By Jennifer Liu,Tasia Jensen

Copyright cnbc

After the influencer’s viral post, Schneider started a formal round of seed funding. While Rowan was seeing positive feedback from customers, getting investors onboard was a different story.

“Fundraising is awful,” Schneider says. “People tell you that you’re an idiot over and over and over again, and then you have to pick yourself up and say, ‘OK, am I? No, I know this is right. I know I can do this.'”

During one particularly low moment, Schneider says she was presented an opportunity to take investor meetings while on a family trip to California, only to be told “no” repeatedly: “Not only was I missing my family vacation, but I was being told that the business idea wasn’t big enough for them.”

It’s not lost on her that investors, mostly men, didn’t see the potential in her business that caters primarily to women. “Male investors are typically the allocators of capital, and because they don’t typically get their ears pierced, I felt that there was an obvious gap in this market” they weren’t investing in, Schneider says. Other ear-piercing companies have been around for decades, she notes, but “the experience has not changed or evolved to modern day.”

Keep the momentum going long enough, though, and “eventually you meet somebody that believes in you,” she says.

The company raised $5 million in seed capital between 2018 to 2021. It went on to raise a series A in the spring of 2021, and by that fall, raised $20 million in series B funding.

“Since that time, we have not raised any money because our business, fortunately and with a lot of hard work, has been very profitable,” Schneider says. The company became profitable in 2023, she says.