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

25:55And 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 Owens Corning and Snoopy.

26:29It'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. And we worked with him for 18 months. We were on the calendar of when it was going to happen. and they were planning on testing it. What kind of designs were you working on? We were doing their tray liners. We designed their uniforms.

27:00We 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.

27:31All 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. it was creatively it was just 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 you were working on this thing and you're working on what is about to become an iconic concept and they stopped taking your calls one day.

28:20Yeah. 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 they were working with some other agencies on some different ideas too.

28:55And so we thought, okay. So you just figured, okay, 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.

29:34And 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 just 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.

30:24Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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33:44Hey, 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. It's super intimidating.

34:25This 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. 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.

35:01Yeah, 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 are you focusing, Tom? How are you and Joe continuing to do your work, your business? Well, it kind of pulled us apart a little bit. 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 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.

35:39You 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, we'd be like, oh, Tom, I heard that Taco Bell thing.

36:06How's that going? Yeah, it was super distracting. I was the guy suing Taco Bell and everybody had known before, or 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, from in California, everywhere were 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.

36:41And 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 have needed anybody to even say it was our work.

37:13They wouldn't even settle for that. They didn't offer us one dime. And if they would have, over those five years, we'd 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.

37:49I 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.

38:26Even 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.

39:06So, 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, OK, 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?

39:39Did 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.

40:15So 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 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.

40:57They 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. I don't remember the number because I was dazed, but they offered us a few million dollars to settle right there. Wow. 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.

41:33Please, 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 and three and a half week trial was hair. It was super hairy. I was crazy cross-examined. But 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. 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.

42:19We 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 beating 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 ask, obviously, what kind of price we 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.

43:03So the claim was just an implied contract claim. So it was, you know, 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. 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 did Taco Bell pay that right away? No, no, they appealed right away. And then a few months later, they settled.

43:40And 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. No. 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. Everybody thought I had$40 million under my mattress. No. I got 33 % to the lawyers plus hard costs, 25 % to my agent. Me and Joe split the rest. The government took the rest.

44:17It 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. Yeah. 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 Kennedy. Who is Rene Kennedy or who is he? uh renee worked at an agency a little design agency that 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 amazing brand designer and he was they were expensive it was like 200 an hour which was a lot for a non-profit but you know as i realized i couldn't afford to keep using an agency and I was going to hire somebody.

45:14And 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 hated it. He didn't believe any of it. And I was like, why would you want to come and work, 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?

45:48This 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 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.

46:25He 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.

47:03Yeah, 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 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. 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.

47:39He 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 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 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.

48:19You buy an old surf fan 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 ordering tequila at a bar or whiskey at a bar, just straight up tequila on the rocks, you're trying to be a badass a little bit. You're not ordering a cosmopolitan. And so he fit that bill.

48:55He 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 De Lyon.

49:38and Brayne actually came up with that name. Daily on Tequila. Daily on Tequila. Right. And had Bill Wall, you know, make a cork. Bill Wall was like a jewelry to the stars, all the 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 Rene 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 badass. It looked like something. I think the cheapest bottle was$125 a bottle all the way up to$850 a bottle. Wow. And you guys, as part of the sort of agreement, you also got a piece of the company.

50:21Yes. 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 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 were kind of building.

50:56And then in the midst of all this, while you're launching De Leon 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 them. And they figured out how to finance this or that's what they were working on.

51:35The 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.

52:07They 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 him 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. They 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?

52:57It 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 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 it was a playtex had just bought hawaiian tropic a couple 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 yeah if it was you know there was nothing that fit their world.

53:35And 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. And it's... 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, that's how it began. All right. So tell me what you, you started to think about building this brand and what it was going to be.

54:15At first it was just, we were, we designed it. Renee and I's office was in Grand Rapids and we were walking to some subway for lunch and we passed a contemporary museum of art. And there was a Ames lounge chair in Ottoman sitting there. I looked at, I saw the wood grain and I saw the curves and I was like wood like wood grain that's that's good and Rene liked it as well so we kind of developed a little wood grain pattern and we realized nothing in in the market was wood grain we liked it it felt good it felt natural you were thinking grain bottle grain bottle bottle and 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 uh my son Drake's billabong thrift store t-shirt was yellow and brown.

55:00I 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 your eye sees. 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 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 name in 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 on 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 drain 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 play on coiff in cafeteria and nobody knew what they did there and they went out of business so yeah so sun bum kind of 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 in your previous iterations with characters, obviously Psycho Chihuahua.

56:25And 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. 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 could just keep they're good they could keep going yeah so and then figuring out you know initially we were drawing you know surf characters and guys would look like hippies and and then we kind of landed on animal and then it went to monkeys and then ape how come monkey well everybody likes monkeys hey yeah and then you know as part of the mashup you need everybody to like I think if surfers would have made this brand, they would have had two cross surfboards and called it Woody's.

57:21And 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.

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1:00:24Hey, 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 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?

1:01:06the 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. Renee had a lot of kid robot stuff up on our shelves and the graffiti world and brought that into this somehow.

1:01:50So looking at all of those pieces, I think Sunny, 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.

1:02:33He 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.

1:03:15It'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. Did Rene design that or you? Absolutely. Like I was sketching stuff 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.

1:03:59But 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 said that before a couple of times, right? 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.

1:04:34I 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 a great everything.

1:05:09And 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.

1:05:48And 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.

1:06:23The 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 ape. Yeah. Is it an ape or a monkey? I'm sorry. It's an ape. Monkeys have tails. Yeah, let's say ape. I'm sorry. That's okay. Pay some respect to Sonny. 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.

1:06:59And some high end hotels came by and they were buying it. Wow. 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 better, 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.

1:07:39You 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 in 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.

1:08:16And so I went to Rene and talked to him about it. We had 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 Rinks 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. Yeah. So now you are your Sunbomb. I mean, you're you're not Rinks Canetti anymore.

1:08:52and 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.

1:09:25Yeah, 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. 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.

1:10:00And 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. And I, you know, nobody ever lied, but 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.

1:10:31So 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 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. 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 it only launched in 2010 because it today feels like such a dominant sunscreen brand.

1:11:07Like you see 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 ahold of him on the phone and sent him some product. He wanted to test the product in the water. He's a surfer.

1:11:40And 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, but then 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 - pictures of sunbump stickers on like the nozzle for like gas tanks like when you 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 because you you had like these plastic apes and like yeah uh a whole like sometimes there'd be a life-size cutout of an ape, or would you send it to every store that sold the product?

1:12:35I 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 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.

1:13:06So 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 sun bomb, 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?

1:13:43Year 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. It was 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 Sunbub, I know that the original owners got out of it and sold it to you.

1:14:23And 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. It's an amazing, incredible exit after just, you know, nine years that, from what I understand, 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.

1:15:05I was the CEO. And I'd heard about that Harvard business model that says, you know, creatives usually start companies and then they're really good at creative. That's why they make companies. And then they 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.

1:15:41And he was getting ready to start a sunscreen business. And he saw a sun bum in Hawaii and said, you know, I can't beat these guys. I got to try to join him. 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. 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. 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.

1:16:23And 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's a significant company growing. You know, you could have kept 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.

1:17:07and 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 S.C.

1:17:48Johnson. 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.

1:18:33Kind of like the furniture store, right? The furniture store, you know, it was a hard place to work. And I kind of felt like maybe even my wife's parents 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, I didn't think I could help in a lot of the circumstances.

1:19:09You know, 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 the 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.

1:19:42You 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. 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.

1:20:21I 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?

1:21:02Vivian 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.

1:21:39So it's the extension of what I was doing my whole life. So I just absolutely 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 sunburn. Yeah. I mean, the products were great because they're dentists.

1:22:22They'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. please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at gyros.com or on Substack.

1:23:05This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtina Ablui. It was edited by Neva Grant. This archived episode was produced by Kerry 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.