It’s not every day that a start-up retailer ends a deal with Target in favor of growing its own way, but that’s what Rowan founder and CEO Louisa Serene Schneider did last September. It worked. Her chain of ear piercing salons employing licensed nurses has grown from one studio in New York City in 2019 to 38 as of February’s opening in Maryland’s Shoppes of Bethesda. Rowan aims to reach nearly 70 stores this year.

During a pilot with Target, Schneider found that Rowan’s own stores outperformed its studios within Target stores. Thus, she chose to grow the company independently. “What we have done is really put our head down and look for real estate opportunities in markets where our customer is and aggressively opening,” said Schneider.

Rowan’s thesis is that ear piercing is a milestone event and should be celebrated as such in the safest environment possible. The salon’s customer base is broad, covering a gamut of incomes and a range of ages from newborns to seniors. In one day, Rowan’s 34th location — in Thruway Center in Schneider’s hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina — pierced the ears of an 87-year-old woman who had just beaten cancer, a dad who went first to make his daughter comfortable, and a number of mother-daughter pairs.

The idea for Rowan came to Schneider after 20 years in finance, starting in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, where her first major deal was the sale of Brooks Brothers. Through the years, she learned more about the retail industry, and then she ran Columbia Business School’s investing program. “I learned a lot about brands and barriers to entry and moats and what made a sustainable company,” said Schneider. She then worked at a hedge fund that specialized in shorting brick-and-mortar retail, traveling around the country looking at Class B and C malls. On that journey, she noted that many malls had Claire’s stores but little else for ear piercing.

Schneider became more intrigued when, in early 2018, Claire’s announced it would seek Chapter 11 protection and restructure. “When I started to study the space, I never realized Claire’s was that big of a company,” she said. “I never realized how pervasive it was and didn’t realize that even in centers that no one wanted to go to, a Claire’s needed to exist because there was nowhere else for people to go to get their ears pierced. I just started to be fascinated by this concept of something that was needed that you couldn’t get via Amazon.”

Schneider’s final epiphany came during a cousin’s baby shower. She learned that in her aunts’ work at urgent care clinics and pediatricians’ offices, they also were piercing ears. The parents of the children getting pierced loved that the medical staff knew how to take care of anxious people and how to hold children. “That is really where I started to put together the idea,” Schneider said.

First, an Idea. Then, Testing

Her business acumen told her to test the concept before diving any deeper, so she launched an at-home concierge service in 2018 in Westchester, north of New York City. She built an online portal to book piercing appointments. “Families really wanted a nurse to pierce their daughter’s ears, but they weren’t always excited to have someone come to their home and it wasn’t always convenient,” said Schneider. “They would often ask: ‘Do you have a store?’”

That demand led her to open the first Rowan studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 2019. “It was really word of mouth, and we were packed from the beginning,” she said. “We learned from that and started to grow in a much more aggressive but precise way.”

Precision and detail are involved in every facet of Schneider’s decisionmaking. Even the name Rowan has a reason. “Rowan County, North Carolina, is where my mom and her sisters, all doctors and nurses, grew up, and I grew up there and in the next-door county,” said Schneider. “Rowan is also both a boy’s and a girl’s name. The rowan tree is very symbolic, and the red color is a beautiful color that we use in our palette.”

Soon, business publication Fast Company featured the brand, and then Target came calling. “They were actively looking into ear piercing as a way to drive foot traffic,” she said. “They really wanted to prioritize safety, and they had talked to a lot of the existing players but they just weren’t ready to move forward with anyone yet.”

The timing was perfect. Schneider had been looking for expansion capital when she got that LinkedIn message from a senior person at Target. An in-person meeting with Target executives at its Minneapolis headquarters followed in November 2019. Soon Schneider opened studios in three Target stores in the Minneapolis area. Though the stores were successful, the pandemic halted expansion of the partnership until late 2020, when Rowan studios opened in Targets in both Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebraska. “Everywhere we opened, it seemed to work, and ultimately it was an incredibly powerful learning experience,” said Schneider.

By this time, three more independent Rowan studios also had opened, and it turns out that they were outperforming the Target locations by a wide margin. Schneider realized the independent concept would work better in the long run, and she called off the Target partnership. “That was a really challenging time because, as you can imagine, there is a lot of excitement around the prospect of growing with such a powerful company as Target, but ultimately we made the right decision,” she said.

Location Strategy and Space Needs

“We are still learning, but we are a concept that should be able to have 1,000 locations in the U.S.,” said Schneider. “Almost every single girl gets her ears pierced, and every year, many, many babies are born and many, many cultures pierce at birth. And Rowan is one of the only concepts that is trained and really capable of piercing babies.”

Celebration of the event of ear piercing is an ethos for Schneider. “Something that we have seen over and over again is just how impactful Rowan can be to so many different kinds of people in so many different stages of their life,” she said. “We see how the brand is resonating with them and it is creating this real memory for them, and so the hope is that we can continue to remain relevant by providing great product and great aftercare instruction so that they feel safe coming back, meeting with our nurses, meeting with our store teams and having a great outcome with healed ears that look great.”

Rowan is nimble when it comes to store size, ranging from 650 to 1,500 square feet. While the optimal range is 800 to 900 square feet, the concept’s flexibility has allowed it to expand opportunistically into all types of centers. “While we initially thought that malls weren’t great, given my prior job, our experience in malls has been tremendously positive and we have begun to partner with a number of large REITs who have been wonderful partners,” she said. “We are looking at more expansion in those locations.”

Working with Rowan senior director of stores Dani Axelrod, RetailUnion senior partner Amanda Royalty seeks out locations and helps the brand measure the performance of new stores. “We have been seeing great performance across the board, but certain types of centers have been stronger performers,” said Royalty. “Classic suburban lifestyle centers are definitely the strongest.” With the next round of stores, Rowan is trying markets like Winston-Salem and Lexington, Kentucky, that have smaller populations but strong incomes, good traffic and positive co-tenancies. “We are really data driven, and we like to make sure that there is a good intersection of the art and the science,” she said.

From the outset, Schneider has clustered store locations. “So many D-to-C companies that were venture backed that are opening retail are kind of throwing darts at the best locations across the country, or they want to prove it in New York and L.A. and then claim that they can do it in the rest of the country,” said Schneider. “That is really not what we are doing. We are picking areas, and then we are hoping to open multiple studios. We call it clustering, and this allows for upward mobility of our workforce internally and a lot of sharing of best practices. For us, it has worked really well.”

Schneider noted that Rowan is successful enough already to be sustainable as a company and a brand. “This is really the dream, to be in a place where your business is self-funding, because then you have created something of long-term value,” she said.

It helps that landlords have been receptive. “Rowan is experiential and not just your typical retail, bringing in potentially all new customers that will shop at the center at other retailers because they have made an appointment to come and have this milestone experience,” said Royalty. “The buildouts are beautiful, and I think they just elevate the look and feel of the center and give it some uniqueness that landlords really look for and are excited to have.”

Schneider also is developing Rowan’s line of earrings. “When we were building our company, we would see that the issue was oftentimes not that someone got a bad piercing but that they bought a pair of earrings that were very affordable,” she said. “What they were putting in was pure brass and nickel, and the body does not like that. We have spent a lot of time thinking about how we continue to maintain a relationship with the customer that we pierce so that they are a lifetime customer with us.”