How DTC Brand Mad Rabbit Cut Their CAC by 50% Using Refunnel
Mad Rabbit had whitelisted fewer than 20 creators in 7 years of running the brand. With Refunnel, they hit 1,000+ in 60 days, cut CAC from the $50–60 range to the $20–30 range.
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Mad Rabbit, co-founded by Selom in 2019, makes tattoo aftercare products built to keep ink looking brighter, popping harder, and lasting longer. Their lineup spans 11–12 products that cover the full tattoo journey, from pre-tattoo prep to during-session care to long-term aftercare, anchored by their flagship tattoo balm that launched the brand.
Mad Rabbit sells direct-to-consumer through their Shopify website, on Amazon, on TikTok Shop, and in retail through Walmart, Target, Ulta, and roughly 1,000 tattoo studios across the U.S.
Revenue splits:
1. 60% Amazon
2. 30% DTC and TikTok Shop
3. 10% across retail and tattoo parlors.
Creator-led content is the engine behind their 50% CAC Reduction, and this was achieved through Refunnel.
We sat down with Selom, Mad Rabbit's co-founder, who runs creator strategy and paid acquisition for the brand.
Before Refunnel:
Before using Refunnel, Mad Rabbit's whitelisting workflow was barely a workflow at all.
The team knew whitelisting was the unlock for CAC, but the operational lift kept them stuck. CAC was climbing into the $50–60 range, Meta spend was already in the low six figures a month, and inventory and payroll costs were rising in parallel.
- Manual Whitelisting That Didn't Scale: Onboarding a creator meant tracking down their handle, working through Business Manager, sending the request, and waiting on the creator to navigate it. Most of the time, nothing happened. In 5–7 years of running the brand, the team got fewer than 20 creators whitelisted total.
- A First Run at Tooling That Didn't Stick: Mad Rabbit tried one of our competitors, but the tool didn't fit how they actually worked. As Selom put it: "It just didn't feel like it had all the tools I wanted to use." The team cycled off, then back, then off again before settling on Refunnel.
- TikTok Shop Stuck in Neutral: The brand had been trying to crack TikTok Shop for two years with no real traction. They had a Discord, but TikTok creators were buried inside the broader brand server with no dedicated channel or strategy.
- Rising CAC With No Margin Lever: With ad costs, inventory, and payroll all climbing, the team needed a way to bring acquisition costs down fast. Whitelisting was the obvious answer, but they couldn't operationalize it.
The result: a creator pipeline that produced fewer than 20 whitelisted creators across the brand's entire history, a TikTok Shop that wouldn't grow, and a CAC line that kept moving in the wrong direction.
4 Ways Mad Rabbit Is Using Refunnel
- Whitelisting at Scale: Selom uses Refunnel to surface every creator who has ever posted about Mad Rabbit, then sends them the whitelisting link in bulk. Creators get paid 5% of the ad spend their content drives, so Mad Rabbit only pays for content that actually performs. Within 60 days, the team had over 1,000 creators whitelisted, a 50x jump on what they'd accumulated in the previous seven years combined.
- Social Listening with Tagged Collections: The team organizes captured content into collections inside Refunnel, some by product (tattoo balm, tattoo wash, lotion, lip balm), so finding the right clip for a campaign takes minutes, not hours.
- Top-Creator Identification for the TikTok Shop Discord: Refunnel's data surfaces the brand's highest-performing creators and affiliates. Mad Rabbit pulls those names into a dedicated TikTok Shop Discord, so TikTok creators have a focused space and the team has a focused community to seed and pay. The Discord now has 800 members with 20–30 members actively posting.
- Always-On Outreach Engine: Refunnel runs in the background every day, surfacing new creators to onboard. Combined with the brand's existing posting culture, the brand now captures roughly 100 daily tags between Instagram and TikTok and feeds the strongest of them straight into paid.
Their Workflow
How Selom turns a Mad Rabbit fan's video into a whitelisted ad:
1. Find the creator: Refunnel surfaces every person posting about Mad Rabbit, including posts that mention the brand without tagging it.
2. Send the whitelist link: Selom sends Refunnel's whitelisting link out in bulk with an outreach tool to anyone who's posted about Mad Rabbit, with the 5%-of-ad-spend offer baked in.
3. Wait for the green light: When a creator accepts, the whitelisting permission gets granted automatically; the ad is ready to run from the creator's handle.
4. Pull the content: The media buyer opens the relevant collection in Refunnel, downloads the clip, and ships it as a partnership ad on Meta from the creator's handle, so the ad shows up in feed looking like a creator post, not a brand post.
5. Invite the best ones deeper: The strongest performers get an invite to the TikTok Shop Discord, where Mad Rabbit seeds product, runs challenges, and turns one-off creators into a recurring engine.
The Results
Within two to three months on Refunnel, Mad Rabbit went from fewer than 20 lifetime whitelisted creators to over 1,000. CAC dropped from $50–60 to $20–30 at an LTV of 2.3–2.4x. TikTok Shop revenue began doubling month over month after the dedicated Discord went live.
Over the last 12 months on the platform:
- 24,000+ pieces of creator content captured
- 10,000+ pieces captured in the last 90 days alone
- 8,200+ active creators posting about the brand
- 130 million impressions
- TikTok Shop revenue doubling month over month
Refunnel turned a stalled, manual whitelisting process into a repeatable acquisition engine that cut CAC in half and unlocked a TikTok Shop channel the team had been chasing for two years.
Why Refunnel?
Refunnel stood out because it allowed them to:
- Whitelist at Volume: A single workflow turned 7 years of <20 whitelisted creators into 1,000+ in two months — the operational lift that had blocked the strategy disappeared.
- Surface Top Creators with Real Data: Performance data on every creator and affiliate makes it obvious who deserves a Discord invite, a free product drop, or a higher kickback tier.
- Cut CAC Without Cutting Spend: With creator-led whitelisted ads doing the heavy lifting, Mad Rabbit dropped CAC from the $50–60s into the $20–30s while keeping Meta spend in the low six figures a month.
Selom's advice to brands still on the fence about Refunnel:
"Refunnel is going to drop your customer acquisition cost. I think in the environment where customer costs are increasing and to stay competitive, you have to find a way to drop it. Because not only are customer acquisition costs increasing, but also inventory, other costs, employees, it's all increasing. So if you want to stay competitive, you have to find a way to drop certain costs. And I would say the biggest thing is dropping your CAC."
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