Sun Bum: Tom Rinks. The Secrets of a Master Brand Builder (2023)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/7a798193a081d0e0

Hey everyone, so this week we're revisiting one of our absolute favorite episodes in the archive. It's my conversation with Tom Ranks. He's the founder of Sun Bom, the Suntan Lotion brand, and it is such a fun story with so many surprises, I highly recommend this one.
This episode first ran in March of twenty twenty three and I hope you enjoy it.
Cocoa Beach just sounded like a good place for a sunscreen company, right? Like Coco Beach. Coco Beach. So we got a P.O. box in Cocoa Beach. And then we uh you know all the calls were getting transferred up, you know, and then we were getting transferred up to Grand Rapids. To Grand Rapids, yeah, too. Like in the middle of winter?
Yes, so we'd be on the phone. I you know, nobody ever lied.
But we we did say, you know, if they call and ask how the weather is
Just tell'em it's unbelievable. If it's snowing outside or whatever,'cause then you're not lying. It's unbelievable.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements.
They built.
I'm Guy Roz, and on the show today, how Tom Ranks knew that a yellow gorilla on a wood grain background
Would be the perfect mascot for a sunscreen brand.
built Sunbom into a$400 million business.
Mm.
A few years ago on this show, we interviewed the founders of Method, the cleaning supply brand.
And if you heard that story.
You might remember that one of the co-founders, Eric Ryan, talked about how they spent most of their seed money on designing a bottle for the liquid dish soap. They wanted that bottle to look cool enough to make people leave it.
on the countertop rather than hiding it under the sink. And even though Eric and his co-founder Adam Lowry also focused on the quality of what was inside the bottle, they knew that wouldn't really matter if they couldn't capture the attention of a casual shopper.
And the way to do that
was through better design.
A well-designed product can have a massive impact on the decisions that consumers make. In fact, this was the exact conclusion reached in a study published in 2013 in the journal Psychological Science. The researchers found that
Rand design?
Is more important than price when the average consumer has to decide between two similar products.
And this might help explain how a sunscreen brand called Sun Bomb
Came out of nowhere in 2010 to capture a significant share of the Suntan lotion market, a market that had been dominated by legacy brands like Copper Tone, Neutrogena, and the Hawaiian Tropic.
Mm.
More than a year before co founder Tom Ranks launched Sunbum.
He thought about every inch of its design.
A now iconic wood grain pattern bottle with a yellow gorilla face staring right at you.
That bottle, as you will hear,
Drew on inspirations as disparate as 1960s surf culture, mid-century modern furniture designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Northern European typography, and Japanese streetwear.
But even before Tom launched that design,
He was already deep into the mechanics of branding.
He had designed and sold t shirts.
A luxury brand of tequila even produced a line of Christian videos, all made using principles of design thinking.

iconic contributions to the world of branding?
The Taco Bell Chihuahua as in
Yo-Kiero Taco Bell, an ad campaign you might remember from the 1990s.
At the time, Tom did not get credit or compensation for the Taco Bell Chihuahua.
So he sued Taco Bell and ended up in a five-year-long legal battle, which you will hear about because it is a wild story. Anyway, for now, what you need to know about Tom is that he grew up in Long Beach in Southern California.
His mom was a teacher, and his dad was, as Tom describes it.
Christian fundamentalist minister.
Tom's strict Christian upbringing eventually turned him away from organized religion.
Toward his true passion.
Drawing and painting.

He ended up studying art at Hope College, right outside Grand Rapids, Michigan.
He got married pretty young and after college he and his wife settled in Grand Rapids, where Tom went to work as a salesman.
At a furniture store.
Yeah, it was just a big chain store. They're out of Detroit.
And they were opening one in Grand Rapids and I
I was one of the first ones.
So you were like a floor sales
Prep.
Yeah, it was just full commission.
Mm-hmm. No salary.
You uh Wow. Yeah. It was really known
in Michigan is like the shark infested waters because
The salespeople wouldn't get off ya. So if you don't sell something, you don't get paid. So you could work for weeks and get nothing. So they did everything they could to sell ya.
And it's retail, so it's crazy hours every weekend, which is brutal on
My wife, for sure.
Yeah.
Alright, so you
You're working at this at the furniture store.
And
You're a young guy and you're in your like mid twenties, so Yep.
Did you start to think about what else you might want to do or were you
happy doing that and
Didn't have like a big plan or anything like that.
Yeah, I wouldn't say I was happy doing that, but I was being successful. I was supporting my wife. We'd had a kid
And she was able to stay at home, so I was feeling good about that. Um
I was just learning how to sell.
Which was
It would end up be everything.
I think his name's Ogilvy, Ogilvy and Mathers, he's like the father of marketing, I I believe.
He said something like, you know, in the modern world
You could be as creative as you want, but unless you know how to sell, you're just not gonna make it.
You know, you have to be able to sell your ideas. So so I think those
Years, those five years of that.
Art Van. It was called Art Van Furniture.
were just hugely, hugely important for my career. Yeah. I ended up becoming sales manager there.
Because I was getting so good at it.
And then people would come to me and ask me, you know, as they had different people on different types of furniture what to do and and I I give an example, like

If somebody was on a leather sofa, if it was a woman, I would send a guy.
salesperson over there and he would use words like soft and sexy and smooth as he touched the leather and if if there was a man customer on the same leather sofa
I would get a woman salesperson to go over and use words like strong and sexy and cool and rugged.
And if it was a family, big family jumping around on it.
I'd send the uh you know the old timer in and to talk about, you know, what a great investment it is, and how it wears like iron and it's easy to clean.
So just knowing what those customers wanted to feel.
about what they were purchasing.
Hm.
So it's almost like a game, like it right, sounds like It was a total game. Yeah.
Yeah.
Say, you know, customer pickup for Johnson, door three, customer pickup for Smith, door five, just to get a frenzy going with nobody picking up anything. Just to Oh you would just get on the loudspeaker and say that customer pickup, door five, even though there was no customer pickup. Yeah. Just to kinda create the impression that people are buying stuff.
Yeah, exactly. But yeah. Anyway, learned a lot. It was a great experience.
I guess while you're there, um, you start to like just
Play around with sketches.
Then.
You turn into a t shirt. Tammu.
What was that all about? How'd that start? Yeah, I was at uh I was with my wife at Holland State Park, which is a really nice beach there in Holland, which is
Forty five minutes from Grand Rapids.
And there was um surfers in the water.
Well, yeah, they were on longboards and I was just in shock'cause it's w there's no waves really, you know. You know, I would learn later that there w actually
was ways most of my kids learn to surf on Lake Michigan, but but these guys were out there and I thought it was funny and I
I commented to my wife about it and I went home and started sketching some cartoons and
I made like an old guy sitting on a s longboard with a beard and really skinny and cobwebs on him and
And it said surf Michigan waiting for the big one. You thought it was funny being from California. Totally, I thought it was funny. It was just kind of a joke and
And then I ended up
deciding to make a t-shirt with it and I made it one t-shirt on a Haynes Beefy t-shirt, a big neon letters on the top chest that surf Michigan and then it had and then it had the drawing and then the little caption underneath it waiting for the big one. Surf Michigan. Yeah.
Um
You know, without really even knowing what I was doing one day it
Art van furniture. On my break I called Meyer, which is a chain of about a hundred stores. Grocery stores, right? They're like a tar they're like a Target. So I call there, ask for their surfware buyer.
and got a hold of an assistant or somebody and I said I was a rep from a surf war company I wanted to show.
A surf line.
You said you were a rep from a surf brand. I was a rep for a surf brand. I had one T shirt, so I I got an appointment.
And then on my day off
I went to that appointment.
This big huge corporate offices, super impressive. And they told me to wait, you know, over here in the lobby and there was guys with rolling racks and I think somebody had one of those big huge cell phones at the time and and I had one T shirt.
In a little suit bag. I was sitting there with my bad corduroy suit.
I almost left when they
Called my name and said to go set up and
one of the rooms and so and wait for the buyer. So I walked into the room, it's this huge room and has this big grid on the wall where you can put all your your you know, your sweatshirts and t shirts and hats and everything. You can just make you show it all together.
And so I just put my one T shirt on the thing, a little wire hanger, hung it up.
Turn the lights on and spread the drawings out.
And waited.
And then Vivian Dreyer walked in.
And she Do you still remember her name?
I still know her. I still talk to her. Wow. Yeah, she changed my life.
Yeah.
She uh yeah, she walks in and looks at me and looks at the wall and sees that one T shirt sitting there.
And I just came clean. I I had one only one choice, just to come clean.
And I just said, Hey
I work at Art Van Furniture. I'm not a surfer. I just was at the beach.
a few weeks ago and saw this. These guys surfing and thought it was funny.
And I'm so sorry for wasting your time, but
Here it is.
And she looked at me and
Sad.
No let's take a look. So she looked at the shirt
looked at the drawings, spread them out a little bit, smiled.
And ordered eighteen hundred T shirts. Wow. She ordered eighteen hundred surf Michigan T shirts. Yeah, which for me at the time was a ton. And at the time, you know Where did you get them printed?
I got a print at a place called Parent Screen Printing, a guy named Carl
Karen.
In Grand Rapids, I just found him in the phone book. And he was cool enough to make me one T shirt, you know? And and you just bought he just bought like eighteen hundred Haynes T shirts and then
Yeah.
I did all the art, took him there.
printed'em and I at the t you know, you can't do this anymore, but I
Put him in back into the Haynes beefy tea box and
put the right name on'em and delivered on myself.
And then went back to work.
Wow, so you had a bona fide legitimate side hustle.
going while you were selling furniture. I did I did that for a couple of years.
And you you turn into a business, you called it new agenda.
That's right.
And in the meantime, this is like
This is like the early nineties.
And
An opportunity would come up, which is the basketball team.
in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan.
is about to blow up. This was the era of
the Fab Five, they were like
Freshman starters who were
just incredible players. They got a ton of media attention. Some of them would go on to have these amazing NBA careers like Jalen Rose and
uh Joanne Howard and and uh Chris Weber.
Right?
Yeah. Yeah, they were kinda like just changing college sports as well. They were
Rebels and
And they were cool and they were they but were wearing black socks and they're the ones that started
wearing the really long shorts. Yeah. And I was at uh Meyer.
And I was looking for a Michigan shirt, and the only
Shirts with
Michigan with basketball was a was just said Michigan.
XXL basketball or Michigan.
And with a like a clip art ball going through a hoop. Basketball.
And
No, there was nothing
Cool.
And I couldn't believe it. I couldn't figure it out. So I I
Again on on a day off I drove to
University of Michigan.
And
Talk to the A D.
And actually got the license for Michigan.
How did you get a end with the athletic director there? That's a big job. I mean I I just walked in.
And at the time he he was the one that's not.
ran the licensing. That was part of his job later. It would go to you know, there's this
college licensing companies now that just handle all of the licenses for all the schools, but at the time it was done um in house at the school.
Wait y you you went there with designs saying, Hey, I could do a better shirts for you guys? No, I didn't. I showed'em nothing. I just asked what it would cost to get a license. So I still would have to get the designs approved. But
I didn't have to show them anything. I just had to
How much was the license?
It was nothing for the license. It was just a percent. I just had to pay them a royalty, which was I think ten or twenty percent. Yeah, it was insane. So I got the license.
and went back and I came up with a shirt called Slam Dance.
That I did on my living room floor.
And what did it look like?
Uh
It was it just said.
Big
Navy blue letters that slam and then a Michigan M in between it.
And then at the bottom it said dance and the University of Michigan written underneath that, but in the middle was a huge M
And a guy that kinda looked like Weber swinging from the rim, and I
Had Carl make it at Perrin.
screen printing and he thought it was cool and I
on on one of my couple of days off I took it
to University of Michigan.
And I guess you what?
You just like walked into
Different stores on campus and
And sold it to them like like the managers just ordered your T shirts?
Based on that one design.
So yeah, so I
went to most sports shop in Ann Arbor, right on campus. It's a it was cr really cool. It's not there any longer, but it was a institution there for so many years.
Showed them they bought it and then El Rick's uh is the bookstore there and sold it to them and they sold ten thousand shirts that season. Ten
'Cause you're doing this a few months before March Madness is all the I mean.
they get to the finals, you sell ten thousand of these shirts to say slam dance. Yeah.
Yeah, it was huge.
That clearly was the impetus for you to leave your job selling.
furniture because y you're making serious money selling T shirts.
Well I knew it I knew
It was getting exciting. I started adding some schools.
But I wasn't making serious money, not enough to think that I could support my fam forever. I didn't know if it was a fluke.
What schools did you go to after Michigan?
But I mean obviously the ones that were close by, Michigan State, Notre Dame.
Indiana, Illinois.
North Carolina, Georgetown. But I had
I didn't really know business. Yeah. So I was I had huge inventory and huge fees from parent.
for the printing and you know, I just didn't have any concept of margins of what it really took to have a business. So while
By the end I had four hundred and something licenses. Well I had lots of licenses.
Um I wasn't super profitable.
And I guess around ninety two you meet this guy named Joe Shield. Um, I guess you meet him in in Grand Rapids, who who you would
Go on to start a new
kind of design business with.
Yeah, I was at I was at parent screen printing and
I saw this guy's
work that was also being printed there and it was really cool and
It was these these characters.
I thought it was super cool.
I just saw it as art. I was
Goofy little doodle cartoonist, right? This guy's a real cartoonist, so saw some of his designs that he was working on for T-shirts and
Said hey I know how to
Get reps and stuff, why don't we start a
accompany ourselves and then
I felt like I wanted to bring something to the table. I was put getting the reps together. It was for the line it was there was two lines. One was called Mosh, the other one's called Caveman that he drew. But these shir like
kind of abstract humans or like cartoon character ish kind of animals. And they would say
Will it say something on the shirt? No, it just said mosh. It was just a it was just a stylized
But who
And who would wear those shirts? Nobody nobody would wear those shirts, guy. Actually. Nobody would buy No, I don't think one uh I don't think one person wore those shirts. But while we're getting ready to do'em
I saw
a article in a magazine that had Madonna
This is like a ninety four.
With a
Or Chikita.
Uh her
Chihuahua.
It was photo of her holding this new ch dog that she just got called Chiquita and
And at the time, right, I'd because I'd been looking at okay, what's going on in the in the T shirt world and
When a line gets popular, it's popular by
The cool people, the the college age kids, the high schoolers, right? They start buying it and then
And then their younger brothers see them wearing it and then they wanna buy it. So then it gets a little younger.
And so then that's the first sign you're it's gonna be trending starting to trend down on the cool factor.
And then when the dad start
Buying it.
And then the dads are wearing it. Then those cool kids stop wearing it. And so then they're gonna be looking for something new. So I saw that kinda happening and I saw
Madonna and Jake, and I was like
Took that to Joe and we called it Psycho Chihuahua.
You took that picture of Madonna in the Chihuahua and you said
Let's do something with a chihuahua? Yeah. Let's do something with a chihuahua. Let's do one more line. So not just those two lines that we're gonna do. Let's do this chihuahua line.
'Cause I think and here's why he loved it, he drew the this really badass little small ch shaking
Chihuahua.
And we put words on it. So Psycho Chihuahua, you know, nineteen twenty three or something, and these Mexican
That's fierce but not really dangerous. Yeah, exactly. That's what it was. So it said things like on the backs of the shirt, they said things like you know, I don't roll over and I don't play dead or bite me or fetch this or big dog suck. Big dogs suck.
And so we sent the we s we made some shirts at Perrin.
And we sent them out. I got found some reps. They said they would they liked them, they would take'em and try to sell'em in and if it sold they would take the line. If it didn't, they wouldn't. And these couple of rep groups took it out to see what it see what the temperature was and
called me back and said, Everybody wants Psycho Chihuahua. Everybody wants Psycho Chihuahua. And how like do you remember how many orders you guys got? This is like
Ninety four, ninety five, I mean.
Tens of thousands of
Shirts, right? We weren't being getting rich by any means, but we had something. We had we could feel the pulse. So
We were going, I was going with new agenda to a show, a trade show called The Super Show, which is now no longer around, but used to be the biggest trade show in the world.
Uh at least for apparel.
And I got a booth space.
And psychochologists was
Blowing up.
Explain that to me. You're standing at a booth. Yep.
When you say blowing up, everybody passing by was like oh my god, I have to have this.
Psycho Chihuahua dog teacher? I know it sounds stupid and no not everybody. But enough people compared to the other booths, right? But by blowing up most booths you're kinda looking for people to talk to. Our booth had people there. We were doing interviews.
We couldn't write the orders fast enough.
on the strength of the Psycho Chihuahua T shirt. It wasn't like you were like, Yeah, we have uh we've we've got like
Nuclear fusion. We've achieved it here at this booth. It was
It was psycho chihuahua and and it was just
That was the thing that people were like, Oh my god, this is so cool.
It was fresh. It was so fresh. And we thought we thought we had discovered gold. We thought it was fusion.
So I guess you guys decide around that time to see if you could license this product.
And I guess you c there was a convention that was like a licensing convention where you bring a product to see if anyone w want to license it.
Yeah, that was part of the timing, right? I knew we had to make as much money as quickly as we could. Yeah. So there's a show called The Licensing Show at the Jabots in New York. New York, yeah. You show your stuff and if if I had a lunch pail company and I wanted to put
Power Rangers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Baywatch or
Snoopy on my lunch pails or my sleeping bags or my mugs or whatever kind of company I have.
I go there and I see all of the licensable properties that people own, companies own, and it and I make a deal with them. So that's what the that show was.
We got a booth, I got us a really great placement next to the first Jurassic Park and rug rats. And what happened? Was it similar to the previous trade show? Was there a lot of buzz around this this little dog?
There was. Yeah. People had started to see it around a little bit. I forget
All of the people that came, but Minolta w came by they were making a little small camera. They were interested in licensing
it for their small camera. So they have a little mascot for it.
Um the psycho chihuahua Minolta dog? Yeah. Yeah. I mean it never went past the trade show, but we but we talked for quite a while at the trade show about it. And just other
companies, you know, they're just looking for who is the demographic, who's our demographic, our demographic was young.
High school, college boys.
You know? Yeah. I don't remember who else other than the big one, you know, Taco Bell.
Taco Bell.
comes to your booth to senior reps from Taco Bell and they were like
This is awesome. We love it like right away.
Yeah, Ed Alfaro was the main guy. I don't remember who he was. He's like in charge of brand at Taco Bell in California.
They were actually there looking
for a mascot. They were looking for something to license. They had been
looking forward and working on it with different ad agencies for a while. And it sent Ed there.
And so they were just looking for ideas and when they stumbled upon our booth and
We had a great conversation. We got obviously super excited about the possibility of that. We sent them home with some T shirts and all the information and all the stuff that we had and
We spent some time with them talking about it. We flew to
Irvine. Irvine.
And we
knew we were over our heads a little bit with this thing, so we got a agent.
Arlene Scanlin.
Just like a a creative uh like a licensing agent. Yeah, she was a licensing agent. She'd worked like she'd gotten the deals for like Pink Panther and Owen's Corning and Snoopy.
Exactly. So she could represent us and and strike the deals and yeah, make sure we're doing everything right. Because you know, just as we were just talking to him even on the phone and and through email, we knew it was getting we needed some help as far as what this was gonna cause, what the fees would be. They were asking about the fees and all that.
And we worked with them for eighteen months. We were on the calendar of when it was gonna happen. They were planning on testing it. What kind of designs were you working on?
Uh, we were doing their tray liners, we designed their uniforms, we designed their hats, we designed their posters. We wrote the commercials, I wrote the commercials, Joe storyboarded the commercials. And but it wasn't a cartoon chihuahua, right? You moved to like a real chihuahua. Yeah, early on when we just you know, probably like the second day when Joe and I were thinking about it, we realized that if
This was gonna be
for T V, it can't be a cartoon anymore. It has to be a real Chall, especially as we started storyboarding it. We had to take it and just turn it into a real dog. Kinda like
Garfield can turn to a real cat, so that's what we did. Alright, so you're working with Taco Bell, and this is exciting. This is a big deal. I mean for a tiny little shop like you guys to have a massive
brand like Taco Bell said yeah to our campaign. I mean that must have been super exciting.
It was the most exciting.
It was creatively, it was just
It was over the moon. Yeah. Designing the toys that that they would give away, the little dogs were just design we were just it was yeah, it was getting good. So anyone who was
was like conscious be in the late nineties will know where this is going, which is the famous
Taco Bell Chihuahua ad, which is amazing. I mean it was an incredible you're working on this thing and you're working on what what is gonna about to become you didn't know. I an iconic
Concept.
And they stopped taking her calls one day.
Yeah.
They just stopped answering your calls in nineteen ninety seven.
Yeah, they did. We were just rolling so well along with everything. And like I said, everything was s slated to go.
And all of a sudden Ed stopped calling us back. Like nothing happened. It wasn't like no blowout fight. They just nothing. They just ghosted you. Completely ghosted us. And we were getting nervous.
I mean, yeah.
Exactly. Yeah, we just thought they weren't gonna go with it. We just thought they were gonna we just thought they've had another idea because we knew they work with some other agencies on some different ideas too. Yeah. So you just figured, okay, that's it. We're
That's it. But it would been cool if they had called us. Come on, it what happened. You know, we were your best buddy and now you won't even
Say goodbye.
And so presumably
I guess you guys just figure well I guess
We just
Move on.
Yeah, sadly. Sadly we didn't know what else to do but to move on.
But yeah, we were it took the wind out of our sails.
For sure.'Cause we told everybody about our families knew everybody was asking about it. We were we were high fiving.
Daily. Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, then um
About three months later.
All of a sudden.
A commercial, an ad campaign comes out.
With a chihuahua.
And at the end the child says Yo Kiero Taco Bell. Yeah.
And what do you remember?
When you saw that ad.

Yeah, they they tested that ad.
in the north east, which is happened to be where I was in Michigan.
And
I just lost it.
You know.'Cause it was the commercial that I'd written.
You know, the first three commercials were our commercials.
that we had storyboarded and shared and sent.
So it wasn't a
It was the it was
Everything was the same.
Well.
And it was just like a knife to the chest.
When we come back in just a moment.
How the Psycho Chihuahua episode turns into a five-year legal drama. And how Tom eventually moves on.
To a brand new mascot.
Sun Bomb Gorilla.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz and you're listening.
how I built this.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1998, and the bottom has just dropped out of Tom's world.
He and his partner Joe are shocked to discover that Taco Bell
has basically stolen their mascot for a national ad campaign which
By the way, is going to become huge. So Tom and Joe are furious and they file a lawsuit against Taco Bell, citing breach of contract.
Taco Bell had.
Like the best law firm in New York, I forget the name of it. And they had Sidley and Austin and Chicago, big one, and LA in house and Grand. Super intimidating. This would take five years of your life.
until a final decision was made. But in ninety nine, uh U in a U S district court, Michigan
They did grant summary judgment to Taco Bell. Yes. And so essentially basically denying your claim. Correct. And that could have been
The end of the story.
But you decided to keep fighting to appeal that.
Yeah.
Now, it was kind of a crazy risk that you were taking, right? Because I'm sure that it was really stressful on you and your family.
And probably hard to focus on your business while you're fighting this lawsuit.
Yeah.
It was the Chihuahuan me, I guess you could say, right? It was fighting for the little guy.
And the big guys just
We're taking advantage and
I'm pretty relentless when it comes to that kind of stuff. So how are you focusing, Tom? How are you and Joe continuing to do your work, your business?
Um
Well, we kind of it kinda pulled us apart a little bit. Yeah.
It was stressful and we had done all this work and
I don't know if we blamed each other. I don't think we did, but it was just, you know, it was kinda over because now Taco Bell owns this little Chihuahua. So even our shir stopped selling because everybody wanted the Taco Bell Chihuahua shirts.
You know, we were just a knockoff. So sales of that dropped off. So we really didn't have anything to work together. So he did his thing. We had offices right next to each other, so we saw each other all the time and consult each other all the time. We were still friends, but we stopped working together.
Meantime everyone around you in Grand Rapids knows you're in this lawsuit. And w was that what people would talk to you about every time you saw them? Didn't that just get tiring because you knew that you'd go to school pickup or the whatever, like the grocery store, be like, Oh Tom, I heard that Taco Bell thing, how's that going? Yeah, it was super distracting. I was the guy suing Taco Bell and everybody hadn't known
before everybody, the my friends had known that we were doing it. So when the commercial started airing when the Super Bowl had ran and all that, people
From all over from
In California everywhere we're calling.
Congratulating me.
For the campaign, thought it was amazing. Congrats. That we got everything, all the congrats in the mail and phone calls all the time. It's so exciting. I was like, Yeah.
That's not us. They took it.
I can't I I don't know what I would do.
I would be so mad and stressed and anxious and
And then like just
People talking to me about it all the time. I would just hate that.
I'd hate it, and I'd hate that Taco Bell wasn't settling this.
I'd hate it.
You know. Yeah. Yeah. They never they never if they would have we met with Sidley and Austin, their lawyers in Chicago, we drove down there with our lawyer.
And if they would have offered us
They're gonna hate to hear this right now. But if they would have offered us
Two hundred thousand.
We'd have taken it.
If they would have because we just wanted to get paid for our work. That's it.
You know what I mean? We wouldn't we wouldn't have needed to anybody to even say it was our
over those five years we'd have taken in a heartbeat because it was beating us up so bad and like you say it was hard to concentrate on anything else.
And we didn't think we could win.
We didn't think we could make it to trial'cause it was c gonna cost so much. Um I mean it's a cliche to say but it's the ultimate Dave and Goliath story. Oh yeah, totally.
Alright, so meantime your
Fighting this.
But around this time this is like
two thousand one.
You start something entirely new, which was uh a departure from what you had been doing. Um
Uh you I guess you start a venture to make like
Christian oriented films. I know when you grew up your dad was a minister, but f from what I understand you kind of rejected it like all that stuff when you were young and then maybe
You went to church again a little bit, after you had a family. Sure. Um
My wife l liked going every Sunday and we had little kids and she wanted them to go to church too and it was okay. I just
Didn't
Listen.
Then this guy came along, Rob Bell.
And he was like a guest speaker. He was young, fresh. He like felt like he swore. If even if he didn't, it felt like he was swearing up there and listened to the same kind of music that I listened to and moved referenced movies that I liked. And he was a real dude. He was a real guy that I would like to hang around that actually believed in God. He was somehow making it work.
Mm.
We decided.
to go to his church when he opened a church. So he opened this little church in this warehouse.
Not that many people.
And he was just so good, man.
He just had it. His sermons were just insane and they were so relevant and
And then one day he had a couple other friends all get together'cause he wanted to talk about
Getting
his cassette ministry cleaned up, so you know, they record the c sermons and he wanted to get his message out to more people.
and thought he could sell his cassettes or or make them available somehow through the church and
And we're just saying, Okay, yeah, that sounds great, do that.
And I kind of, you know, there was no light coming through a window, but just hit me like
You can do this, Tom.
Why don't you step up and do it?
Alright, so you start working on this.
This new
product basically, which is gonna be these kind of Christian inspirational videos. Was the idea from from this video business to
I mean, how was it gonna make money? Was it did you see a path there to build a big business?
Um
No. In fact I made it a nonprofit.
Oh wow.
It was originally gonna be
you know, the brand of Christianity, if you will,'cause that's what I've kind of gotten good at is making brands over the years.
The brand of Christianity was just horrible.
Like the only message it wasn't beautiful, it was kinda ugly with all the protesters and
You know, people killing
abortion clinic doctors and things like that on the news and just the perception of Christianity was really
Not that good. And so I thought maybe
So we could actually try to change the brand a little bit by this thing. So
Um
Made it a nonprofit.
And started to try to think about.
How to make this thing happen.
Alright, but meantime, you're
You're not
uh done with with Taco Bell because
Yeah.
uh you and Joe decide to appeal that case. And and this goes to uh this is a a federal court and and now you have to focus
On the trial.
And w what do you remember?

You know, about testifying and all that stuff?
Yeah.
I was on the stand I think for three days. It was a three and a half week federal trial.
The first time they offered us something was at the trial. It was just before
It started. They had lots of lawyers on their side. We had our little three lawyers on our side and
Yeah. Judge came out, everybody rose, the jury was in and
And they went up and said they'd like to see everybody in chambers and so the judge a asked us all to come in and
Tacabell. I don't remember the number, but it'cause I was
Mm.

To settle right there.
Well five years after everything they had been putting us through and uh
I just looked at Joe.
And he looked at me and g gave me a little nod and then I looked at the
Look at our lawyers and they're like, Oh please, oh please, do not say yes. Please, we've worked five years.
To get to this moment to take these guys on. Don't say yes. And I I looked at him and said, No, let's go.
And we walked back in and
three and a half week trial, it was hairy it was super hairy. I was I was crazy cross examined and
But they they really they didn't have anything and
I think it helped us being in Grand Rapids, I think.
Our lawyers were so good.
And their lawyers were super slick.
So you testify.
At this trial.
And
Eventually you're brought back in.

Yeah.
Tell me what happened.
Well
We got notice that the verdict was in, so we all went back to the
Courthouse.
And
Judge came in, jury came in, we all were standing there, holding hands and
And they read guilty on all counts.
Wow.
Did you cry? Did you collapse? Did you Oh dude. Yeah, just probably cry like
Probably just the emotion.
Of it being over?
And I've haven't taken these guys on.
And
Beating'em.
It was just overwhelming.
Well.
Yeah.
And awarded us
What we asked for, which was the contract. You know, we'd at one point we'd given'em the contract. They'd ask obviously.
what kind of price they were we were gonna want it and Arlene Scanlund had given them the terms of everything, which was a piece of the profits from the toys, a piece of the advertising budget, a piece of all these things and
So the claim was just a a c implied contract claim. So it was you know, we were asking for that contract and the jury agreed that we deserve that contract.
Yeah. So yeah, we all cried, we hugged. You know the people in the audience that were there on our side were
obviously ecstatic and
Taco Bell saw I just dropped their heads, packed their bags, and we just looked at them, scowled at them, and they walked out.
The jury awarded you guys$30.1 million plus another$12 million in interest.
And uh did Taco Bell pay that right away? I mean
No, no, they appealed right away.
And then um and then a few months later
They settled.
And were you I mean, you had up until this point not necessarily been
You were making a decent living.
But you weren't
Rich. Um but but when that Taco Bell money came in, like you were in pretty great shape financially for your I mean, now you could really
kind of I guess breathe a a a a sigh of relief a little bit, right?
Yeah.
It for sure I could breathe a sigh of relief, but it wasn't as much money as everybody thought. You know, everybody thought I had forty million dollars under my mattress. No. I got the you know the thirty three percent of the lawyers.
Plus hard cost twenty five percent of my agent.
Me and Joe split the rest, tech government took the rest. You know, it was not it was not as much. But it was five, six million bucks. Right. You're you're right on the money. But that was still absolutely gigantic for a family like mine.
Yeah.
Um
Meanwhile, while you were working on the Christian videos with with this nonprofit, I guess you met this guy who would wind up helping you with
with that project and then who would become
Your next business partner, his name is Rene Kennedy, who
Who is Renee Kennedy?
Or who is he?
Uh Renee worked at an agency, a little design agency that was a couple of doors down from the little office that we had
He had just gotten here from Copenhagen. He grew up in Copenhagen and he was just an amazing brand designer and he was they were expensive. It was like two hundred dollars an hour, which was a lot for a nonprofit.
But you know, as I realized I couldn't afford to keep using an agency
And I was gonna hire somebody.
And he said, I'll do it and I said I can only pay X amount, which was half of what he was getting.
And I was like, Why would you he w and he was he was basically grew up an atheist.
You know what I mean? He he hated the church. He hated he didn't think leave any of it. And and I was like, Why would you wanna come and w do this? And he said, Because
I have never f looked for God or looked for spirituality or anything'cause there was no on ramp for me, a person like me. Wow. And Renee helped open my eyes to what needed to be said to create those on ramps.
I guess you I mean, this reminds me of the story with Joe, right? This is a guy you meet in the in the T shirt printing shop and then you start something with him.
Renee is a guy you meet a couple doors down who starts working with you guys in these films and clearly you see talent, a lot of talent in him, and the two of you decide to
Basically.
Join forces and build a branding agency together.
Yes. In two thousand seven.
You call it rinks Kennetti.
Yeah.
Yes. And you were gonna do branding work for whoever, but how how did you even get those accounts?
Um Well when we did Rinks Canadi
The word was kinda getting a a little bit around about
us on the brand side of things, just word of mouth. Um, he had a lot of talent on the design world that he had brought with him from
Copenhagen. So the accounts that we worked on that we got initially
were the Rock and Republic, the Daily on Tequila. And the idea was we'll make we know how to make brands.
We'll make a brand for you.
And you pay the fees.
For us to do that and you gave us a piece of your company.
Right. So somebody would come to you and say, Hey, I wanna do this or I wanna do that, and I guess one of those things was
Mm.
Somebody came to you, maybe it's a friend of yours who came to you wanting to make
Tequila.
High end tequila.
Yeah, he was my best friend growing up. He was also a pastor's kid, and we kind of saved each other's life by sneaking out and going out to clubs together and
My childhood was great because of Brent. His name's Brett. His name's Brent Hawking, yeah. And he ended up being a mortgage guy and just crushing into the mortgage businesses and
Just one of the best in the country.
Uh but was just getting tired of it and and wanted to start a tequila company. He wanted to get into the into the spirits business. Right. It's the natural path. It is. So he he wanted to do that, he knew what I did, he knew about me and Renee doing his thing and some and some of our work.
I mean the the whole point of this was to take this liquid and turn it into a brand. And so you guys were doing
Your job was to make the bottle and to make the logo and to make the the to style this thing. Yes. That was what you were charged to do.
Correct. Did he know about Tequila? Like was he experienced was he a distiller? He he wasn't, but man, he fit the bill, you know?
It's all about feeling when you build a brand, right? Every people buy things because the way they make them feel, right
You buy Louis Vuitton'cause you m think it makes you feel rich. You buy old surf fan'cause you think it looks cool. You buy Athletic Shoe Nike because you
Think you look more athletic or whatever the type might be. I know there's other things, but everything you do is based on
How this product or
brand makes you feel about yourself or f think other people feel about you. So when it came to tequila and looking at the tequila business when Brent called me.
It was pretty easy if you're if you're ordering tequila at a bar or whiskey at a bar, just straight up tequila on the rocks.
Um you're trying to be a badass a little bit. You're you know, you're not you're not owning a cosmopolitan.
And so he fit he fit that bill. He was
He had just such a great aesthetic, he was but he he was big guy, tough.
It's great in the clubs.
He knew people.
Um
He was a great businessman.
And so he could
basically source tequila. Like that wasn't hard. Like he knew
he could get it distilled from like a white label distiller to his specifications.
Correct. He found a fabrica plant, a place where they make the tequila down in Jalisco somewhere. Which is where they make all the tequila down that state in Mexico and
And he
He got that and then just needed a brand.
behind it.
Did you have a name for it?
Yeah, they're they were from Lyon.
So which means lion. So we called it daily own.
Brent actually came up with that name.
Daily on tequila. Daily on tequila. Right. And
Uh had
Bill Wall, you know.
make a cork, Bill Walls uh it was like a jewelry to the stars, all the all the uh
skull and crossbone and all that stuff for rock stars. He was the guy that made them all and he had a shop in Malibu and
Renee mostly designed this cork that had skulls and snakes on it and they
Cast it out of a
ball of sterling silver and he carved it for us and it looked
They look badass. It looked like something I think the cheapest bottle was a hundred and twenty five dollars a bottle, all the way up to eight hundred and fifty dollars a bottle.
Well.
And you guys as part of the
sort of agreement, you also got a piece of the company.
So you were incentivized to make this work because it was your company now. Yeah, well, I mean it wasn't my company, it was Brent's company, but yeah, I was totally incentivized because that would be the bigger the larger payoff. Right. So that's what Rings Canada did. We just kind of
We got paid for making brands, but then you had these little chips you were putting down on this roulette wheel and if one of them hit, you got a bigger hit.
Alright, so s we've talked about um T-shirt surf Michigan and uh Psycho Chihuahua and Christian Videos and a tequila brand. I mean, a very wide range of things that you are kind of building, and then
In the midst of all this, while you're launching Daily On Tequila.
somebody else comes to you with a concept for or an idea for sunscreen.
Yeah, that's around two thousand and nine.
Yeah.
What was the story? It was a friend from my school that my kids went to.
In Michigan.
And he wanted to get be in the sunscreen.
business, him and a couple of his friends.
And so asked me to come and take a look at what they were dealing and see if I had any suggestions or see if I thought there was a hole in the market and see if I was interested in making it for him.
And they figured out how to finance this. Or that's they were still working on the guy was super rich. So he could handle the money part of it.
So they come to you and they say, Hey, we wanna do s and they had no name, they had no
concept at all, it was just like they just knew where they could make sunscreen.
No, they were trying to do sunscreen. They had some different names out there doing it and it was failing and they were losing money. So they
They wanted me to come and look at it and see what they were doing wrong, basically. What did you think when you got there? They were doing it wrong.
What was it called?
They had three. They had Race Face, which was for NASCAR, for NASCAR people. They had um game face, which was for colleges, which would never approve it.
And then they had Sun Bum, actually, that was that had a little carabiner on it and a little
Clip art, uh, hammock guy.
Um on the cover of the bottle.
What what about their
Concept appeal to you.
Nothing.
Nothing. It was it was I told him he was it was never gonna make it. None of them were gonna make it. They were horrible. Like like NASCAR people don't use
expensive sunscreen and there had to be licensing with colleges. I knew colleges
But it was just horrible. It was just horrible design, horrible ideas. And they they didn't know what they were doing.
Given that the branding was so terrible.
And you already had a bunch of different
accounts you were working on or brands you were building, what appealed to you about this idea of working
And sunscreen.
It was local.
So that made it easy.
We didn't have to travel as much. And I knew the surf world. I knew the beach world and I liked it.
And
You know I just didn't say yes right away. I looked at the
Industry.
I looked at what was happening in the space and I saw
Just gigantic hole that you could drive through. PlayTex had just bought.
Hawaiian tropic a couple of years earlier. So it was just all these big players. There was no
Authentic.
sunscreen brand. Only thing that was out there were stuff that my kids didn't want in the car or on their towel. It looked like their mom left something in their car behind if if it was you know there was nothing that fit their world.
And I knew I could create that and I knew, like I said, there was a space for it.
What was the first thing you did? You said ditch these NASCAR and college brands and focus on Sun Bum?
No, I said ditch it all and then we started our process and it's Tell me how you did it there.
It's a three month process.
So it's the first month is research.
looking at the industry, looking at the holes, looking at how to do it.
Second is ideation, just creative thinking together, Renee and I.
And then the third month is laying down the design work.
And so that's that's how it began.
Alright, so tell me what you
you start to think about
building this brand and what it was gonna be.
At first it was just
We were we designed it Renee and I's office was in Grand Rapids and we were walking to some w Subway for lunch and we passed a
Contemporary Museum of Art.
Aims.
Lounge chair and ottoman.
Sitting there.
I looked at the I saw the wood grain and I saw the curves.
And I'm like wood. Like wood grain, that's that's good.
And Renee liked it as well, so we kinda developed the little wood grain pattern and we realized nothing in in the market was wood grain and we liked it. It felt good. It felt natural. Wood grain bottle grain bottle.
Bottle.
And there and it would be you know, there was every color in the rainbow already there and you kinda wanna own the block.
And then uh
My son Drake's
Billabong thrift store.
T shirt was yellow and brown. I brought that in one day and
We like those colors. Yellow is a is a good color. It got brighter over the years, but uh but yellow is the first color your I see, you know, that's why caution tape is yellow. It's it's great for brands.
We hated the name Sun Bom.
But then when I came up with Trust the Bum.
You know, for a tagline for it.
And then protect your lazy ass.
It kinda all started to come together and then the name didn't matter. And then and then the other thing about when you're naming a brand, which
It's good when the brand is in the name. Yeah. So there was no
Sun.
You know, you need sunscreen on a sunny day, uh you're going out in the sun, and there was no brand out there with the word sun in it. And so that made it really good'cause you're already saying half the name. It's like if your drain is clogged, drain is the perfect name. Or
If you need home products, home depot's good. Or office products, office depot. And if office depot's taking office max, you're already saying
The name.
I mean I went to a
Haircut place called Quafeteria.
And they play on Coff and Cafeteria and nobody knew what they did there and they went out of business. So Yeah. So Sun Bum kinda grew on us and then
We started figuring out how how the rest of it would look and how to mash it up.
So you had um
Of course.
A lot of experience.

characters, obviously Psycho Chihuahua.
And and did you did you think about
Like we need a character, like a mascot for this as well.
Yeah, as crazy as that sounds like such an obvious idea, it just wasn't. Hm.
But realizing the strength of a character, realizing the Budweiser Frogs, the M and M guys, the
Energizer bunny. Yeah. They live forever. Mickey Mouse, right? They don't get old. They don't get D UIs. Like
Founders or celebrities or right. They can just keep they're good.
We keep going.
Yeah.
And then figuring out, you know, initially we were drawing, you know, surf characters and guys with look like hippies and and then we kinda landed on animal and then it went to
Monkeys and then ape.
How come Monkey
Well
Everybody likes monkeys.
Yeah.
And then
You know, as part of the mashup, you need everybody to like it. I think if surfers would have made this brand, they would have had two cross surfboards and called it Woody's.
And it'd still be in surf shops today and that would or maybe it wouldn't be, but it would be a wooden bottle called Woodies. Woody's and sur cross surf guards. That's it. But
But to do what we did and to do what you need to do to be a
Like a global brand, you gotta have a wider
Demographic.
Than just a niche.
When we come back in just a moment, why Tom and Renee decide to place their new sunscreen brand.
in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
even though it's not really based in Cocoa Beach or Florida.
Stay with us, I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to how I built this.
Hey, welcome back to how I built this. So it's around 2009, and Tom and his partner Renee are working on the packaging for Sunbum. The colors, the fonts, the facial features for their gorilla mascot. And for inspiration, they print out a series of creative panels and hang them on the wall, kind of like storyboards.
And each panel.
has a different theme.
The first panel would be
hippies, van life, skinny, long hair, tattoos, that whole freedom feeling that you think when you think surf counterculture, you know, the beach culture.
So was that the second one was seeing this furniture, right? The Scandinavian mid-century modern furniture design that that led the way for the wood grains and the curves.
in the bottles. And then, you know, Renee was from Copenhagen, so he was really up on Northern European typography and layout, so super clean, negative space.
on e you know every even the ingredients, just the way they're laid out, everything was considered and spaced, all the ballhouse fonts and and those types of things.
Next page would be Japanese and New York Street.
where lines like Supreme, Bathing Ape.
Undefeated.
And then the last page was
Collectible vinyls.
Uh Renee had a lot of kid robot stuff up on our shelves.
And the graffiti world and brought that into the somehow. So that looking at all of those pieces, I think Sonny, who's the logo of the gorilla
logo that was led a lot from Japanese street art.
You know, Tom, this this reminds me a little bit of something that you mentioned to me um before this interview started. Um
called the Elvis principle that you you mentioned what what's
What's the Elvis principle that you what is it and and how do you use it to develop a brand?
The Elvis principle is kind of similar to the mashup that I talked about. Mm-hmm. Except this is more on the personality.
I was watching an Elvis special or something about him and
And I then I got really intrigued with him.
And he
He came out when he came out on the scene in the fifties, he he was sh you know rock and roll, he was dangerous, he's sexy.
Shaking his hips like crazy, right? And then he got banned, right? He was he was just too he was too sexual. You could have had to film him above the waist, right?
And so then he came out with a gospel album.
And the parents that had been you gotta burn the records or you can't go to an Elvis.
concert which is which made people want to go to the concert more
Once he did the gospel albums and did so showed that side, they were like, Oh, he's a good boy.
It's okay to listen.
To Elvis. He's a good boy.
And so it's this juxtaposition.
Of edge.
Sex.
Good, kind, humble.
Like mashing all of that together.
It's kind of what people want. It's that combo is what's what's a really interesting personality for brands, for people.
So I was very conscious of that in
in using that when I did ads and all that stuff, I was kind of making that personality type.
So you ha you h start to work on this.
mascot, right? And it it's a simple I mean there I think a lot of people can picture it. It's a basically
An oval, a yellow oval with a brown line through it for the mouth and an X for the nose and
Like sunglasses and a little sort of it's a very simple
Designed to renade.
Design that or you or absolutely. Like I was sketching stuff and and he was sketching some stuff and a couple of times he thought he had it and was, you know, fired up and looking for a high five and I hated it and but he he was the designer, not me. I was just kind of creative directing it.
And then one weekend he called me. I was at our cottage on Lake Michigan with my family and
He called me and he just said I got it.
But he had he had said that before a couple of times, right? And he but I could hear it in his voice. I got it.
And I walked into the office on Monday and he
you know, sat me down and prepped me. And then uh he pulled it up on a screen and it was exactly what you see today. It was perfect. It was just magic.
How did you know it was perfect when you saw it? Because I loved it. I just as soon as I saw it, I loved it. I knew how strong it was. I knew how powerful that logo mark was, you know? That's the other thing, you know, if you take Sonny, the logo, the ape logo, and you
put it next to all the other big brand out there, right? Forget about the copper tones and the banana boats, those are just names. But if you put it next to, you know, the Nike Swoosh, the Adidas mark, you put it next to the Disney mark, you put it next to the Ford logo, you put it next to the Apple logo.
And then you put this badass ape in sunglasses staring at you stone faced. I knew it would be a great sticker.
Everything and we we knew we were gonna graffiti m market the shit out of this thing, so we could literally
Take just the
image of that ape.
And not even put sunbum on it, and the idea was people wouldn't know that was sunbum. Correct. And you could put it on anything and make them think about not sunbomb necessarily, but think of sunscreen. So we put it on footballs and frisbees and paddle ball sets and towels and hats. No word sunbum.
on it. It just was that. We did ads, we did billboards, we and it just had the ape on there and people didn't know it. We stickered the crap out of every surf town in California. And then uh
We decided to take it to the January tenth surf expo. It's the surf expo in in Orlando.
Yeah, so that would be the first show, so all the surf shops in the country come.
And high end hotels that are on the beaches and stuff come to buy products. And what happens at that trade show? Do you get a lot of orders?
It was not so much the orders, it was just the buzz.
I mean
It was the skaters that were there'cause all the skate brands were there as well, and all the surf brands are there. So the skaters were coming by and taking the stickers and I'd walk over to the skatevert ramp and see our stickers on the ramp itself. The people were sticking and they were and the kids were coming by asking if we had more stickers of just the sunny guy. Just the character just the monkey. Just the
It's an ape or a monkey, I'm sorry. It's an ape. Monkeys have tails, so it's say ape. I'm sorry. Pay some respect to Sunny. Okay. So the sticker but the sticker, you just had like thousands of stickers available. People could just take them and the idea was you wanted to them to put them on the back of their skateboards, maybe on their surfboards. Yeah, exactly. And so they were doing that.
And then
Women that we've got.
Oh
boutiques up in Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard and all that were trying it and smelling it and buying it.
And some high end hotels came by.
And they were buying it. Wow. So immediately
It was this it's like okay, this is not normal, this wide of a demographic. It's really hard to get that and I knew we had it
That first day of that show.
It was basically
Validating your
assumption here that this would
appeal to people. This yellow
ape and these colours and this wood grain.
But it was at the end of the day suntan lotion, right? And so people had to feel like it was better a better product.
Correct. And we did have a better product because we
We were making it for us, you know, and that's
basically what you do you should do all the time is not make it for other people, you make it for yourself. And so it had to be safe. It had to be clean. It had to be great. Everybody had to like it. I couldn't just have my kids like it.
I needed my wife to like it, my wife's friends to like it, I needed my s my kids' surf friends to like it.
I needed that wide demographic.
I guess at that trade show when you saw the enthusiasm for it.
You and Renee decide.
to shut down your
brand agency and to put all your effort into Sun Bum and to basically become employees or to join it.
Yeah.
The the guy that owned the company asked me if I would take over.
Um and but actually for me to take charge.
Yes,'cause if we come work for him.
And so I went to Renee and talked to him about it and we had a
A long talk about it. It was a tough decision, right?'Cause all of a sudden I was going to be the boss and not as much partners anymore. And you saw the potential in it. Just saw the huge potential and and there was really good money behind it to be able to do it the right way. And so we closed down Reeks Kennedy and took over.
Sunbom.
And the founding partners were sort of silent partners. They were they were happy with the direction you were taking it in. They were like, Go for it. You do your thing. Yep.
So now you are you're Sun Bom. I mean you're you're not um Rings Kennedy anymore and and you are running this business. And and you had a it was a small team at first, just like four or five people. And based in Grand Rapids.
Based in Grand Rapids at one of Bob the owner's offices that he let us use. And uh just three or four of us. And but then just had to figure out the whole thing. And saying, Here you go, good luck like we had done before. But with this one all of a sudden we had to take it on.
Yeah, Coca Beach was the you know, there was a direct flight to Orlando and Daytona was up the
Beach a little bit, but Cocoa Beach just sounded like a good place for a sunscreen company, right? Yeah, like Coco Beach. Cocoa Beach. It sounded like internationally. I kinda want a sunscreen that's made in Cocoa Beach, kinda cocoa butter.
Oh my gosh, yeah. If you're going to back to Tokyo after your trip to Hawaii, you're like, Yeah, this place does mean Cocoa Beach Florida. Exactly. Didn't that sound good?
So we like that, so we got a P.O. box in Cocoa Beach. And then we uh you know, all the t calls were getting transferred up, you know, and then we yeah, we had a couple of You mean the the customer service calls? Yeah, customer service calls. They were getting transferred up to Grand Rapids. To Grand Rapids, yeah, too. Like in the middle of winter? Yes. So we'd be on the phone, I you know, nobody ever lied.
But we we did say, you know, if they call and ask how the weather is, you know, just tell'em it's unbelievable. If it's snowing outside or whatever,'cause then you're not lying. It's unbelievable. Right? And they'll think you mean unbelievably good, but it's unbelievably bad.
Uh and if they if they pushed it on anything or waves or any of that, just say we're up at the Great Lakes office actually. So we were that and then we
Really quickly got a house.
down in Cocoa Beach and made it a legitimate office and uh that was our first office and we hired some people to work there and then so eventually we thought we'd all be moving down there.
So would you go back and forth between
All the time.
Oh yeah.
I mean it was a Florida brand through and through. It was made in Florida. The first real office was in Florida and our reps were in Florida.
Um, our first stores and everybody were that took a chance on us were in Florida.
Yeah, I mean it's it's hard for me to just to realize that it only launched in twenty ten because it today feels like such a dominant sunscreen brand, like
You see in airport stores, you see it at Target everywhere. But
To get to that point, right?
What got it to gro like how did you create the awareness around it? It was hard.
When I was at that first surf expo, I was looking for reps. We didn't have any reps at the time.
And everybody was saying.
You need to get this guy named Michael Lacera. If you can get Michael Lacera.
He can take it. He's done it before.
And
So while there was other people that wanted to potentially take the line, I got a hold of him.
he on the phone and sent him some product. He wanted to test the product in the water as a surfer and
He'd done vans and a bunch of other big brands. He was right. He was a sales guy. He was a sales he was an independent sales rep. So he'd

He single handedly, you ask how we did it. It started with him. Without Michael Lacera we're we're we wouldn't have made it. He was relentless. He was hopping fences, he was stickering every off ramp with stickers and every sign and every pictures of sunbum stickers on like the nozzle for like
Gas tanks, like when you felt like him. That's him, man. He would he we had all size stickers and so everybody I mean, radio stations were getting calls, what's the ape? What's this ape we keep seeing around? And they nobody really knew until until they did. But he was amazing.
And we had great displays. Yeah, would you send the display like
'Cause you you had like these.
plastic apes and like uh a whole like sometimes there'd be like a life size cut out of a

Would you send it to every store that
Sold the product?
I mean a lot of it from the beginning was you had to buy the whole thing. We weren't we didn't let you cherry pick. Michael helped us with that. No cherry picking, which means you can't just buy two bottles and put it on your shelf with all the other bottles because we knew that wasn't gonna do it. We knew we needed it to seem bigger than it was. So we we went to IKEA.
and got these big bookcases that they had on sale for like fifty bucks or something, these tall bookcases, and we redid the whole so they would fit our sunscreen bottles perfectly and stickered the side of them and
Put the ape on top.
And that's what we showed at the trade show. So if somebody looked at it, they'd say, How much for this you say you have to buy the whole thing, which included the
The footballs, the Frisbee's, the T shirts, the sunscreen, the guy on top, the and you got the display. So if you wanted to carry Sunbum, you had to carry this whole
Big
Display.
But then that's what everybody looked at. That's what drew everybody to it,'cause it seemed like something and not just two bottles of sunscreen on the bottom shelf.
So this really I mean, this the growth of this business really so year one, uh a hundred thousand dollars. And so was it like
Doubling or tripling or quadrupling by year two. Year two we did one point one million. So yeah, so that was a that was a nice jump.
But it was in the right
It was in the right stores, right? It was the best surf shops, it was the best hotels, it was Casa de Estes, the Breakers, some of those people early took it. Richard Branson and Joan. The end of the first year they
They saw it and bought it for to be their exclusive sunscreen on Necker Island. Wow. And we use that like crazy. It's exclusive on Necker Island and then the four seasons and the standard and then all those just started falling one at a time and then you're then you're rolling.
A a few years into Sunbom I know that uh the original owners
uh got out of it and sold it to you and y and you guys left
Michigan, right? Like you move the company to California in twenty fourteen, right? That's right.
And then in twenty nineteen, which is
ten years after it was started, really nine years after its launch.
Um
Some but
was purchased by S. C. Johnson, and reportedly for$400 million. Amazing.
incredible exit after just, you know, nine years that from what I understand, that was that was the plan all along, right? Like
like the Tequila brand and and the other brands that you worked on to to basically build it and then
Eventually to sell it.
Yeah, that was the idea.
And I've I'd made mistakes before with this because I was
basically running it, I was the CEO.
not heard about that Harvard business model that says, you know, creatives usually start companies and then they
And they're really good at creative. That's why they make companies and and then they
start hiring people and doing the P N L's and managing people and all the stuff they suck at, and by year three it the curve starts going down and by year five the company's over and
I knew that.
Track.
And so about it was about year three or four
When I got called from
Adam Francis, who was a guy in Australia, who's ex pro surfer, he went to Harvard, his wife Tegan was a lawyer, and they had
done a lot of good businesses and
And he was getting ready to start a sunscreen business and he saw a sunbum in Hawaii.
And
So you know, I can't beat these guys, I gotta try to join'em. So he called me
I w knew who I was talking to, I was talking to my next CEO, so I said
Will you be my s our CEO.
And
I got out of his way.
You think that you did not have the skills

For branding rather than
Managing.
A company.
I don't think I know.
Yeah. You know, I was even in Michigan when we took over the company
Three years later, trying to get financing, man, the banks they were like clamoring to help us until they saw my books.
And then they were like, I'm sorry, Tom, we can't help you. And I didn't know enough about margins and scalability and
production and all that kind of stuff. I'd never really built anything to that scale. And you know, it's hard to give up the CEO role.
Most founders don't.
But uh I had I knew I had to do it.
I think at a certain point the Sunbone was doing
You know, seventy million.
Annual salesman is
significant company growing
You know you could
kept going and built a billion dollar brand. Um
So why did you decide to sell?
in twenty nineteen.
Uh yeah, I I mean I think it is a billion dollar brand now. But
We decided because
You know, just like I had taken it and we had taken it f as far as we could in Michigan and and then came to California and
We always thought we'd go international. We had all the trademarks and we were trying to go international, but
Sunscreen's a drug. So it's regulated because it says it's gonna protect you against getting a disease, which is what makes it a drug. So so it's got the FDAs in every country and there's so many regulations and they're all different rules and regulations of what ingredients and what you can do and can't do.
So we were hitting that wall and we wanted to go
International. We were being asked from day one to go international, so
We realized the
Keep growing.
We would need a partner that had
boots on the ground, manufacturing facilities offices in all these countries that could handle
that and landed on
S C Johnson.
You know, it's interesting because you also
This is one.
One of the first interviews you've ever done in your life.
Yes.
Probably the first really intensive interview you've ever done.
Yeah.
Other than the depositions for the Taco Bell trial. Which were more intense than this, trust me. Yeah. Uh but yeah, but I've not d I've not done this before.
And you're basically you don't even exist online, barely.
Right. Right. Like it's really hard to find anything about you. And
Yeah.
And you'd been through this very public trial around Taco Bell.
And
Why did you not want to be
in the public eye at all.
Uh
I grew up so probably
Insecure.
Mm.
Poor maybe, not feeling accepted.
Uh kinda like the furniture store, right? The furniture store
You know, it was a hard place to work and
And I kinda felt like maybe even my wife's parents were
were like, why'd you marry this guy? I'm not saying they thought that, but like you were dating all these really rich guys and then you marry this artist guy and he's like works at this furniture store.
And I just didn't want to ever make anybody feel that way. So I was very conscious about
Bragging and I just didn't like braggers.
Or about being out in front of something.
And this quite frankly the
I didn't think I could help in a lot of the circumstances, you know? I wasn't
I wasn't the brands that I was creating necessarily. I wasn't the big surfer. I wasn't the big
Tough guy for tequila. I wasn't a big Christian guy.
You know, there were people like that that were better than me at it, I suppose if I would have
done like a brand of t shirts for tall skinny guys, I probably could have gotten out in front of it or something, or a picky eater food brand if I would have done that. I could have probably been that guy.
You didn't want to be out in front because you weren't the tequila guy. You weren't the surfer guy. You weren't the Christian guy. And that with sounds like reading between the lines, what you're saying is like
In your mind you felt like
Consumers.
maybe would expect that the brand would come from a person like that.
And so maybe that's why you didn't want to be out in front.
Yeah.
And and when I you know had the Taco Bell lawsuit, I went from being this creative
Guy.
to the guy that sued Taco Bell. So any interview, the only thing you could find at the time was Taco Bell lawsuit. So I was the that's what people wanted to talk about and that would hurt.
the brand that I was trying to promote and not help it. I didn't want
Flex. I let other people let other people flex. I flexed
by doing the work and I felt really good about that.
Tom, when you think about
all that you've done. I mean you're sixty, you've got
A new
venture you're right you're working on. I I think you're probably gonna work till you drop dead.
just knowing you from this conversation. Um
How how much of what's happened to you?
And and this
Success do you think?
Is because of all the work you put in and all the sweat. And how much do you think has to do with some of the just the lucky breaks?
I think it's a combo.
Obviously probably everybody says that.
I think there were so many.
Lucky breaks, right?
Vivian Dryer.
Back it.
Meyer, you know, giving me those that order for eighteen hundred.
T shirts, like all the people that I met, all the stores that said yes, all the buyers.
It's really.
The lucky breaks of people taking it.
Chance on me?
And believing?
In wanting to take the ride with me.
But I also
Uh it's also a ton of work. It's also doing it more.
You know, like Kobe said, you just practice more.
So
practicing more than anybody else makes you better than anybody at it and I've
Practice.
a lot because I love it. Because it's kinda my art.
It's kinda my paintings, you know? These brands are kinda my paintings, so it's my the extension of what I was doing my whole life.
So I just absolutely love
Love it, it's art to me.
So yeah.
It's both.
That's Tom Rinks, co-founder of Sunbom, and the mind behind many other brands, including Made by Dentists, which was in fact founded by two dentists. Two sisters, actually, from Ireland.
And they
They were killing it in Ireland.
But they tried to come to America and
And it wasn't working. Yeah. Then they thought maybe I could help them.
So I told him I would if I could just blow it up and start it.
Just like sunbone.
I mean the products were great'cause they they're dentists.
They're so authentic and they're so passionate and they're and they're you know, again, you you went back to that question, you know, why aren't I why aren't I in front of this brand?
Right,'cause I don't I'm not a dentist.
Not a dentist, but Tom did do all the design work for the new brand.
And one place he got really creative was around Made by Dentists' line of toothpaste for kids.
With flavors like
Alien blood?
and eyeball juice.
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This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtina Rablui. It was edited by Niva Grant. This archived episode was produced by Carrie Thompson. Our production staff also includes, Chris Massini, John Isabella, Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, and Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to how I built this.