How DTC Brand Mad Rabbit Cut Their CAC by 50% Using Refunnel

Mad Rabbit was built on community from day one. In 2019, co-founder Selom Agbemava and his college friend launched with a single product, a tattoo balm designed to make ink pop and last longer and a clear belief: people who love their tattoos want to show them off.

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That instinct was right.

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The brand grew to 11 products covering the full tattoo care journey, distribution across Amazon, their website, TikTok Shop, Walmart, Target, Ulta, and roughly 1,000 tattoo parlors.

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They were generating more than 100 organic tags a day across their 14 social media accounts.

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Their community was real, vocal, and active.

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But they couldn't access it at scale for paid media.

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Whitelisting — getting creator permission to run their organic content as ads — was theoretically one of their highest-leverage growth tools.

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In practice, it was a manual nightmare.

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The process meant requesting access through TikTok's business manager, waiting for creators to respond, then managing each relationship individually. In seven years, Mad Rabbit had managed to whitelist fewer than 20 creators.

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"We used to try to do whitelisting, but it was just too difficult to figure out," said Selom. "In seven years we probably had less than 20 people whitelisting."

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The content was there. The creators were there. The infrastructure to use it wasn't.

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Turning community into a content machine

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When Mad Rabbit came to Refunnel, Selom's approach was deceptively simple: start with everyone who had ever posted about the brand.

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Using Refunnel's social listening, his team identified every creator who had organically tagged Mad Rabbit on TikTok.

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Then they exported that list and used an outreach tool to mass-send a Refunnel whitelisting link, no individual DM-ing, no manual follow-up.

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The offer? Five percent of ad spend.

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Within 24 to 48 hours, the responses started rolling in.

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"Within the first couple of months we had over a thousand people give us access to whitelist," said Selom. "That has helped a lot in driving down our customer acquisition costs."

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They were able to whitelist one thousand creators in two months.

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Building a system, not a campaign

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Mad Rabbit didn't treat Refunnel as a one-time campaign.

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They built a repeatable workflow around it.

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Today, the process runs in four steps.

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First, Refunnel surfaces the right creators, people already posting about Mad Rabbit, filtered and ranked using our social listening tool.

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Second, their team exports that list and uses a mass outreach tool to send whitelisting invitations at scale.

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Third, creators who opt in get funneled into a Discord community, turning a permission grant into an ongoing relationship.

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Fourth, they run ads to those pieces of content, and when one sticks, they go all in.

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The content side has followed the same logic.

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Mad Rabbit no longer pays for UGC.

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Instead, TikTok Shop product seeding drives a steady stream of organic content.

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Creators receive samples, post naturally, and Mad Rabbit captures and repurposes that content across Meta, Instagram, and beyond.

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The numbers show it working: 24,000 pieces of content in the last twelve months.

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Over 8,200 creators. 52 million impressions. In Selom's words, "It's a lot."

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What changed for the media buyer

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Before Refunnel, Mad Rabbit's media buyers were working with a thin library of creator-licensed content.

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They could run their own brand assets, but whitelisted ads, which tend to perform better because they look native, were scarce to none.

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Now, the library is deep.

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Refunnel's social listening helps the team sort content into collections: some organized by product, others flagged for performance potential.

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Media Buyers can pull from thousands of assets rather than dozens.

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The downstream impact is where Selom focuses most.

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"Through whitelisting — yeah, it's our acquisition cost coming down. That's the biggest thing I would say we've gotten."

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For a brand spending in the low six figures every month on Meta, even marginal improvements in CAC compound fast.

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Their CAC went from $50-$60 to $20-30.

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All of it, attributed to whitelisting at scale.

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What they'd tell other brands

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Mad Rabbit operated for years with a tool that wasn't working before returning to Refunnel when whitelisting became the priority.

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The lesson Selom draws from that experience is direct.

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"In an environment where customer acquisition costs are increasing, to stay competitive you have to find a way to drop them. 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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Refunnel made that possible by removing the friction between an engaged creator community and a paid media program that could actually use it.

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The content was always there. Getting access to it at scale just required the right system.

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Results at a glance

• <20 whitelisted creators in 7 years → 1,000+ in 2 months
• 24,000 pieces of UGC captured in 12 months
• 8,200+ creators in the Refunnel ecosystem
• 52 million impressions
• CAC declining while scaling Meta to low six figures/month