With Neon Lights and Selfie Mirrors, This New York-Based Piercing Studio is Redefining an Industry
Where do you go to get your ears pierced? Ask any regular, level-headed person this question, and you’re likely to hear: inside a dark tattoo parlor, at a mall kiosk, maybe even in a friend's kitchen with a needle and an ice cube. People who otherwise appreciate quality customer service wind up surrendering to the dim, intimidating, sometimes sketchy settings of piercing “studios” because there’s no place better. Studs is changing that. Founders Anna Harman and Lisa Bubbers—two former in-person service executives (Harman was chief customer officer of Jetblack, while Bubbers served as Homepolish’s VP of marketing)—found a gap in the piercing industry and were instantly excited by the prospect of filling it. “Nobody has touched the world of ear piercings since the age of Claire’s and Piercing Pagoda,” Bubbers tells us. “Anna and I wanted to be the first movers and innovators in this space.” Studs, which opened in SoHo late last year, is for customers who wish to relax and get inspired in an upbeat, neon-tinged studio, where they can shop through a whimsical assortment of jewelry and, if they’d like, put a stylish new hole or two in their heads.
When it came to creating brand DNA, the concept of a comfortable space for self-expression is what drove the founders from the beginning. “Anna and I loved the brands we grew up with in the ‘90s, like dELiA*s, Rock Candy, and Wet Seal,” Bubbers says. “But now, even with the slew of brands by millennials for millennials, it’s rare to find companies that are creating retail experiences.” To bridge the gap between the ’90s-era super-stores and millennial-age experiential shops, Bubbers and Harman knew that the interior design of Studs would drive their branding. To create a comfortable, welcoming, stylish setting for customers, they tapped Justin Huxol of HUXHUX Design. His work has run the gamut from Dr. Barbara Sturm’s first US flagship to the holiday store for New York Magazine’s The Strategist, making him one of the leading designers in the world of contemporary startups.
“We wanted the store design to relate to the materials and services we provide,” Bubbers says. “I wanted to play with neon shades and lightness, which was the direction I gave Justin. His previous work is very light, bright, and contemporary.” Artist Dan Flavin’s light installations, retail work done by Gachot Studios, and even the diner in Saved By The Bell were included in Bubbers’ effervescent and evolving moodboard. The resulting space is an amalgam of all that, and then some: brightly lit, quirky, and clad in mirrors, Studs offers an irresistible backdrop for selfies; a space where your imagination can run wild. The fun interiors, combined with a casual air of formality (to ease those pre-piercing jitters) is what sets the brand apart. The organic shape of ears and the sharp geometries of jewelry and gems are what inspired the overall design concept, with its rounded archways and display counters, contrasted against stark, industrial design elements. “I wanted Studs to speak to women, men, non-binary people, moms and kids, college students, and whoever else may pop in, so appealing to a wide range of customers was a really important aspect. I think Justin did a great job of putting it all together,” Bubbers adds.
We got the chance to speak with Huxol on how he brought the design to life.
ELLE DECOR: Tell me a little bit about how Anna Harman and Lisa Bubbers reached out to you for this project.
JUSTIN HUXOL: The project manager for The Strategist’s holiday pop-up was working with the Studs founders, and recommended us based on that commission.
ED: This type of retail space isn’t new to HUXHUX design. When designing these contemporary, Gen Z-driven shops, do you consider the habits of these customers prior to drawing up the designs?
JH: We design for a bunch of different markets. Our clients range from ultra-luxury boutiques for Dr. Barbara Sturm to Gen-Z meccas of Bulletin stores. We definitely design into each market and the unique desires that each presents. For Studs, we knew before we started that communal space is very important for their shoppers. If you’re going to get pierced, chances are you are showing up with one, if not four of your closest friends. It’s a social event, it’s ritualistic, it’s a real transformation moment. So designing a space to foster all this activity was central to our design concept.
ED: Unlike other aesthetically similar stores, Studs is a place where people are making fairly major decisions that can be painful and sometimes scary. What were some design elements you incorporated to ease those nerves?
JH: As with any transformational process, piercing is the end product of often a lot of consideration and aspiration. That said, the process itself sparks the need for a healthy dose of distraction and calming of the nerves. To that end, our design concept was to provide an environment where one can get lost in glowing light, wacky reflections, and of course a ton of mirrors where they can pose with their soon-to-be piercing jewelry. Surfaces are clad in gold mirrors, standard mirrors, distorted mirrors in a variety of lighting conditions to facilitate this process. It’s a delicate balance of providing all sorts of ways to project your new self image while also enjoying the anticipation.
ED: You mentioned that you drew inspiration for the store design from the geometry of jewelry and the concept of light. What was your creative process for connecting those dots and executing them?
JH: Shape play is HUXHUX Design’s wheelhouse. I’ve taught numerous studios at Parsons that focus on playful geometry in the context of retail design. For each project, we develop a formal language that directly responds to our clients, and these languages tend to have a clarity that affords adaptation across many scales. The design must have a capacity to adapt and grow with the brand. For Studs, this was a process of becoming extremely in tune with the product and the shopping experience. It allowed us to adapt global shape logic at different scales so that something as small as an earring holder speaks to a gallery wall installation. While geometry connects most directly with product, light conditions the experience.
ED: Where else did you go—both physically and otherwise—to get inspired?
JH: We typically turn to design research as the grounds for our inspiration. Wendell Castle’s plastic furniture design, sculpture from Greg Bogin, drawings from Friends with You, Charles Ray photographs...it’s all fair game and touch points for our inspiration. We also looked to artists that are inspiring us with current jewelry design and figural augmentation, like Austin James Smith, Salvjiia, and Boldtron.
ED: How did you strike a balance between playfulness and professionalism?
JH: There’s definitely a front of house/back of house shift. Once you enter the piercing rooms, you quickly notice that they are very white, minimal, and clinical in a space-age sort of way. We deliberately designed this shift so that as you enter the piercing rooms from the color-changing mirrored hallway, where you probably took five to 10 selfies in the mirror, the tone changes and most of the visual engagement of the sales floor is removed to make for a quiet, clean, focused space.
ED: And in terms of the visual merchandizing tools, what was that like to design?
JH: Our process involved making physical maquettes of each merchandising tool, playing with the actual merchandise, and digitally modeling each sculptural display tool so that we fully tested and prototyped before production.
ED: Favorite part of the entire project?
JH: Because the space comes to life with all of the dynamic colorful light, we are obsessed with the ON/OFF nature of the space. If you ever get a chance to peep the shop early in the morning before any lights come on, you’ll see a very different Studs. It’s all white, quiet, and asleep. Once the lights come on, the space comes to life and becomes uniquely interactive and full of perceptual surprises.
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