Anna Harman is the co-founder and CEO of Studs, the New York-based ear-piercing and earrings brand she launched with Lisa Bubbers in November 2019. A former mutual-fund lawyer and Bridgewater Associates operator turned consumer-retail entrepreneur, Harman built Studs to fill the gap between Claire's and the tattoo parlor: a clean, needle-piercing studio paired with curated 'Earscapes' of affordable jewelry. The store was profitable in its first month and has since grown to dozens of locations nationwide, raising a $20M Series B in 2021 and roughly $25.6M in total funding.
Louisa Serene Schneider is the founder and CEO of Rowan, the ear-piercing company that hires registered nurses to do the piercing and runs its own medical advisory board. She started it from her attic in 2017 after a career in M&A and retail trading at Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, and built it into a chain doing roughly $70-100 million a year with dozens of studios and hundreds of employees, more than half of them nurses.