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

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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**Guy Raz** (2:45)
Hey everyone, so this week we're re-visiting one of our absolute favorite episodes in the Archive. It's my conversation with Tom Rinks. He's the founder of Sun Bum, 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.

**Tom Rinks** (3:13)
Cocoa Beach just sounded like a good place for a sunscreen company, right?

**Guy Raz** (3:17)
Like, Cocoa Beach.

**Tom Rinks** (3:19)
So we got a PO box, Cocoa Beach. And then we, you know, all the calls were getting transferred up, you know, and then we-

**Guy Raz** (3:26)
They were getting transferred up to Grand Rapids?

**Tom Rinks** (3:28)
To Grand Rapids, yeah.

**Guy Raz** (3:29)
Like in the middle of winter?

**Tom Rinks** (3:30)
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, even if it's snowing outside or whatever, because then you're not lying, it's unbelievable.

**Guy Raz** (3:48)
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 woodgrain background would be the perfect mascot for a sunscreen brand, and built Sun Bum 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 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 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 Sun Bum 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.