# Building Sun Bum: Design, Perception, and Scaling

**Podcast:** How I Built This with Guy Raz
**Published:** 2026-07-13

## Transcript

Hey, everyone.
So this week, we're revisiting one of our absolute favorite episodes in the archive.
It's my conversation with Tom Rinks.
He's the founder of Sunbomb, 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 2023, and I hope you enjoy it.
Cocoa Beach just sounded like a good place for a sunscreen company, right?
Like Cocoa Beach.
So we got a P.O.
box in Cocoa Beach.
And then we, you know, all the calls were getting transferred up, you know, and then we— They were getting transferred up to Grand Rapids?
To Grand Rapids, yeah.
Like in the middle of winter?
Yes.
So we'd be on the phone.
You know, nobody ever lied, but we did say, you know, if they call and ask how the weather is, just tell them it's unbelievable, if it's snowing outside or whatever, because 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 Raz, and on the show today, how Tom Rinks knew that a yellow gorilla on a wood grain background would be the perfect mascot for a sunscreen brand and built SunBum into a $400 million business.
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 Lowery, 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 brand 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 Sunbum 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 Coppertone, Neutrogena, and Hawaiian Tropic.
More than a year before co-founder Tom Rinks launched Sunbum, He thought about every inch of its design, a now-iconic woodgrain 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.
And one of his most iconic contributions to the world of branding, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, as in Yo Quiero 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, a Christian fundamentalist minister.
Tom's strict Christian upbringing eventually turned him away from organized religion and 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 was one of the first ones to apply and actually open that store in Grand Rapids on 28th Street.
So you were like a floor sales rep?
Yeah, it was just a full commission.
No salary.
Wow.
Yeah.
It was really known in Michigan as like the shark infested waters because the salespeople wouldn't get off you.
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 you.
And it was retail, so it was crazy hours every weekend, which is brutal on my wife for sure.
Yeah.
All right.
So you're working at this at the furniture store and you're a young guy and you're in your like mid-20s.
So did you start to think about what else you might want to do or were you happy doing that?
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.
I was just learning how to sell, which was, it would end up be everything.
There's a, I think his name's Ogilvy.
Ogilvy and Mathers.
He's like the father of marketing, 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 going to make it.
You have to be able to sell your ideas.
So I think those years, those five years at Art Van, it was called Art Van Furniture, were just hugely, hugely important for my career.
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 I give you 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 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, a big family jumping around on it, I'd send the old timer in to talk about what a great investment it is, 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.
So it was almost like a game, right?
It was a total game.
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.
Oh, you would just get on the loudspeaker and say that?
Customer pickup, door five, even though there was no customer pickup?
Yeah, totally.
Just to kind of 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, you start to like just play around with sketches.
you turned into a t-shirt.
Tell me, what was that all about?
How'd that start?
Yeah, I was with my wife at Holland State Park, which is a really nice beach there in Holland, which is 45 minutes from Grand Rapids.
And there was surfers in the water.
Wow.
Yeah, they were on long boards, and I was just in shock because there's no waves, really, you know?
You know, I would learn later that there were actually...
It was ways most of my kids learned to surf on Lake Michigan.
But these guys were out there, and I thought it was funny, and 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 long board with a beard and really skinny and cobwebs on him.
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 then I ended up...
Deciding to make a t-shirt with it.
And I made it one t-shirt on a Hanes Beefy t-shirt.
Big neon letters on the top chest said, Surf Michigan.
And then it had the drawing and a little caption underneath it waiting for the big one.
Surf Michigan.
Yeah.
And, you know, without really even knowing what I was doing one day at Art Van Furniture, on my break I called Meijer, which is a chain of about 100 stores.
Grocery stores, right?
They're like a target.
Target, yeah.
So I called there, asked for their surfwear buyer, and got a hold of an assistant or somebody, and I said I was a rep from a surfwear company and I wanted to show my 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 got an appointment.
And then on my day off, I went to that appointment.
It's this big, huge corporate office.
It's 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 I had one t-shirt in a little suit bag.
I was sitting there in my bad corduroy suit and I almost left when they called my name and said to go set up and...
one of the rooms 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, you know, your sweatshirts and t-shirts and hats and everything.
You can just make, you can show it all together.
And so I just put my one t-shirt on the thing, a little wire hanger, hung it up, turned the lights on and spread the drawings out and waited.
And then Vivian Dreyer walked in as the buyer.
And she...
You still remember her name.
I still know her.
I still talk to her.
Wow.
Yeah, she changed my life.
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 had only one choice, just to come clean.
And I just said, hey, I work at Art Van Furniture.
I'm not a surfwear rep.
I just was at the beach a few weeks ago and saw these guys surfing and thought I was funny.
And I'm so sorry for wasting your time.
Here it is.
And she looked at me and said, let's take a look.
So she looked at the shirt, looked at the drawing, spread them out a little bit, smiled and ordered 1800 T-shirts.
Wow.
She ordered 1800 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 Perrin Screen Printing, a guy named Carl Perrin.
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 you just bought, he just bought like 1,800 Hanes T-shirts, and then...
Yeah.
I did all the art, took them there, printed them, and I at the time, you know, you can't do this anymore, but I put them back into the Hanes BVT box and put the right name on them and delivered them 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.
I did that for a couple of years.
And you turned into a business.
You called it New Agenda.
That's right.
And meantime, this is like the early 90s 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 Juwan Howard and Chris Webber, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, they were kind of like just changing college sports as well.
They were rebels and they were cool and they were wearing black socks and they're the ones that started wearing the really long shorts.
Yeah.
And I was at Meijer and I was looking for a Michigan shirt and the only...
shirts with Michigan with basketball.
It just said Michigan XXL basketball or Michigan with like a clip art ball going through a hoop basketball.
And, you know, there was nothing cool.
And I couldn't believe it.
I couldn't figure it out.
So I, again, on a day off, I drove to University of Michigan and talked to the AD and actually got the license for Michigan.
How did you get in with the athletic director there?
That's a big job.
I mean, I just walked in.
And at the time, he was the one that ran the licensing.
That was part of his job later.
It would go to, you know, there's college licensing companies now that just handle all of the licenses for all the schools.
But at the time, it was done in-house at the school.
Wait, you went there with designs saying, hey, I could do better shirts for you guys?
No, I didn't.
I showed them nothing.
I just asked what it would cost to get a license.
I still would have to get the designs approved, but I didn't have to show them anything.
I just had to get a license.
How much was the license?
It was nothing for the license.
It was just a percentage.
I just had to pay them a royalty, which was, I think, 10 or 20 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?
It just said big navy blue letters that said 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 kind of 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 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 sold it to them?
Like the managers just ordered your t-shirts based on that one design?
So yeah, so I went to Moe's Sports Shop in Ann Arbor, right on campus.
It was really cool.
It's not there any longer, Rosa.
institution there for so many years.
Showed them, they bought it, and then Ulrich's is the bookstore there, and sold it to them, and they sold 10,000 shirts that season.
10,000, because you're doing this a few months before March Madness.
Yes.
I mean, they get to the finals, you sell 10,000 of these shirts that say Slamdance.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was huge.
So that clearly was the impetus for you to leave your job selling furniture, because you're making serious money selling t-shirts.
Well, 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 family forever.
I didn't know if it was a fluke.
What schools did you go to after Michigan?
I mean, obviously the ones that were close by, Michigan State, Notre Dame, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgetown.
But I didn't really know.
So I had huge inventory and huge fees from Perrin for the printing.
And I just didn't have any concept of margins, what it really took to have a business.
So while at the end I had 400 and something licenses, while I had lots of licenses, I wasn't super profitable.
And I guess around 92, you meet this guy named Joe Shields.
I guess you meet him in Grand Rapids, who you would go on to start a new kind of design business with.
Yeah, I was at Parent Screen Printing and I saw this guy's work that was also being printed there.
And it was really cool.
What was it?
It was these characters.
I thought it was super cool.
I just saw it as art.
I was a goofy little doodle cartoonist, right?
This guy's a real cartoonist.
So I 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 putting getting the reps together.
It was for the line.
There was two lines.
One was called Mosh.
The other one was called Caveman that he drew.
But these shirts were like kind of abstract humans or like cartoon character-ish kind of animals.
And it would say, would it say something on the shirt?
No, it just said Mosh.
It was just a stylized.
version of these people dancing on the front of shirts in different positions.
It just said mosh on the top, right?
Which was kind of cool because of mosh pits and all that.
And who would wear those shirts?
Nobody.
Nobody would wear those shirts, guy.
Actually.
Nobody would buy.
I don't think one person wore those shirts.
But while we were getting ready to do them, I saw an article in a magazine that had Madonna.
This is like in 94 with her Chiquita.
her chihuahua.
It was a photo of her holding her chihuahua.
It was a photo of her holding this new dog that she just got called Chiquita.
And at the time, right, because I'd been looking at, okay, what's going on in the t-shirt world?
And when a line gets popular, it's popular by the cool people, the college-age kids, the high schoolers, right?
They start buying it, and then their younger brothers see them wearing it, and then they want to buy it.
So then it gets a little younger.
And so that's the first sign it's going to be trending, starting to trend down on the cool factor.
And then when the dads start buying it, and then the dads are wearing it, then those cool kids stop wearing it.
And so then they're going to be looking for something new.
So I saw that kind of happening, and I saw Madonna and Chiquita, and I was like, took that to Joe, and we called it Psycho Chihuahua.
You took that picture of Madonna and 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 going to do.
Let's do this chihuahua line.
Because I think, and here's why, he loved it.
He drew this really badass little small shaking chihuahua.
And we put words on it.
So it was Psycho Chihuahua, you know, 1923 or something.
And then these Mexican colors.
It was supposed to be funny.
Like, look at this little...
psycho chihuahua 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 dogs suck.
Big dogs suck.
And so we sent the, we made some shirts at Perrin and we sent them out.
I found some reps.
They said they liked them, they would take them and try to sell them 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 the temperature was and called me back and said, everybody wants Psycho Chihuahua.
Everybody wants Psycho Chihuahua.
And do you remember how many orders you guys got?
This is like 94, 95.
You know, we're selling tens of thousands of shirts, right?
We weren't getting rich by any means, but we had something.
We could feel the pulse.
I was going with a new agenda to a show, a trade show called The Super Show, which is no longer around.
It used to be the biggest trade show in the world, at least for apparel.
And I got a booth space, and Psycho Chihuahua just 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 t-shirt.
I know it sounds stupid, and no, not everybody.
guy but but enough people compared to the other booths right but by blowing up most booths you're kind of looking for people to talk to our booth had people there we were doing interviews we couldn't write the orders fast enough all on the strength of the psycho chihuahua t-shirt this is i mean 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 psycho chihuahua.
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 there was a convention that was like a licensing convention where you bring a product to see if anyone wanted 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 Javits in New York.
New York, yeah.
You show your stuff.
And 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 I make a deal with them.
So that's what that show was.
We got a booth.
I got us a really great placement next to the first Jurassic Park and Rugrats.
And what happened?
Was it similar to the previous trade show?
Was there a lot of buzz around 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 came by.
The camera?
Yeah, they were making a little small camera.
They were interested in licensing it for their small camera, so they'd have a little mascot for it.
The psycho Chihuahua Minolta dog?
Yeah.
I mean, it never went past the trade show, but we talked for quite a while at the trade show about it.
And just other companies, 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 came by.
Taco Bell.
So Taco Bell comes to your booth, two 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 had sent Ed there.
And so they were just looking for ideas and 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 and we knew we were over our heads a little bit with this thing so we got an agent.
Arlene Scanlon.
Just like a creative, like a licensing agent?
Yeah, she was a licensing agent.
She'd worked like she'd gotten the deals for like Pink Panther and Owing and Snoopy.
It's like a talent agent for people like you.
Exactly.
So she could represent us and strike the deals and make sure we're doing everything right.
Because, you know, just as we were just talking to him, even on the phone and through email, we knew it was getting, we needed some help as far as what this was going to cost, what the fees would be.
They were asking about the fees and all that.
We worked with them for 18 months.
We were on the calendar of when it was going to happen.
They were planning on testing it.
What kind of designs were you working on?
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.
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 going to be...
For TV, it can't be a cartoon anymore.
It has to be a real chihuahua, especially as we started storyboarding it.
We had to take it and just turn it into a real dog, kind of like Garfield could turn it into a real cat.
So that's what we did.
All right, 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 say, yeah, do our campaign, I mean, that must have been super exciting.
It was the most exciting.
Creatively, it was over the moon.
Designing the toys that they would give away, the little dogs, it was getting good.
So anyone who was conscious in the late 90s would know where this is going, which is the famous Taco Bell Chihuahua ad, which is amazing.
I mean, it was incredible.
You were working on this thing, and you're working on what is about to become, you didn't know, an iconic.
concept, and they stopped taking your calls.
Yeah.
They just stopped answering your calls in 1997.
Yeah, they did.
We were just rolling so well along with everything.
And like I said, everything was slated to go.
And all of a sudden, Ed stopped calling us back.
Like nothing happened?
He wasn't like no blowout fight?
They just...
No, they just...
Nothing.
They just...
Just ghosted you.
Completely ghosted us.
And we were getting nervous.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah, we just thought they weren't going to go with it.
We just thought they were going to we just thought they've had another idea because we knew their work with some other agencies on some different ideas, too.
Yeah.
And so we thought you just figured, OK, that's it.
That's it.
But it would have been cool if they had called us.
Come on.
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.
Because we told everybody about our families.
Everybody was asking about it.
We were high-fiving daily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Then about three months later, all of a sudden, a commercial, an ad campaign comes out with a Chihuahua.
And at the end, the Chihuahua says, Yo quiero Taco Bell.
Yeah.
And what do you remember when you saw that ad?
What do you remember thinking?
Yeah, they tested that ad.
in the Northeast, which happened to be where I was in Michigan.
And I just lost it, you know, because 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 everything was the same.
Wow.
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, the Sunbum Gorilla.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to 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 in Austin and Chicago, big one, and L.A.
in-house and Grand Rapids.
They had so many.
It's intimidating.
Super intimidating.
This would take five years of your life.
I'll just start by saying that.
Actually longer, but five years until a final decision was made.
But in 99, at a U.S.
District Court in 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 Chihuahua in me, I guess you could say, right?
It was fighting for the little guy.
And the big guys just were taking advantage.
And I'm pretty relentless when it comes to that kind of stuff.
How were you focusing, Tom?
How were you and Joe continuing to do your work, your business?
Well, it kind of pulled us apart a little bit.
Yeah.
It was stressful and we had done all this work.
I don't know if we blamed each other.
I don't think we did.
But it was just, you know, it was kind of over because now Taco Bell owns this little Chihuahua.
So even our shirts 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 consoled 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 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?
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 had known before, everybody, my friends had known that we were doing it.
So when the commercial started airing, when the Super Bowl ad ran and all that, people from all over, in California, everywhere we're calling, congratulating me for the campaign.
Thought it was amazing.
Congrats.
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 don't know what I would do.
I would be so mad and stressed and anxious.
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 going to hate to hear this right now, but if they would have offered us 200,000, 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 even say it was our, they wouldn't even settle for that.
They didn't offer us one dime.
And if they would have.
Over those five years, we would have taken it 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 because it was going to cost so much.
I mean, that's a cliche to say, but this is the ultimate David and Goliath story.
Yeah, totally.
All right.
So, meantime, you're fighting this.
But around this time, this is like 2001.
You start something entirely new, which was a departure from what you had been doing.
I guess you start a venture to make like Christian-oriented films.
Can you tell me about that?
Because I know when you grew up, your dad was a minister.
But 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.
Just tell me about it.
Sure.
My wife 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.
But then this guy came along, Rob Bell.
And he was like a guest speaker.
He was young, fresh.
He felt like he swore.
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 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.
And we decided to go to his church when he opened a church.
So he opened this little church in this warehouse with 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 then one day, he had a couple other friends all get together because he wanted to talk about getting his cassette ministry cleaned up.
So, you know, they record the sermons, and he wanted to get his message out to more people and thought he could sell his cassettes or make them available somehow through the church.
And we were 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?
All right.
So you start working on this new product, basically, which is going to be these kind of Christian inspirational videos.
Was the idea from this video business to, I mean, how was it going to make money?
Did you see a path there to build a big business?
No.
In fact, I made it a nonprofit business.
Oh, wow.
It was originally going to be, you know, the brand of Christianity, if you will, because 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 kind of ugly.
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 we could actually try to change the brand a little bit by this thing.
made it a nonprofit and started to try to think about how to make this thing happen.
All right.
But meantime, you're not done with Taco Bell because, as we said earlier, you and Joe decide to appeal that case.
And this goes to – this is a federal court.
And now you have to focus on the trial.
And what do you remember, like getting cross-examined?
Do you remember just being nervous?
You know, about testify 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.
Yeah.
The judge came out.
Everybody rose.
The jury was in.
And they went up and said they'd like to see everybody in chambers.
And so the judge asked us all to come in and talk about it.
I don't remember the number, because I was...
but they offered us a few million dollars to settle right there.
Five years after everything they had been putting us through.
And I just looked at Joe and he looked at me and gave me a little nod.
And then I looked at our lawyers and they were 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 looked at him and said, no, let's go.
And we walked back in.
Three and a half week trial.
It was super hairy.
I was crazy cross-examined.
But they really 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.
Yeah.
And eventually you're brought back in to hear the judgment.
Yeah.
Tell me what happened.
Well, we got noticed 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 they read guilty on all counts.
Wow.
Did you cry?
Did you collapse?
Did you?
Oh, dude.
Yeah, just probably cried.
Like probably just the emotion of it being over and of having taken these guys on and beaten them.
It was just overwhelming.
Wow.
Yeah.
and awarded us what we asked for, which was the contract.
You know, at one point we'd given them the contract.
They'd asked, obviously, what kind of price they were going to want on it.
And Arlene Scanlon 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.
So the claim was just an implied contract claim.
So we were asking for that contract, and the jury agreed that we deserved 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's side just dropped their heads, packed their bags.
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 did Taco Bell pay that right away?
No.
No, they appealed right away.
And then a few months later, they settled.
And were you – I mean you had up until this point not necessarily been – I mean you were making a decent living, but you weren't rich.
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 sigh of relief a little bit, right?
Yeah.
For sure, I could breathe a sigh of relief, but it wasn't as much money as everybody thought.
I had $40 million under my mattress.
I got 33% of the lawyers plus hard costs, 25% of my agent.
Me and Joe split the rest.
Tax government took the rest.
It was not as much.
So in the end, you might have five, six million bucks, right?
Yeah, you're right on the money.
But that was still absolutely gigantic for a family like mine.
Meanwhile, while you were working on the Christian videos with this nonprofit, I guess you met this guy who would wind up helping you with that project and then who would become your next business partner.
His name is Rene Canetti.
Who is Rene Canetti or who is he?
Rene worked at an agency, a little design agency.
It was a couple of doors down from a 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 they were expensive.
It was like $200 an hour, which was a lot for a nonprofit.
But as I realized I couldn't afford to keep using an agency, and I was going to 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?
And he was basically, he grew up an atheist.
You know what I mean?
He hated the church.
He didn't believe any of it.
And I was like, why would you want to come and do this?
And he said, because I have never looked for God or looked for spirituality or anything because there was no on-ramp for me, a person like me.
And Rene 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 t-shirt printing shop and then you start something with him.
Rene is a guy you meet a couple doors down and 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 2007.
You called it Rinks Canetti.
Yeah.
Yes.
And you were going to do branding work for whoever.
But how did you even get those accounts?
Well, when we did Rinks Canetti, the word was kind of getting a little bit around about.
us on the brand side of things, just word of mouth.
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 Rockin' 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 give us a piece of your company.
Right.
So somebody would come to you and say, hey, I want to do this or I want to do that.
And I guess one of those things was somebody came to you, maybe it was 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.
My childhood was great because of Brent.
His name is Brent.
His name is Brent Hawking, yeah.
And he ended up being a mortgage guy and just crushing it in the mortgage businesses and just one of the best in the country.
But he was just getting tired of it and wanted to start a tequila company.
He wanted to get into the spirits business.
Because what else do two children of ministers do but start a tequila brand?
It's the natural path.
It is.
So he wanted to do that.
He knew what I did.
He knew about me and Renee doing this thing and some of our work.
I mean, 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, to style this thing.
That was what you were charged to do.
Correct.
Did he know about tequila?
Like, was he experienced?
Was he a distiller?
He wasn't, but man, he fit the bill.
You know, it's all about feeling when you build a brand, right?
People buy things because the way they make them feel, right?
You buy a Louis Vuitton because you think it makes you feel rich.
You buy Old Surfan because you think it looks cool.
You buy 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 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 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 earning a cosmopolitan and so he fit he fit that bill he was He had just such a great aesthetic.
But he was a big guy, tough.
He was great in the clubs.
He knew lots of people.
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 he got that and then just needed a brand behind it.
Did you have a name for it?
Yeah, they were from Lyon, which means lion.
So we called it DeLeon.
The brand actually came up with that name.
DeLeon Tequila.
DeLeon Tequila.
Right.
And 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 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 it looked badass it looked like something i think the cheapest bottle was 125 dollars a bottle all the way up to 850 dollars a bottle wow And you guys, as part of the sort of agreement, you also got a piece of the company.
Yes.
So you were incentivized to make this work because it was your company now.
Yeah, 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 Rinks 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.
All right.
So we've talked about T-shirts, Surf Michigan and 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 Own Tequila, somebody else comes to you with a concept or an idea for sunscreen.
Yeah, it's around 2009.
Who approached you?
What was the story?
It was a friend from my school that my kids went to in Michigan.
And he wanted to 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 what they were 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 want to do this.
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 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 Game Face, which was for colleges, which would never approve it.
And then they had Sunbum, actually, that had a little carabiner on it and a little clip art hammock guy on the cover of the bottle.
And what about their concept appealed to you?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
I told them.
He was never going to make it.
None of them were going to make it.
They were horrible.
Like NASCAR people don't use expensive sunscreen.
There had to be licensing with colleges.
I knew colleges.
But it was just horrible.
It was just horrible design, horrible ideas.
And 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 in 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 a 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 was 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 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 Sunbomb?
No, I said ditch it all.
And then we started our process.
Tell me how you did it there.
It's a three-month process.
So 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 how it began.
All right.
So tell me what you started to think about building this brand and what it was going to be.
At first, it was just we designed it.
Renee and I's office was in Grand Rapids and we were walking to Subway.
For lunch, and we passed a contemporary museum of art, and there was an Ames lounge chair in Ottoman sitting there.
I looked at it.
I saw the wood grain, and I saw the curves, and I was like, wood, like wood grain.
That's good.
And Rene liked it as well, so we kind of developed a little wood grain pattern, and we realized nothing in the market was wood grain.
We liked it.
It felt good.
It felt natural.
You were thinking wood grain bottle.
Wood grain bottle.
Bottle.
And it would be, you know, there was every color in the rainbow already there, and you kind of want to own the block.
And then my son Drake's Billabong thrift store T-shirt was yellow and brown.
I brought that in one day, and we liked those colors.
Yellow is a good color.
It got brighter over the years, but yellow is the first color I see.
That's why Caution Tape is yellow.
It's great for brands.
We hated the name Sunbum, but then when I came up with Trust the Bum, you know, for a tagline for it, and then protect your lazy ass.
It kind of all started to come together.
And then the name didn't matter.
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 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 because you're already saying half the name it's like if your drain is clogged drano is the perfect name or if you need home products home depot is good or office products office depot and if office depot is taken office max you're already saying the name so it's good and i mean i went to a haircut place called coiffeteria And they had to play on coif in cafeteria, and nobody knew what they did there, and they went out of business.
So Sun Bum kind of grew on us, and then we started figuring out how the rest of it would look and how to mash it up.
So you had, of course, a lot of experience in your previous iterations with characters, obviously Psycho Chihuahua.
And did you think about...
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.
But realizing the strength of a character, realizing the Budweiser frogs, the Eminem guys, the Energizer bunny, they live forever.
Mickey Mouse, right?
They don't get old.
They don't get DUIs like founders or celebrities or, right?
They can just keep their good.
They can keep going.
Yeah.
And then figuring out, you know, initially we were drawing, you know, surf characters and guys with look like hippies.
And then we kind of landed on Animal and then it went to Monkeys and then Ape.
How come Monkey?
Well, everybody likes Monkeys, eh?
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 Woodies.
And it would still be in surf shops today, or maybe it wouldn't be.
And it would be a wooden bottle called Woody's.
Woody's and cross surfboards, and that's it.
But to do what we did and to do what you need to do to be like a global brand, you've got to 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 Raz, 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 it's that.
The second one was seeing this furniture, right?
The Scandinavian mid-century modern furniture design that led the way for the wood grains and the curves in the bottles.
And then, you know, Rene was from, Copenhagen, so he was really up on Northern European typography and layout, so super clean, negative space on every, even the ingredients, just the way they're laid out, everything was considered and spaced, all the Bauhaus fonts and those types of things.
Next page would be Japanese in New York Street, where lines like Supreme, Bathing Ape, Undefeated, and then the last page was Collectible Vinyls.
And Renee had a lot of kid robot stuff up on our shelves and the graffiti world and brought that into this somehow.
So that looking at all of those pieces, I think Sonny, who's the logo, the gorilla logo, that was led a lot from Japanese street art.
You know, Tom, this reminds me a little bit of something that you mentioned to me before this interview started called the Elvis principle that you mentioned.
What's the Elvis principle that you?
What is it, and how do you use it to develop a brand?
The Elvis principle is kind of similar to the mashup that I talked about, except this is more on the personality.
I was watching an Elvis special or something about him, and I got really intrigued with him.
And he came out, when he came out on the scene in the 50s, he was rock and roll.
He was dangerous.
He's sexy.
shaking his hips like crazy, right?
And then he got banned, right?
He was just 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 got to burn the records or you can't go to an Elvis concert, which is what made people want to go to the concert more.
Once he did the gospel albums and 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.
It's what's a really interesting personality for brands, for people.
So I was very conscious of that in using that when I did ads and all that stuff.
I was kind of making that personality type.
So you start to work on this.
mascot, right?
And it's a simple, I mean, I think a lot of people can picture it.
It's 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 design to renaissance.
design that or you or absolutely like i was sketching stuff and he was sketching some stuff and a couple 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 and but 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 he pulled it up on his 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 brands out there, right?
Forget about the Coppertones 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.
I knew it would be great everything.
And we knew we were going to graffiti.
market the shit out of this thing.
You could literally take just the image of that ape and not even put sunbomb on it, and the idea was people would know that was sunbomb.
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 sunbomb on it.
It just was that.
We did ads.
We did billboards.
And it just had the ape on there.
And people didn't know that we stickered the crap out of every surf town in California.
And then we decided to take it to the January 10th Surf Expo.
It's the Surf Expo 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, because all the skate brands are 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 skate vert ramp and see our stickers on the ramp itself.
On the ramp.
The people were sticking, and the kids were coming by asking if we had more stickers of just the sunny guy, just the monkey.
Just the monkey.
Just the ape, yeah.
Yeah.
It's an ape or a monkey.
I'm sorry.
It's an ape.
Monkeys have tails.
Yeah, let's say ape.
I'm sorry.
No, that's okay.
Let's pay some respect to Sonny.
Okay.
It's 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 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 owned 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.
So immediately it was just like, OK, 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 colors 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 a better product.
Correct.
And we did have a better product because we were making it for us.
And that's basically what 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 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 Rene decide to shut down your brand agency and to put all your effort into Sunbom and to basically become employees to join it.
Yeah.
The guy that owned the company asked me if I would take over.
But actually for me to take charge, he asked us if we'd come work for him.
And so I went to Rene and talked to him about it.
A long talk about it.
It was a tough decision, right?
Because 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 there was really good money behind it to be able to do it the right way.
And so we closed down Riggs Canetti and took over Sunbomb.
And the founding partners were sort of silent partners.
They were happy with the direction you were taking it in.
They were like, go for it.
You do your thing.
So now you are...
You're Sunbomb.
I mean, you're not Rinks-Kanetti anymore, and you are running this business.
And 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 just three or four of us.
But then just had to figure out the whole thing.
I was just planning on, Renee and I were just planning on making the brand for them 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.
One of the interesting things I came across is that it never said Grand Rapids, Michigan on the bottle.
It said, I think, Cocoa Beach, Florida.
Yeah, Cocoa 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?
Like Cocoa Beach.
Cocoa Beach.
It sounded like internationally, I kind of want a sunscreen that's made in Cocoa Beach, kind of cocoa butter.
Oh, my gosh, yeah.
If you're going back to Tokyo after your trip to Hawaii, you're like, yeah, this place doesn't mean Cocoa Beach, Florida.
Cocoa Beach, exactly.
Doesn't that sound good?
So we like that, so we got a P.O.
box in Cocoa Beach.
And then we, you know, all the calls were getting transferred up, you know, and then we had a Cocoa Beach.
You mean the customer service calls?
Yeah, customer service calls.
They were getting transferred up to Grand Rapids?
To Grand Rapids, yeah.
Like in the middle of winter?
Yes, so we'd be on the phone.
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 them it's unbelievable.
If it's snowing outside or whatever, because then you're not lying.
It's unbelievable, right?
And they'll think you mean unbelievably good, but it's unbelievably bad.
And 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 that was our first office and we hired some people to work there.
And then 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.
Our first stores and everybody that took a chance on us were in Florida.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard for me just to realize that it only launched in 2010 because today feels like such a dominant sunscreen brand.
Like you see it in airport stores, you see it at Target everywhere.
But to get to that point, right, what got it to, 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 Lassera.
If you can get Michael Lassera.
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 on the phone and sent him some product.
He wanted to test the product in the water.
He's a surfer.
And he had done Vans and a bunch of other big brands.
He was a sales guy.
He was a sales.
He was an independent sales rep.
So he'd done it for a lot of other brands.
He single-handedly, you ask how he did it, it started with him.
Without Michael Lassero, 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...
I've seen pictures of Sunblum stickers on the nozzle for like...
gas tanks, like when you fill out your car.
That's him.
That's him, man.
We had all size stickers.
So everybody, I mean, radio stations were getting calls.
What's the ape?
What's this ape we keep seeing around?
And nobody really knew until they did.
But he was amazing.
And we had great displays.
Yeah.
Would you send the display?
Because you had like these plastic apes and like a whole, like sometimes there'd be like a life-size cutout of an ape.
Or 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 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 going to do it.
We knew we needed it to seem bigger than it was.
So we went to Ikea and got these big bookcases that they had on sale for like 50 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'd say you have to buy the whole thing, which included the footballs, the Frisbees, the T-shirts, the sunscreen, the guy on top.
And you got the display.
So if you wanted to carry sunbomb, you had to carry this whole big display.
But then that's what everybody looked at.
That's what drew everybody to it, because it seemed like something and not just two bottles of sunscreen on the bottom shelf.
So this really, I mean, the growth of this business really, so year one, $100,000.
And so was it like doubling or tripling or quadrupling by year two?
Year two, we did 1.1 million.
So yeah, so that was a nice jump, but it was in the right stores, right?
It was the best surf shops.
It was the best hotels.
Casa de Estes, The Breaker, some of those people early took it, Richard Branson and Joan.
The end of the first year, they saw it and bought it to be their exclusive sunscreen on Necker Island.
And we used that like crazy.
It's exclusive on Necker Island.
And then the Four Seasons and the Standard and all those just started falling one at a time and then you're rolling.
A few years into Sunbomb, I know that the original owners...
got out of it and sold it to you.
And you guys left Michigan, right?
Like you moved the company to California in 2014, right?
That's right.
And then in 2019, which is 10 years after it was started, really nine years after its launch, Sunbom was purchased by SC 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 the tequila brand and the other brands that you worked on to basically build it and then eventually to sell it.
Yeah, that was the idea.
And I had made mistakes before with this because I was basically running it.
I was the CEO.
And I'd heard about that Harvard business model that says, you know, creatives usually start companies and they're really good at creative.
That's why they make companies.
start hiring people and doing the P&Ls and managing people and all the stuff they suck at.
And by year three, the curve starts going down.
And by year five, the company's over.
And I knew that track.
And so it was about year three or four when I got called from Adam Francis, who was a guy in Australia who was ex-pro surfer.
He went to Harvard.
His wife, Tegan, was a lawyer.
And they had done a lot of good businesses.
And he was getting ready to start a sunscreen business.
He saw a sun bomb in Hawaii and said, you know, I can't beat these guys.
I got to try to join them.
So he called me.
I knew who I was talking to.
I was talking to my next CEO.
So I said, will you be our CEO?
And I got out of his way.
Do you think that you did not have the skills?
Your skills were better suited for branding rather than managing a company?
I don't think I know.
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 I knew I had to do it.
I think at a certain point, Sunbaum was doing, you know, 70 million annual sales.
I mean, it was a significant company growing.
You know, you could have kept it going and built a billion-dollar brand.
So why did you decide to sell in 2019?
Yeah, 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 as far as we could in Michigan and then came to California.
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 going to protect you against getting a disease, which is what makes it a drug.
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 to...
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 SC Johnson.
You know, it's interesting because you also, this is 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.
But yeah, but 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 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?
I grew up so probably insecure.
poor maybe not feeling accepted kind of like the furniture store right the furniture store you know it was a hard place to work and and i kind of 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 married 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.
It sounds like what you were saying was 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, it 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 when I 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 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 to.
flex.
I 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 60, you've got a new venture you're working on.
I think you're probably going to work until you drop dead, just knowing you from this conversation.
How much of what's happened to you 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 Dreyer back at Meijer, you know, giving me that order for 1800 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 a chance on me.
and believing in wanting to take the ride with me.
But I also, it's also a ton of work.
It's also doing it more.
You know, like Kobe said, you just practice, you got to practice more.
So practicing more than anybody else makes you better than anybody at it.
And I've practiced a lot because I love it because it's kind of my art.
It's kind of my paintings, you know, these brands are kind of my paintings.
So it's like 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 Sunbomb 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 were killing it in Ireland.
But they tried to come to America, and it wasn't working.
Then they thought maybe I could help them.
So I told them I would if I could just blow it up and start it.
from scratch.
Just like Sunbun.
Yeah.
I mean, the products were great because they're dentists.
They're so authentic and they're so passionate and they're, you know, again, you went back to that question, you know, why aren't I in front of this brand?
Right?
Because 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 Dentist's line of toothpastes for kids with flavors like alien blood.
and eyeball juice.
Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.
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This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtina Rablui.
It was edited by Neva Grant.
This archived episode was produced by Carrie Thompson.
Our production staff also includes Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, John Isabella, Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, and Elaine Coates.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.