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Mad Rabbit's Growth Playbook: A $56m Tattoo Skincare Side Hustle

Plus: How they find new customers through Amazon ads

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Tattooing has a long and diverse history, spanning across different cultures and periods. The oldest evidence of tattooing was found in the Alps and dates back over 5,300 years.

Despite being once considered a taboo, tattoos have gained widespread acceptance as a form of self-expression. Athletes and celebrities have helped in popularising tattoos and bringing them into mainstream culture. I think this has influenced the changing attitudes and consumer preferences, responsible for driving the industry's growth.

Today, the global tattoo market is thriving, and it’s expected to grow from $1.8b to $3.5b by 2029, with studies indicating that 1 out of 2 millennials are more likely to get tattoos.

On the back of this, Mad Rabbit found a gap in the DTC tattoo skincare space, providing an alternative option to traditionally mass-produced products that are generally deemed harmful to tattooed skin.

In today’s edition, I’ll be covering the following:

  • Mad Rabbit’s origin story

  • How they leveraged brand advocates to increase DTC sales

  • Finding new-to-brand shoppers with Amazon ads

  • Tactics that helped them grow their TikTok audience from 50k to 600k

  • Overcoming IOS14.5 tracking changes

  • Trend spotlight: Rising cost of influencer marketing

Hope you enjoy today’s breakdown, and don’t forget to vote in the poll 🙏

- Dev

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FEATURE CASE STUDY
Mad Rabbit

Context: Mad Rabbit (MR)started in 2019 when two college friends, Oliver Zak and Selom Agbitor, identified a gap in the tattoo aftercare market. Frustrated by the outdated, petroleum-based products available, they decided to create their own natural tattoo balm using just seven simple ingredients.

With a $600 investment, Oliver and Selom launched Mad Rabbit as a direct-to-consumer brand. During their first summer in business, they generated $300,000 in sales, proving there was a demand for their high-quality tattoo care products.

Initially, they kickstarted with a focus on one product, and one advertising channel.

Today, Mad Rabbit has grown significantly, raising $16 million in funding and securing a $500,000 investment from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank. The brand's commitment to clean, natural ingredients and its focus on empowering tattoo enthusiasts have helped it dominate the untapped tattoo aftercare market.

Once they found product-market fit through paid social ads, their growth marketing strategy was largely driven by creating and capturing existing demand across popular channels and kickstarting an ambassador program.

AMBASSADOR PROGRAM
Brand Advocates Driving Sales

Mad Rabbit reached new potential customers by tapping into the audiences of people who liked the product first through their ambassador program, helping them cut through the noise of traditional marketing channels.

This quickly became an instrumental growth tactic, helping them acquire over 7,000 brand ambassadors who enjoyed being part of the brand.

When ambassador signs up this is how they’ve structured their benefits:

  • 20% commission on all approved sales

  • 20% off on all purchases

  • They can earn rewards by completing social challenges

  • Access to private online communities to meet like-minded people via Discord and social media.

This is how they get the most out of ambassadors:

  1. They share a unique code with their network, encouraging referrals and driving incentives.

  2. Through their exclusive rewards program, they encourage ambassadors to create user-generated content (UGC, telling about the brand and its products to their social audiences.

AMAZON ADS
Capturing New-To-Brand Audiences

Taking a full-funnel approach on Amazon allowed MR to ensure that they are consistent with getting in front of shoppers who have:

  1. High intent

  2. In the mood to spend money on Amazon

Reviews are the golden currency on Amazon. They’ve focused on generating as many reviews as possible to help convert customers and push their rankings up higher across their category to find and reach new-to-brand audiences.

This is how they approached Amazon ads:

  1. Sponsored products focused on capturing related product search terms like “tattoo care” and “tattoo cream” to make sure they show up on relevant search queries.

  2. Sponsored brands: Used to engage with new shoppers by showcasing a professional video that highlights the benefits of Mad Rabbit's products.

  3. Sponsored Display is to cover all touchpoints across the entire shopping journey.

On Amazon, the key metric to measure the success of pay-per-click ads is to maintain your ACOS aka advertising cost of sales through regular optimisation practices.

This is how they optimised their campaigns:

  • Gather data on product trends, customer behaviour, reviews, and competition.

  • Identified popular search terms, top products, and ad performance metrics like click and conversion shares.

  • Use insights to make better decisions about product promotion, listing optimization, and how to refine ad strategy for better performance.

TIKTOK ADS
Going From 50k to 600k Followers

TikTok has been the fastest-growing channel for them.

They’ve increased their followers from 50k to 600k followers, generated millions of views, received 1,000+ comments, and importantly generated 15% of DTC sales.

Strategy: Mad Rabbit understood the power of TikTok's For You page algorithm in driving product discovery and reaching new audiences beyond their followers. This helped them to focus on producing creatives that were native to the platform and ads that would stop scrollers in their track.

Key ad angles that worked for them:

  • Tattoo inspirational videos

  • Soothing gel product swipe videos

  • Education tutorials

  • Reaction videos

TikTok enabled them to double down on successful creatives and allowed them to find the right creatives to repurpose across YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.

FACEBOOK & INSTAGRAM ADS
Driving Majority of DTC Sales From Meta

Source: Meta Ad Library

Meta has been steady in driving sales, making up close to 60% of their DTC sales from Facebook and Instagram. Many of their first-time customers came from paid social ads and it still underpins their entire digital acquisition strategy.

Why Meta: The tattoo culture is diverse — you have 18-year-olds getting inked, chefs, athletes, and sub-niches like Harley Davidson riders. Meta allowed them to reach tattoo enthusiasts based on interests and behaviours rather than demographics. Plus, it gave them real-time feed during the initial testing phase that they iterated on.

What did they do: The founders started running ads before they had an actual physical product to make sure there was a product-market fit. Using the feedback they received from their initial campaigns, they launched their first product (tattoo balm), which generated $300k in sales by the end of summer.

They scaled quickly after that until the IOS14.5 tracking changes that brought attribution gaps in their data and skyrocketed conversion costs.

They figured they needed to offset higher top-of-the-funnel costs that they were experiencing on Facebook. So, they did two massive pivots in their strategy:

  1. Created a deal with Inked (an online magazine) who have over 60 million followers across their socials. They agreed to exclusively and aggressively promote the brand in exchange for owning part of Mad Rabbit.

  2. Leveraged TikTok organic where they had generated over 20 million views and 400,000 followers.

Both of these top-of-funnel traffic feeders helped to make Facebook ads work again as it was getting more accurate data that campaigns could optimise towards. Meta’s powerful powerful remarketing capability meant they were converting people coming in from the new TOF channels.

Ad angles that are working for them:

  1. Benefits of using their products

  2. User-generated content style

  3. Testimonials of existing customers used in the ads

  4. Seasonal promotions/discount ads i.e. Mother’s Day, 25% off promo code

TREND SPOTLIGHT
Influencer Marketing Costs Are Rising

Influencer marketing is getting pricier and more complicated for brands. They want more money, often through agents, which is tough for smaller brands. Some give products directly, but scaling up has become difficult.

As a result, brands are increasingly focusing on personal connections and real content. Although it's tough out there, influencer marketing still works. Brands are studying results closely and trying different methods, like using local supporters/micro-influencers instead of costly prominent ones.

Some alternative strategies that brands are exploring at the moment:

  • Focusing more on measurement of influencer campaigns using tech.

  • Working with local advocates who may have fewer followers but a more authentic connection with their audience. Making the most of their higher engagement rates.

  • Creating offers and distributing them via influencers gain brand awareness and maintain return on investment.

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