mall. And they can swing by Studs and decide, ‘Hey, I want to get a piercing.'”
This has caught the attention of property managers, Walsh said, with some saying that other tenants have asked to see Studs come into the center. “I think that’s a huge compliment to us as a brand. But it wasn’t like that two years ago,” he said. “We were struggling a little bit to get them to understand how this was going to work. At the time, we were signing two- and three-year leases. Now we’re signing 10-year leases.”
Studs faces unique staffing challenges as a specialty retailer that requires certified piercers in every location. It doesn’t help that regulations aren’t uniform from state to state. “In some states, a piercer needs to have 24 months of experience — that’s a big hurdle when you’re trying to open in new markets,” Walsh said.
To address this, the company launched Studs Academy, a six-week training program based in New York. The program trains piercing apprentices and helps them get certified, ultimately feeding talent into new and existing stores. Graduates are eligible to become Studs piercers, earning $31-$38 per hour plus tips.
As for the look and feel of the stores, Walsh said new stores will be set up with a more monochrome aesthetic rather than the bold neons of its earlier iterations. A sterile-looking environment helps put potentially nervous customers at ease — and it also provides a bold look from outside the store.
To help ensure continuity, Studs also newly edited its standard operation procedures for stores — like the color to turn the LED lights behind its signs to, and the kind of store maintenance to undertake on a daily basis.
Walsh also said the company is setting up KPIs for stores around what sales numbers to hit. While more corporate-sounding than a typical piercing studio may be, Walsh said the company tries to go by the “the 80/20 rule,” where about 80% of operations are the same and repeatable.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s store development or if it’s marketing or finance or operations. For 80% of what we do, we’ve got to get dialed in because it’s repeatable,” he said. “The 20% is still our place to continue to dream and grow and learn new things.”