671: Tori Quit The Barber Shop, Built a Brand In Her Spare Room, and Hit $1M In Under 2 Years

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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Welcome to Little Empires, brought to you by the team at Foundr. At Foundr, our mission is to support the next generation of e-comm founders. So while you may know us for interviewing some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, this series is a little different. Little Empires shines a spotlight on the builders inside our own Foundr community, the entrepreneurs who are in the trenches, taking action, learning, and building their businesses in real time. These aren't overnight success stories. These are real journeys, real lessons, and real founders creating their own little empires one step at a time. This podcast is proudly produced by the Foundr team to give our students a platform to share their experiences, wins, challenges, and honest realities of building a business from the ground up. Now, let's dive into today's episode. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode. We have a round two today here in Melbourne in person. One of our community members, Tori Gill, spoke to her about 14 months ago and she did $100,000 in 90 days with her sunscreen brand, Sun & Daughter.
Incredible brand. Make sure you check it out. We're gonna hear all the latest on how she's rapidly growing this brand. It is now a million dollar plus a year brand. Maybe more, we'll find out. We're gonna hear the good, the bad, the ugly on how she's building this brand, how she's trying to go international, how she's working through seasonality, all sorts of things. So Tori, welcome.

**Tori Gill** (2:36)
Thank you. Thanks for having me back.

**Nathan Chan** (2:37)
You're welcome. So for those that missed our first episode, which was incredible, tell us a little bit about Sun & Daughter.

**Tori Gill** (2:45)
So Sun & Daughter is a natural children sunscreen brand that I started because my eldest son, when he was one years old, I think, I couldn't find a sunscreen that I liked using on his skin. They either had like chemicals in there or the natural ones wouldn't rub in nicely on the skin. So I thought there must be a better way. And I decided that I wanted to create my own. And it took two years to create. And then we launched it on Boxing Day, 2024, which has been like, I don't know, what's that 15, 16 months ago now.
And now we have two other sunscreens. So we created one mineral sunscreen. And then now we have the same one in tinted ones. We've got a pink one and a yellow one. And now we are expanding our range into lots of other products.

**Nathan Chan** (3:32)
Yeah. So you have such an incredible brand for context for everyone. I first found out about Tori when we ran a competition, like a pitch competition within our community. I found a plus community. And Tori presented a brand pitch and she won. And we gave away, I think it was seven and a half grand US. We were just something we did for the members.
And I was just blown away. Like you're not hairdressing anymore, right? Or you are?

**Tori Gill** (4:03)
I still cut hair occasionally.

**Nathan Chan** (4:05)
Okay.

**Tori Gill** (4:06)
Like on the weekend.
And yeah, my clients, I've cut for 10 years. So it's very hard to like say that I'm not going to cut your hair anymore. But I've cut down like dramatically. I'm not working in a barbershop and I'm pretty much full time working in the office with Sun & Daughter.

**Nathan Chan** (4:20)
See when we last spoke, we did this incredible interview. You talked about your journey on sourcing this product, how you never thought it, like there were times when it might not come to life and you did $100,000 in your first 90 days post-boxing day. Incredible run. So to give the audience context, like where you're at right now, what happens next?