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Tattoo aftercare brand Mad Rabbit saw quick and early success on TikTok. But with the platform’s future in potential flux, the strategy is shifting.
The direct-to-consumer brand has nearly 600,000 TikTok followers and has been posting more of its TikTok content to social platforms like YouTube and Snapchat in the last year, as well as increasing spend.
This was spurred by uncertainties over TikTok’s future, plus technical issues with TikTok Shop and tracking conversion campaigns. As such, Mad Rabbit stopped buying ads on the platform in August 2023 for eight months.
Mad Rabbit reported $20 million in revenue in 2023. While nearly 60% of its sales come from Meta behemoths like Facebook and Instagram, TikTok generates 15% of its sales. While smaller, the platform’s role in building new audiences is important, partly thanks to the For You page algorithm driving product discovery.
“Whenever you post [to TikTok], it’s not your followers that are seeing it all the time, it’s multiple people outside your following,” said Mad Rabbit co-founder and chief revenue officer Selom Agbitor, who will be speaking at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week event in New York next week about the impact of a potential TikTok ban. “A lot of content that does well for us on TikTok also ends up doing well on YouTube Shorts.”
The ongoing debate in Washington, D.C., over TikTok’s fate in the U.S., should its Chinese ownership fail to divest, has prompted some DTC brands like Mad Rabbit that rely on the platform to test content, reach new audiences and boost sales to diversify their platform strategy.
Mad Rabbit debuted on TikTok in late 2021, getting cut through with its soothing gel product swipe videos, where tattoo artists applied the gel with a wooden stick to enhance the appearance of tattoos, driving brand awareness. This propelled its followers from 50,000 to nearly 600,000 over three years, with videos like applying healing gel on tattoo sleeves netting millions of views and over 1,000 comments.
“We’d have over 1 million views on every other post,” said Agbitor. “That’s how easy and fast it got for us.”