How Rowan’s retail boom fueled its revenue

In just over five years, ear piercing studio Rowan has grown its footprint (earprint?) tremendously. Last month, the company opened its 100th location in Memphis, Tennessee, and is projecting $150 million in revenue run rate for 2025. It was founded in 2017 as a concierge ear piercing service and launched on New York City’s Upper East Side in 2020.

The idea behind Rowan came from CEO and founder Louisa Schneider’s search for a safe and sterile place to take her daughter to get her ears pierced. That led her to her family of doctors to see if any of their offices were equipped to perform the service.

“They all said, ‘we have been asked to pierce ears in the past at different occasions working in pediatricians’ offices, and it’s not a particularly difficult procedure,’” Schneider recalled.

Filling the gap

While other chains like Claire’s and Studs were already established players in the ear piercing space, Rowan offered what it believed was a key point of differentiation: licensed nurses to perform the piercings. (The company also doesn’t have an age limit on piercings like some other companies do.)

The first big move, back in 2019, was a partnership with Target for in-store piercings. This tie-up ended in 2022 so Rowan could focus on its own brick-and-mortar studios.

“Our comp store sales are very, very healthy,” Schneider said. “They’re two to three times the specialty retail average. I think a lot of that is brand awareness is growing. The more people that know about us, the better.”

Schneider explained how Rowan’s nurses are trained to gradually perform different functions.

“Most of our nurses begin working at Rowan with a level of training that allows them to pierce the earlobe and the outer helix,” Schneider said. 

Over time, its nurses are trained to pierce other parts of the ear and as well as the nose, which in turn increases the number of services each location can provide.

How AI informs growth

After raising $20 million in a 2021 Series B and wrapping up its Target partnership, Rowan has steadily increased its brick-and-mortar count across the country. The company works with Placer, an intelligence platform that uses mobile data to analyze foot traffic and consumer behavior, to help choose new store locations.

"You can’t get pierced online. Our service is inherently experiential, and our rapid growth reflects the strong and continuing demand for an ear piercing experience that is both safe and celebratory,” said Rowan’s chief revenue officer, Lynda Fisher in an email statement.

Rowan’s first store opening of the year will be at Danbury Fair in Danbury, Connecticut. The company is also expanding into new states like California, Washington, and New Hampshire in the first half of this year. It is also opening more stores in Florida and New Jersey and is looking at expanding internationally in the near future.

Industry at large

Though reliable and broad data on the ear piercing market is hard to come by, one brand has long served as a leading indicator of demand for the service.

Accessories company Claire’s, which for millennials was the go-to place for ear piercings, initiated its second bankruptcy filing last August (the first was in 2018) and closed hundreds of stores. Rowan is looking at this as an opportunity, by eyeing these vacant locations for its own store openings.

Changing consumer trends could be the other part of the opportunity for both Rowan’s and major competitor Studs (that business started swiftly expanding its store footprint in 2022) . According to Allison Collins, co-founder and managing director of data and insights platform the Consumer Collective, individuality is making a comeback in a way that she calls the “adornment effect.”

“When I think about the adornment effect, it’s about decoration in all areas of your life,” Collins said. “That concept really took on a new life in 2025, but I expect it will pick up even more in 2026. There’s a little bit of this broader shift back towards maximalism, this shift out of Instagram styles or TikTok styles more toward personal style.”

Collins says that piercing falls neatly into this category. For the aforementioned companies, this is no small thing. More adornment means more dollars.

Correction 01/13/2026: This article has been corrected to reflect that Rowan was founded in 2017; its Upper East Side store opened in 2020.