Mad Rabbit: Why Building a Tattoo Brand Is Really About Selling a Lifestyle

[00:00:00] Irving Gonzalez: Mad Rabbit is different because, internally, we focus quite a lot on our community. Here, we're selling, I believe it's an experience, a lifestyle, and just like a state of being rather than just a product.

[00:00:20] Kailin Noivo: Welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Toolbox: Expert's perspective. Joining us today, we have Irving and Erin from Mad Rabbit. Really excited to have you on the show today. Thanks.

[00:00:31] Irving Gonzalez: Thank you.

[00:00:32] Kailin Noivo: Awesome. Well, Erin, I'll kick it off to you to kick us off. Maybe give us a brief introduction to who you are and your career journey so far.

[00:00:39] Erin Murray: Yeah. So I'm Erin. I am the fractional chief brand officer over at Mad Rabbit. I was actually one of the founding members who started in 2021. I was, like, their fourth full time employee, so I've really helped drive and grow the brand to where it is today. Um, it's really exciting to see all of the momentum around tattoos and the industry itself. It's no longer a really niche category, so it's fun to really see that. The North America beauty category is really growing with these other standards. But to give you a little bit of background on my career, I've spent the last twelve years building brands, particularly mostly in the personal and beauty care space and not vertical, but has spent the majority of my time in integrated marketing. So everything from retail, digital, packaging, product innovation. The way I like to put it is I am the brand steward for how the customer sees, feels, touches, experiences any brand that I'm a part of.

[00:01:41] Kailin Noivo: Irving, why don't you kick us off with your intro?

[00:01:44] Irving Gonzalez: So hi. I'm Irving. I'm the life cycle marketing manager here at Mad Rabbit, and I've been working for the brand for about a year and a half. I joined primarily because their community focus approach. And whenever I was looking into their social media posts and into what people said online about them, it just gave me some sort of inspiration to join the brand. But here at Mad Rabbit, I focus on life cycle, which is in the realm of retention and also membership and a few other things.

[00:02:25] Kailin Noivo: Very cool. Erin, you mentioned you support other businesses as well. How different is it doing the brand for someone that's creating a category versus competing in a category?

[00:02:34] Erin Murray: You know, I think I don't ever approach it that way. So I always approach it as we need to have a strong POD whether the category exists or not. So I think that's really important and relevant to today's brand strategy. I think the talking point there really is around how we create and craft a brand story and a brand world that a customer really wants to adopt to. So, for example, I work for a teen skincare brand. Teen skincare has been around for generations. However, the way that we approach a gen alpha or a gen z consumer is so different than the way we maybe had had approached a teen ten, fifteen years ago when you think about ClearCell or if you think about Proactive as an example. I think instead of trying to think about how you're going to break through a category, it's how are you gonna break through as a brand and really build a strong identity that a customer sees themselves in.

[00:03:27] Kailin Noivo: Very cool. You're rifling off some nostalgic brands for me. I remember when I was in high school, everyone was trying to clear up their acne all at the same time. I remember those commercials. So that's really, really cool. Yeah. I mean, diving into it, Irving, Pierce, on your front on the retention side, you've been at different businesses from the pet side to other businesses. How is this business different than your previous roles?

[00:03:48] Irving Gonzalez: I think I mentioned a little bit about it in my previous answer. But this one, Mad Rabbit is different because, internally, we focus quite a lot on our community and knowing about whatever's trending in tattoo culture, pretty much anything and everything about tattoo culture. In other brands that I've been with, for the most part, we just focused on selling a product. But here, we're selling I believe it's an experience, a lifestyle, and just, like, a state of being rather than just a product. So that's, like, the primary difference between here and then the other brands.

[00:04:28] Erin Murray: I would agree. I would also say that the other component is our business functions a lot different than, I would say, maybe a brand that's selling a product or does have a community. Um, the other component is is that our customer is really focused on specific life cycle moments of tattoo care. So, particularly, like, subscription is not necessarily something that works for us really well, and that's why, you know, Irving had this great idea of building out a membership program. And part of it stems from our strong affiliate programs as well that linking that as a way to give them incentives to continue to come back even though it's not necessarily a subscription based business has really been kind of a point of differentiation for us because we don't thrive so well within that a customer is gonna go buy an aftercare product or even a tattoo bright in the next ninety days unless they have very high intent. So those are some other ways that we're very different.

[00:05:27] Kailin Noivo: Very interesting. And as you folks have grown from, like, d two c to also having retail partners, how are you thinking about, like, okay, how you brand yourself online, and then how do you kinda carry that through which retail partners you select and then how they actually expose your product? Like, maybe talk us through a bit about that. Like, how that you've been able to select some of your partners or so that you guys are partnered with, like, Walmart, for example. So, yeah, maybe talk us through that.

[00:05:53] Erin Murray: So when we were initially because I was definitely spearheading a lot of the retail strategy from the beginning. And when we were trying to pick retailers, we actually spent more time sort of wanting to understand, like, where our customer wanted us to show up, not where we thought we needed to be. So most brands, you know, at the time were thinking, oh, I need to be in prestige beauty. People within prestige beauty have tattoos. But I think we did multiple surveys across multiple years to figure out, like, hey, customers and community, where do you really wanna see us? What shelves do you wanna see us on? Does it look make more sense for us to be in first aid? Do you want us in men's personal care? Do you want us here? And the ultimate story really was they wanted to see us in more of the mass retailer, a Target, a Walmart. And they really wanted to see us and really envisioned us as part of the body care space. So that was a very interesting learning, and it's really behooved us to actually listen to our customers of where they wanted to find us because we've seen a lot of success there. That being said, we're expanding into Ulta marketplace. So we're on ultabeauty.com now, and I think it's a really interesting test for us. We're learning a lot more about our female consumer who, by the way, 50% or about 56% of our customer are women. So that customer cohort's shopping very differently than how our typical customer shops on Walmart or Amazon on our ecom site. So those are some learnings there. Now in terms of the brand strategy and how we show up both from a digital perspective and how that translates into retail, I am a firm believer that it really needs to feel cohesive. Right? So I think if you look at a Nike or you look at a Starbucks or you look at any of the bigger brands, their branding is consistent throughout any touch point the customer finds them. Now that's not to say we don't have a different personality and we don't play into trends, etcetera, on a social media platform, for example. But I think in terms of brand recognition, it's really important to make sure that it feels seamless where the customer is finding us through their journey.

[00:08:00] Kailin Noivo: That's really, really, really cool. Just to parlay that, Irving, into your membership program, talk to us a bit about why a membership program versus a subscription product. What kinda made you think a bit about that? And then talk to us a bit about the membership program and how that's going.

[00:08:15] Irving Gonzalez: Of course. So the thought behind it is mainly driven because maybe four or five of our products out of, like, 15, you could only subscribe to them. So it was a model that was only very selective. And whereas I was in other brands, um, the whole category their whole category was in the subscription model. For us, it was only a very select few products, which was not sustainable and very difficult to scale. For the membership, the way that we were thinking about it was that we have a very loyal consumer base and a very loyal fan base wherever they are. So we were trying to capitalize on that kind of momentum and build the membership program around it. Right now, we have the program gated, but we have plans in the future to change that. But the people who are in the program, they have been our best consumers. They have the highest LTV, the highest repeat purchase rate within a specific period of time, let's say, the last twelve months. So the program has been working much better than the subscription, and people are able to purchase pretty much any product rather than the select few that the subscription offered. That's not to say that any other brand shouldn't use subscription programs. Like, I've kind of honestly, the subscription program was working really well for them, but it's just not a model that really works for us.

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[00:10:06] Kailin Noivo: I'm curious because I'm a bit of a tattoo novice. If I'm gonna be honest, I don't have any tattoos. Is it something that you want to do, you need to do, or is it more of like a luxury thing, kinda like a face cream? Or is it more of, like, a brushing your teeth in terms of, like, using your products?

[00:10:23] Erin Murray: So I think it is a must have. I think there are multiple ways that you can try to heal or recover a new tattoo as an example. However, we've done a lot of research. We've partnered with dermatologists on the right products, the right ingredients to support the actual health and recovery of micro wounds, which essentially is what a tattoo is. So I would argue to say it's something that you must do in order for it to actually heal properly for it to continue to thrive so that you don't get, like, irregular ink pulling. You don't get irregular scabbing because all of those things contribute to essentially bad tattoos at the end of the day. So our goal is to really provide you a solution that's going to support the best tattoos that you can have. Now in terms of, like, long term care, I think it is important to use products that have ingredients that are going to support that as well. I'll give you another example. So sunscreen. Sunscreen can be argued that that product is a luxury product, that you'd only need to use it during certain times of the day or in outings, etcetera. But, actually, the impacts of blue light, for example, on your computer are in UV rays from that are impacting your skin. I would say, like, the light coming from the window is impacting your skin. I think people aren't thinking about it. So as an example, sunscreen is really necessary. Then you add another layer into that, and you think about, well, should I be using chemical sunscreens or mineral sunscreens? Chemical isn't gonna have as much of a white cast. Mineral sits on top of the skin. So when we're thinking about art, which basically tattoo is a living art on your living skin, how would you want to approach taking care of that? Sunscreen becomes very thinking about adding chemicals into the dermis is probably not the best thing in terms of ink longevity. So, again, that becomes a product, sunscreen in general. I'm like a big proponent of sunscreen, by the way. It's something that you should be wearing every day, all day outside of when you're going to sleep. So to me, there's a lot of functions in which these are things that you should be doing if you're really serious about keeping your tattoos healthy for the long run.

[00:12:30] Kailin Noivo: Very cool. I've just learned a lot. This wouldn't be a podcast in 2026 if we didn't talk about AI. So let's maybe shift to how you folks are thinking about AI. I think one of the earliest use cases was definitely, like, marketing copy, things like that, branding. I know there's a lot of people that are kinda creating their own branded voice. We do it for some of our LinkedIn posts. Curious, Erin, for you, how are you thinking about AI adoption in your teams? How have you looked at that?

[00:12:57] Erin Murray: Yeah. So we actually were some of the first adopters for generative AI, which was really interesting years ago. So for example, some of our holiday campaigns, we had Santas that had tattoos on their skin, etcetera. And, you know, it's fun to play around with that. But, also, at the same time, our customer is very sensitive to AI, I would say, specifically from a generative perspective. Like, there's a lot of brands actually right now that are using generative AI for model, photography, videos, etcetera. We really take a strong stance that it's important for us to be as authentic as possible, so real models. While it's a bigger investment for us, it's a more authentic approach. And our customer, you know, really is sensitive to that. Right? And so we wanna make sure as a brand that we are being as authentic as possible with tattoo culture, with showcasing real tattoos on real skin. So that's one approach. Now in terms of optimization from messaging, etcetera, I think to ignore AI is silly. I think it really has helped optimize our roles in so many ways, but I don't think it should be the end all, be all in our communication strategy. At the end of the day, the customer loves the speed to market with AI and the innovation with AI, but there's still a humanity level that needs to be implemented. They don't want to feel like it's AI. So it's really a big balance in how you leverage it.

[00:14:22] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. It makes sense. I'm seeing, like, kind of in retail, people are looking at it two ways. One for operational efficiency, so getting employees to use AI. And then another one is, like, AI content, AI copywriting, and that one's a bit more, like, finicky. Right? Like because that's where you have to be a bit more careful. If your images are all AI generated and it looks like a cartoon, then, like, that's probably not the move. Right? Irvin, curious for your role, how are you thinking about, like, retention, life cycle marketing, and things that are kind of all relevant to you when it comes to AI?

[00:14:52] Irving Gonzalez: I feel like, Erin, you've mentioned quite a lot of the points that I was gonna mention. But, generally, AI, quite honestly, I've been working with it maybe for, like, two to three months. But it has been very useful in terms of operations right now. It does help with speed and analysis and testing. Also, whenever we need to, like, create some copy for pretty much any messaging, but the one thing that it does lack is a soul. So whenever we get anything from AI, we'd have to, like, run it through pretty much Erin, just to make sure that it has the brand in there just because it hits some of the points, but it's just not quite right. So it does help speed the process and generate ideas, which are in line with what you would expect. It's just the brand is not there. Another thing that I did notice whenever starting with AI is just that you do have to learn how to prompt. Otherwise, you're going to spend just as much time as creating whatever it is that you're trying to create by yourself. So learning how to prompt is a good base. In that way, you can be a little bit successful with it.

[00:16:08] Erin Murray: I think the other places in where we are leveraging AI is automation in terms of reporting. That has been really helpful in terms of speed to market. How do we pivot? How do we reframe? Whether that is email flows or SMS flows as an example? That data, the quicker we can get it, the quicker that we can actually address and make pivots. So I think in terms of retention, those are some other ways that we really leverage it and to ensure that we're staying, one, on top of the trends. We're improving our open rates. We're improving conversion rates. We're always evolving. Those are some other critical ways that we're kind of leveraging it within the space.

[00:16:44] Kailin Noivo: Very cool. As we're looking to wrap up, I'm curious, Erin, a question for you because you mentioned you joined pretty early on. At what moment did you know that the business had product market fit? Like, is there a distinct moment?

[00:16:57] Erin Murray: You know, it's really funny you asked that question. So when I had joined you know, I have many friends in the beauty industry. They were like, what is Mad Rabbit? Never heard of this brand. And I already had tattoos. Actually, in my interview, one of the team members I was interviewing with at the time, he's like, do you have tattoos? They're like, it's not a requirement, but we wanna sort of understand. Like, do you understand the culture? And I was like, yeah. I have, like, seven. You just can't see them. Now I have, like, 15, which is kind of wild to think about, but it happens being in the space. But in terms of the market fit, where I really saw the opportunity, I mean, when I had joined and we had only really been around for to a year and a half when I had joined, we'd already built our Instagram following to a 100,000 followers. I think I already saw the appetite, and tattoo culture was continuing to grow. Historically, if you look at it from, like, 2012, about 20% of North Americans had at least one tattoo in comparison to, like, if you fast forward to 2022, which was, like, less than a year after I had started. I had started in September 2021, and by, like, February 2022, a new survey came out. About 41% of North Americans had at least one. So you're talking about a double in a decade. So I think I kind of understood that there was product fit right away just because of the growth segments that I was seeing, what was happening within the COVID space. So as an example, like, that was kind of, like, sort of the beginning still of COVID. And people were at this point in their life cycle where they're like, you know what? I don't know how much time. Life is confusing. The world is confusing right now. I wanna do all of the things I was never going to do before. And you saw a surge of increase of people getting tattoos because they wanted to express themselves. So I think that was kind of a peak moment for me. I also just really love niche building categories. I think I have this knack of sort of understanding the consumer mindset, what's happening. I spend a lot of time trying to understand consumers in general, and I saw that there was a big opportunity here. There was just, like, no way around it. And then I think when we were able to finally get into retail, which we secured that in beginning of twenty twenty three and then launched in September of Walmart doors, I really knew then, like, there was a lot more opportunity here. And the customer you know, the majority of our customer at the time was Coastal, But to get into Walmart doors where their primary customer is, like the Midwest, the middle parts of America, you really can see there is a big opportunity at that point when a big retailer like that wants to take a bet on you.

[00:19:38] Kailin Noivo: I love it. Cool. Well, we're at time, so I really appreciate your time, Irving and Erin. It was a phenomenal episode. I learned a lot. Thanks.

[00:19:45] Irving Gonzalez: Thank you.

[00:19:46] Kailin Noivo: Thank you so much.

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