She left finance to build a clean, friendly place to get your ears pierced. Then she made the whole industry look amateur.
Walk into a Studs and the first thing you notice is what is missing: the spinning gun, the mall fluorescents, the teenager with a clipboard. Anna Harman built the brand around a single stubborn idea - that getting a needle through your cartilage should feel like a treat, not a dare. She co-founded Studs with Lisa Bubbers in November 2019, opened the doors, and watched the store turn a profit in its very first month.
Today she runs a national chain of piercing studios that doubles as a jewelry label, with a flagship at 12 Prince Street in Soho and a location parked inside Rockefeller Center. The core product is something she more or less named into existence: the Earscape, a curated cluster of flatback studs, huggies and clickers arranged across a single ear like a small constellation. Customers come for one piercing and leave plotting their next three.
The path here was not obvious. Harman studied English at Princeton, took a law degree at Boston University, and spent her early career drafting mutual-fund paperwork. Then she became an operator: COO of Research Analytics at Bridgewater Associates, a stint at Walmart's Store No. 8 incubator, acting Chief Customer Officer at Jetblack. By the time she got to piercing, she had spent a decade learning how complicated businesses actually run. Studs is the place she pointed all of it.
What she will tell you, repeatedly, is that the romance of founding a company is mostly a myth. "People really don't talk enough about how hard it is day-to-day," she has said, "and how the buck really does stop with you." During the pandemic that was literal: she was the one running payroll, she was the one on the customer-service line.
To me, Studs is filling a hole in the market. It's a place to go get needle piercings.- Anna Harman, on the whole point
Harman wanted a second lobe piercing. Her options were Claire's, built for twelve-year-olds, or the tattoo shop on the corner, built for almost no one in particular. There was nothing in between - no clean, well-lit, adult room where a needle and a curated tray of jewelry waited for you. Investors, when she pitched them, kept reaching for the same shorthand: the grownup version of Claire's.
Before she raised a dollar she stress-tested the concept in a self-organized "female shark tank," a working group of businesswomen who poked holes in the plan until it held water. She and Bubbers described what they were making as a "chic medi spa" - the hygiene of a clinic, the warmth of a boutique. The pitch worked. The first store proved it in thirty days.
Her marketing strategy is almost a provocation: her biggest line item is rent. Pick the right corner, do the piercing beautifully, and people tell their friends. Studs grew on word of mouth long before it grew on ad spend.
"I am the reason Studs is functional."
- The CEO on her own job description
A decade at firms obsessed with operational excellence - Bridgewater chief among them - taught her to ask the unglamorous question first: how do you expand without burning capital? Hence shop-in-shops and kiosks over splashy flagships.
When the pandemic shuttered retail, the CEO did the work herself. Payroll. Support tickets. She is unsentimental about the grind, and unusually honest that founding a company is harder than the highlight reel suggests.
By her own account she is not a big social-media presence. The energy goes into the stores and the product, not the personal brand. Studs is the broadcast; she stays behind it.
People really don't talk enough about how hard it is day-to-day, and how the buck really does stop with you.ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP
I was the customer-service agent. I was the one running payroll.ON THE PANDEMIC
How do you physically expand in a way that's not incredibly capital intensive?ON GROWTH
To me, Studs is filling a hole in the market. It's a place to go get needle piercings.ON THE IDEA
"Owning the Earscape market" isn't a slogan. It's the plan - one kiosk and shop-in-shop at a time.