Name: Studs’ 39-year-old founder ditched her law career to launch the adult version of Claire’s
Uploaded: 2024-04-24
Duration: 5 min 31 s
Description: 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.

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.

Studs’ 39-year-old founder ditched her law career to launch the adult version of Claire’s

Features

So this is a studs escape. It's our signature yellow ear. It has a wide assortment of both piercings to illustrate the types of piercings you could get at studs as well as all of our fashion jewelry. And we actually use these to help people see both the jewelry as well as the types of piercings they could get. Hi. My name is Anna Harmon. I'm 39 years old. I'm the CEO and co founder of Studs and this is my secret to success. I grew up in Westchester, right outside of New York City. My father was an architect. My mom was an executive and a big role model for me. I went to school at the same school for my entire time from kindergarten to 12th grade. And then I went to Princeton University and I studied English right after I graduated from college, I went to Boston University for law school. I had always known that I wanted to go to law school and potentially be a lawyer. I was a mutual fund formation lawyer which is unfortunately about as boring as it sounds and was part of the reason I stopped practicing law, I knew I never wanted to be a partner at a law firm. So that was never my goal. Um And then when I left, uh being a lawyer, I went on to go work at an asset manager called Bridgewater. So I spent a little under five years at Bridgewater. I then left and I went to a start up that was funded and founded by a former very senior Bridgewater person. We actually sold that business after about two years. And I went to work at Wal Mart's Incubator and spent another about two years there primarily working on a business that was a text to shopping business called Jet Black. So I started thinking about studs because I had a sort of shrink piercing experience while working at Jet Black. I went to get another piercing about five or six years ago. Now, a second piercing on my left ear and I went to a very fancy piercing parlor downtown and they told me I would have to wait about two hours and I probably would have spent 500 or $750. And I ended up going to the tattoo parlor and I had a really good experience piercing wise at the tattoo parlor. It was done healthily and safely with a needle. And I really liked my piercer, but I didn't like the jewelry and it was still expensive and I was very personally out of place at the tattoo parlor. And so then I actually started to do research to understand. Well, what had happened to the mall brands that I remembered going to when I was growing up and what I learned was there really isn't a place to go until studs. Once you've graduated from those mall brands, if you want to get a piercing on your ear, done with a needle with a cute selection of earrings, that concept didn't exist. Nobody had created it. And so I felt like, well, I would have wanted to go there. So what if that were the business that I were to start? When you think of the mall brands that you visit? The first thing I think you think of is they're meant for younger customers. In particular, Claire is really self described as targeted at tweens studs, core demographic is 18 to 35 and our median age is actually 27. And so everything we think about in terms of the store experience, the store design, how we actually want people to interact with. The brand is for an older customer that Claire's was really never designed for. To me, we were filling a hole in the market, taking us back to November of 2019. We're opening the first stud studio in Nolita. I am five months pregnant, I guess, or four months pregnant thereabouts. And it was interesting, you know, when you start a start up and it's a physical experience, meaning it's a store right at some level, it's real like this is going to work or it's not going to work. And what was fascinating was it worked from day one. We had lines out the door at the Nolita Studio the first weekend. And so that was really validating for Lisa and I, because when you are selling products online, nobody knows how many products you're selling. Right on day one, you might sell nothing. You might sell two right units of whatever it is you're making for. If you start a store, people know if people are in the store with you. And so we felt really lucky and inspired that the thing we had created was generating both that much buzz that Lisa had created and that people wanted the product that we made. Well, when we first started, you know, working in a co working space, we funded it ourselves. We obviously weren't spending much money on it, but we spent probably 4 to 6 months pre fundraise investing in the business by ourselves. Then we went out and fund raised for our seed round in, I would say February of 2019 ish. We raised a little north of 3 million. So COVID was really, I think out of total left field for us. So we had launched the first studio in November of 2019 and we had launched a second studio actually in Hudson Yards in late late February of 2020 about weeks before obviously, the world shut down and we were super lucky to have raised another round of financing right before COVID happened, also about two weeks before the world shut down. And so we were well positioned financially, but obviously the business had to close for about six months. And at the time I was eight months pregnant. And I remember being really concerned one, what would happen to me, to my child, to everyone in my family's lives because of this. But also what would happen to our business, which at the end of the day, right, post COVID, we were so lucky to see people come back and wanna get piercings again. But we were questioning at the beginning of COVID whether that would be true. I think the biggest thing about the secret to success for studs is again, the amazing experience that the studio team provides to customers every single day. And so we really focus at studs on. How can we continue to enable that from our HQ office? Because the reason people like studs is because studs has great reviews and because they have a great experience at studs and then they tell their friends.