Anna Harman, a former lawyer and Bridgewater asset manager, is a mom of two who has remained at the helm of Studs since she founded it in 2019.
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00:00 So this is a Studs earscape. It's our signature yellow ear.
00:05 It has a wide assortment of both piercings to illustrate the types of piercings you could get at Studs,
00:11 as well as all of our fashion jewelry.
00:14 And we actually use these to help people see both the jewelry,
00:17 as well as the types of piercings they could get.
00:20 Hi, my name is Anna Harmon. I'm 39 years old.
00:23 I'm the CEO and co-founder of Studs, and this is my secret to success.
00:27 I grew up in Westchester, right outside of New York City. My father was an architect.
00:31 My mom was an executive and a big role model for me.
00:33 I went to school at the same school for my entire time from kindergarten to 12th grade,
00:38 and then I went to Princeton University, and I studied English.
00:41 Right after I graduated from college, I went to Boston University for law school.
00:45 I had always known that I wanted to go to law school and potentially be a lawyer.
00:49 I was a mutual fund formation lawyer, which is unfortunately about as boring as it sounds,
00:53 and was part of the reason I stopped practicing law.
00:55 I knew I never wanted to be a partner at a law firm, so that was never my goal.
00:59 And then when I left law, being a lawyer, I went on to go work at an asset manager called Bridgewater.
01:05 So I spent a little under five years at Bridgewater.
01:08 I then left and I went to a startup that was funded and founded by a former, very senior Bridgewater person.
01:13 We actually sold that business after about two years, and I went to work at Walmart's incubator
01:19 and spent another about two years there, primarily working on a business
01:22 that was a text-to-shopping business called Jet Black.
01:24 So I started thinking about studs because I had a sort of strange piercing experience while working at Jet Black.
01:31 I went to get another piercing about five or six years ago now, a second piercing on my left ear,
01:37 and I went to a very fancy piercing parlor downtown, and they told me I would have to wait about two hours,
01:43 and I probably would have spent $500 or $750, and I ended up going to the tattoo parlor.
01:49 And I had a really good experience piercing-wise at the tattoo parlor.
01:52 It was done healthily and safely with a needle, and I really liked my piercer, but I didn't like the jewelry,
01:56 and it was still expensive, and I was very personally out of place at the tattoo parlor.
02:01 And so then I actually started to do research to understand, well, what had happened to the mall brands
02:05 that I remembered going to when I was growing up.
02:08 And what I learned was there really isn't a place to go until studs,
02:13 once you've graduated from those mall brands, if you want to get a piercing on your ear,
02:18 done with a needle, with a cute selection of earrings, that concept didn't exist.
02:22 Nobody had created it, and so I felt like, well, I would have wanted to go there,
02:26 so what if that were the business that I were to start?
02:28 When you think of the mall brands that you visit, the first thing I think you think of is
02:32 they're meant for younger customers, and particular, Claire's really self-describes as targeted at tweens.
02:38 Studs' core demographic is 18 to 35, and our median age is actually 27.
02:44 And so everything we think about in terms of the store experience, the store design,
02:48 how we actually want people to interact with the brand is for an older customer
02:53 that Claire's was really never designed for.
02:55 To me, we were filling a hole in the market.
02:58 Taking us back to November of 2019, we're opening the first studs studio in Nolita.
03:03 I am five months pregnant, I guess, or four months pregnant, thereabouts.
03:07 And it was interesting, you know, when you start a startup,
03:10 and it's a physical experience, meaning it's a store, right?
03:14 At some level, it's real, like, this is gonna work or it's not gonna work.
03:18 And what was fascinating was it worked from day one.
03:20 We had lines out the door at the Nolita studio the first weekend.
03:26 And so that was really validating for Lisa and I, because when you are selling products online,
03:31 nobody knows how many products you're selling, right?
03:34 On day one, you might sell nothing. You might sell two, right, units of whatever it is you're making.
03:38 For, if you start a store, people know if people are in the store with you.
03:43 And so we felt really lucky and inspired that the thing we had created was generating both that much buzz
03:49 that Lisa had created and that people wanted the product that we made.
03:52 Well, when we first started, you know, working in a co-working space, we funded it ourselves.
03:57 We obviously weren't spending much money on it, but we spent probably four to six months
04:01 pre-fundraise investing in the business by ourselves.
04:04 Then we went out and fundraised for our seed round in, I would say, February of 2019-ish.
04:11 We raised a little north of three million.
04:12 So COVID was really, I think, out of total left field for us.
04:16 So we had launched the first studio in November of 2019, and we had launched a second studio,
04:21 actually, in Hudson Yards in late, late February of 2020, about two weeks before, obviously, the world shut down.
04:28 And we were super lucky to have raised another round of financing right before COVID happened,
04:32 also about two weeks before the world shut down.
04:35 And so we were well-positioned financially, but obviously the business had to close for about six months.
04:41 And at the time, I was eight months pregnant, and I remember being really concerned,
04:47 one, what would happen to me, to my child, to everyone in my family's lives because of this,
04:52 but also what would happen to our business, which at the end of the day, right, post-COVID,
04:57 we were so lucky to see people come back and want to get piercings again.
05:00 But we were questioning at the beginning of COVID whether that would be true.
05:04 I think the biggest thing about the secret to success for Studs is, again, the amazing experience
05:09 that the studio team provides to customers every single day.
05:13 And so we really focus at Studs on how can we continue to enable that from our HQ office,
05:19 because the reason people like Studs is because Studs has great reviews
05:22 and because they have a great experience at Studs, and then they tell their friends.
05:25 [ Music ]