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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 (DTC) brand has nearly 600,000 TikTok followers and has been posting more of its TikTok content to social platforms like YouTube and Snap in the last year, as well as increasing spend.
This is spurred by uncertainties with TikTok’s future, plus tech 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 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 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 over TikTok’s fate in the U.S., should its Chinese ownership fail to divest, has prompted some direct-to-consumer (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 a million views on every other post,” said Agbitor. “That’s how easy and fast it got for us.”
Mad Rabbit’s TikTok content expanded to include educational tutorials on products and reaction videos, these are also posted on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. The content is created by a four-member content creation team, posting either once or twice a day on TikTok.
