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

Tom Rinks got his start in the commission-only "shark tank" of midwestern furniture sales. That’s where he learned what makes customers buy. Decades later, those instincts helped him grow a joke of a side hustle into a $400 million success. In 2009, he created the iconic branding for an obscure sun tan lotion, drawing on a mish-mash of surf culture, Scandinavian furniture, and Japanese streetwear. Sun Bum became a huge success, but even before that, Tom helped boost a wildly diverse range of brands: a line of tequila, a series of Christian videos, and the ubiquitous “Yo quiero Taco Bell” campaign. All were successful, though it took a prolonged legal battle for Tom to get paid for the Taco Bell chihuahua. In this episode, Tom reveals how he learned to manipulate consumer psychology, survive the brutal warfare of a stolen idea, and engineer a brand explosion on his own terms. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Chihuahuas and Apes: How the Right Mascot can Transform a Brand What it takes to survive a five-year legal battle against a corporate titan. The "Elvis Principle:” How combining unexpected design elements can create an unforgettable package The "Trojan Horse" Strategy: Why forcing retailers to buy a massive display creates the illusion of a brand overnight. TIMESTAMPS 08:15 - What selling furniture taught Tom about customer psychology 10:00 - How the Slogan “Surf Michigan” got him into the T-shirt Business 25:07 - Psycho Chihuahua, Taco Bell, and the Branding Deal that Wasn’t 33:49 - Inside the grueling battle over a chihuahua mascot. “I was the guy suing Taco Bell.” 39:35 - A dramatic legal verdict, and Tom’s branding business takes off with fancy Tequila 49:47 - The sun screen opportunity: “I saw a gigantic hole that you could drive through.” 55:03 - How Tom and his partner came up with their “badass ape” logo 1:07:36 - Opening (fake) Sun Bum headquarters in Cocoa Beach, Fla 1:10:31- Early store displays and making the brand seem bigger than it was 1:14:56 - A $400M sale to SC Johnson, and Tom starts a new company This episode was researched by Katherine Sypher and Susannah Broun and produced by Casey Herman, with music by Ramtin Arablouei, and edited by Neva Grant. Follow How I Built This: Instagram → @howibuiltthis https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis/ X → @HowIBuiltThis https://x.com/howibuiltthis Facebook → How I Built This https://www.facebook.com/howibuiltthis Follow Guy Raz: Instagram → @guy.raz https://www.instagram.com/guy.raz/ Youtube →guy_raz https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNSfrxNEmCruNtjIzxCBHjg X → @guyraz https://x.com/guyraz Substack →https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/guyraz.substack.com__;!! Iwwt! RZoD751oWzUzoqqdJiqaoL6HdJfRHDUO1TKvYJ424d3Udn7-Pw9Nj6nEsauh9zcgEvLjUEc$guyraz.substack.com http://guyraz.substack.com Website →https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/guyraz.substack.com__;!! Iwwt! RZoD751oWzUzoqqdJiqaoL6HdJfRHDUO1TKvYJ424d3Udn7-Pw9Nj6nEsauh9zcgEvLjUEc$guyraz.com http://guyraz.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:40Guy Raz?

  Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan, build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from US Bank, a question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make, the one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company.

• 1:21Guy Raz?

  It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in, business is growing, you've got expenses coming from six directions, gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned,

• 2:04Guy Raz?

  money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cell phone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more.

• 2:45Guy Raz?

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• 3:27Guy Raz?

  your pre-flight oasis to recharge with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value. Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the card that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Main to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance.

• 4:09Guy Raz?

  Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. Hey, everyone. So this week, we're revisiting one of our absolute favorite episodes from the archive. It's my conversation with Tom Ranks. He's the founder of Sunbum, 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.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Cocoa Beach just sounded like a good place for a sunscreen company, right? Like Cocoa Beach.

• 4:48Guy Raz?

  Cocoa Beach.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  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-

• 4:57Guy Raz?

  They were getting transferred up to Grand Rapids.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  To Grand Rapids, yeah.

• 4:59Guy Raz?

  Like in the middle of winter?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:18Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 5:32Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Tom Ranks knew that a yellow gorilla on a wood grain background would be the perfect mascot for a sunscreen brand and built Sunbum into a $400 million business.

• 5:49Guy Raz?

  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.

• 6:30Guy Raz?

  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 Ranks launched Sunbum,

• 7:15Guy Raz?

  he thought about every inch of its design, a now iconic wood grain patterned 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.

• 7:57Guy Raz?

  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

• 8:41Guy Raz?

  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.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:09Guy Raz?

  So you were like a floor sales rep?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just a full commission, no salary. You-

• 9:16Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So you, you're working at this, at the furniture store, and-

• 9:44Guy Raz?

  You're a young guy and you're in your like mid twenties. So did you start to think about what else you might want to do? Or were you happy doing that and didn't have like a big plan or anything like that?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  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 know, you have to be able to sell your ideas. So, 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.

• 10:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  I ended up becoming sales manager there because I was getting so good at it. And, and then people would come to me and ask me, you know, as they had different people on different types of furniture, what to do. And, and I 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, if there was a man customer on the same leather sofa, I would get a woman, salesperson to go over and use words like strong and sexy and cool and rugged. And if it was a family, big family jumping around on it, I'd send the, you know, the old timer in and to talk about, you know, what a great investment it is, how it wears like iron and it's easy to clean.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  So just knowing what those customers wanted to feel about what they were purchasing.

• 11:26Guy Raz?

  Hmm. So it was almost like a game, like it, right? It sounds like.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  It was a total game.

• 11:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  We'd say, you know, customer pickup for Johnson, door three, customer pickup for Smith, door five, just to get a frenzy going with nobody picking up anything, just to.

• 11:41Guy Raz?

  Oh, you would just get on the loudspeaker and say that, like customer pickup door five, even though there was no customer pickup? Just to kind of create the impression.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that people are buying stuff. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, anyway, learned a lot. It was a great experience.

• 11:54Guy Raz?

  I guess while you're there, you start to like just play around with sketches that you turn into a T-shirt. Tell me, what was that all about? How'd that start?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was at, 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.

• 12:16Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were on longboards and I was just in shock because there's no waves really, you know? You know, I would learn later that there were, actually was waves. Most of my kids learned to surf on Lake Michigan, but, but these guys were out there and I thought it was funny and I, I commented to my wife about it and I went home and started sketching some cartoons and I made like an old guy sitting on a longboard with a beard and really skinny and cobwebs on him. And, and it said Surf Michigan, waiting for the big one.

• 12:45Guy Raz?

  You thought it was funny, being from California?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Totally. I thought it was funny. It was just kind of a joke. And, and then I ended up deciding to make a T-shirt with it. And I made it one T-shirt on a Haynes beefy T-shirt, big neon letters on the top chest that Surf Michigan, and then it had, and then it had the drawing and then a little caption underneath it, waiting for the big one.

• 13:04Guy Raz?

  Surf Michigan.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, without really even knowing what I was doing, one day at Art Van Furniture, on my break, I called Meyer, which is a chain of about a hundred stores.

• 13:16Guy Raz?

  Grocery stores, right?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  And they're like a, they're like a Target.

• 13:19Guy Raz?

  Target, yeah, yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  So I called there, asked for their surf wear buyer and got ahold of an assistant or somebody and I said, I was a rep from a surf wear company and I want to show my surf line.

• 13:30Guy Raz?

  You said you were a rep from a surf brand?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  I was a rep for a surf brand. I had one T-shirt. So I, I got an appointment and then on my day off, I went to that appointment. This is big, huge corporate offices, super impressive. And they told me to wait, you know, over here in the lobby. And there was guys with rolling racks and I think somebody had one of those big, huge cell phones at the time. And 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 in one of the rooms and so, and wait for the buyer. So I walked into the room, it's this huge room and has this big grid on the wall where you can put all your, you know, your sweatshirts and T-shirts and hats and everything you just make, you could show it all together.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  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 Dryer walked in as the buyer and she.

• 14:31Guy Raz?

  You still remember her name?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  I still know her. I still talk to her.

• 14:34Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, she changed my life. Yeah. She, yeah, she walks in and looks at me and looks at the wall and sees that one T-shirt sitting there. And I just came clean. I, I had one, only one choice, just to come clean. And I just said, hey, I work at Art Van Furniture. I'm not a surf wear rep. I just was at the beach a few weeks ago and saw this, these guys surfing and thought it was funny and I'm so sorry for wasting your time, but here it is. And she looked at me and said, you know, let's, let's take a look. So she looked at the shirt, looked at the drawing, spread them out a little bit, smiled and ordered 1,800 T-shirts.

• 15:16Guy Raz?

  Wow. She ordered 1,800 Surf Michigan T-shirts?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, which for me at the time was a ton. And at the time, you know.

• 15:24Guy Raz?

  Where did you get them printed?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  I got it printed 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.

• 15:37Guy Raz?

  And you just bought, he just bought like 1,800 Haynes T-shirts and then?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  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 in, back into the Haynes beefy T-box and put the right name on them and delivered them myself and then went back to work.

• 15:55Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you had a bona fide legitimate side hustle going while you were selling furniture?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I did, I did. I did that for a couple of years.

• 16:04Guy Raz?

  And you, you turned into a business. You called it New Agenda.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:08Guy Raz?

  And meantime, this is like, this is like the early nineties and an opportunity would come up, which is the basketball team in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan is about to blow up. This was the era of the Fab Five. They were like freshman starters who were just incredible players. They got a ton of media attention. Some of them would go on to have these amazing NBA careers like Jalen Rose and Juwan Howard and, and Chris Webber, right?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. They were kind of like just changing college sports as well. They were rebels and they were cool and they were, they were wearing black socks and they're the ones that started wearing the really long shorts.

• 16:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  And I was at Meyer and I was looking for a Michigan shirt. And the only shirts with Michigan with basketball was, was just said Michigan XXL basketball or Michigan and 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, I, again, on, on a day off, I drove to University of Michigan and talked to the A D and actually got the license for Michigan.

• 17:23Guy Raz?

  How did you get in with the athletic director there? It's a big job. I mean.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  I, 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 this 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.

• 17:43Guy Raz?

  Wait, you, you went there with designs saying, hey, I could do better shirts for you guys?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  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. So I.

• 17:57Guy Raz?

  How much was the license?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  It was nothing for the license. It was just a percentage, just had to pay them a royalty, which was I think 10 or 20%. 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.

• 18:17Guy Raz?

  And what did it look like?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Uh, it was, it just said, big navy blue letters that slam and then a Michigan M in between it. And then at the bottom it said dance and the University of Michigan written underneath that. But in the middle was a huge M and a guy that 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.

• 18:48Guy Raz?

  And I guess you what? You just like walked into different stores on campus and, and sold it to them? Like, like the managers just ordered your T-shirts based on that one design?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so I. Went to Mo's Board Shop in Ann Arbor, right on campus. It's a, it was really cool. It's not there any longer, but it was an 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.

• 19:16Guy Raz?

  10,000, because you're doing this a few months before March Madness.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:22Guy Raz?

  I mean, they get to the finals, you sell 10,000 of these shirts that say Slam Dance.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was huge.

• 19:28Guy Raz?

  So that, that clearly was the impetus for you to leave your job selling furniture, because you're making serious money selling T-shirts.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Well, I knew it, I knew it was getting exciting. I started adding some schools, but I wasn't making serious money, not enough to think that I could support my fam forever. I didn't know if it was a fluke.

• 19:48Guy Raz?

  What schools did you go to after Michigan?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously the ones that were close by, Michigan State, Notre Dame, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgetown. But I had, I didn't really know business. So I was, I had huge inventory and huge fees from Perrin for the printing. And, you know, I just didn't have any concept of margins, of what it really took to have a business. So while, by the end, I had 400 and something licenses. While I had lots of licenses, I wasn't super profitable.

• 20:20Guy Raz?

  And I guess around 92, you meet this guy named Joe Shields. I guess you meet him in, in Grand Rapids, who, who you would go on to start a new kind of design business with.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was at, I was at Perrin Screen Printing, and I saw this guy's work that was also being printed there, and it was really cool.

• 20:40Guy Raz?

  What was it?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  It was these, these characters, and 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 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, a company 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.

• 21:10Guy Raz?

  But these shirts were, were like, kind of abstract humans, or like cartoon character-ish kind of animals? And they would say, would it say something on the shirt?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  No, it just said Mosh. It was just, 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.

• 21:32Guy Raz?

  And who would wear those shirts?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Well, nobody, nobody, nobody would wear those shirts, Guy, actually. Nobody would buy them. I don't think one, 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, of her Chihuahua.

• 21:56Guy Raz?

  It was a photo of her holding her Chihuahua?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  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, in the T-shirt world? And when a line gets popular, it's popular by the cool people, the, the college-age kids, the high schoolers, right? They start buying it. And then, and then their younger brothers see them wearing it, and then they want to buy it. So then it gets a little younger. And so then, that's the first sign, you're, 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

• 22:42Speaker 01

  that to Joe, and we called it Psycho Chihuahua.

• 22:45Guy Raz?

  You took that picture of Madonna and the Chihuahua, and you said, let's do something with a Chihuahua?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do something with a Chihuahua. Let's do one more line. So not just those two lines that we were 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 Psycho Chihuahua, you know, 1923 or something, in these Mexican colors.

• 23:11Guy Raz?

  It was supposed to be funny, like, look at this little psycho Chihuahua. That's fierce, but not really dangerous.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:27Guy Raz?

  Big dogs suck.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  And so we sent the, we made some shirts at Perrin, and we sent them out. I found some reps. They said they would, 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, see what the temperature was, and called me back and said, everybody wants Psycho Chihuahua.

• 23:47Guy Raz?

  Everybody wants Psycho Chihuahua. And how, like, do you remember how many orders you guys got? This is like 94, 95?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, we're selling tens of thousands of shirts, right? We weren't being, getting rich by any means, but we had something. We had, we could feel the pulse. So we were going, I was going with a new agenda to a show, a trade show called The Super Show, which is not, no longer around. But 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.

• 24:20Guy Raz?

  Explain that to me. You're standing at a booth.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:23Guy Raz?

  When you say blowing up, everybody passing by was like, oh my God, I have to have this Psycho Chihuahua dog T-shirt?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:49Guy Raz?

  All on the strength of the Psycho Chihuahua T-shirt.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 24:53Guy Raz?

  This is, I mean, it wasn't like you were like, yeah, we have, we've, we've got like, nuclear fusion. We've achieved it here at this booth. It was, it was Psycho Chihuahua. And it was just, that was the thing, that people were like, oh my God, this is so cool.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  It was fresh. It was so fresh. And we thought, we thought, we had discovered gold. We thought it was fusion.

• 25:16Guy Raz?

  So I guess you guys decide around that time to see if you could license this product. And I guess you, there was a convention, that was like a licensing convention, where you bring a product to see if anyone wanted to license it?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was part of the timing, right? I knew we had to make as much money as quickly as we could.

• 25:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  So there's a show called The Licensing Show at the Jabbits in New York.

• 25:38Guy Raz?

  New York, yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  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 it, and I make a deal with them. So that's what that show was. We got a booth. I got us this really great placement next to the First Jurassic Park and Rugrats.

• 26:11Guy Raz?

  And what happened? Was it similar to the previous trade show? Was there a lot of buzz around this, this little dog?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  There was, yeah. People had started to see it around a little bit. I forget all of the people that came, but Manolto came by.

• 26:24Guy Raz?

  The camera?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:33Guy Raz?

  The Psycho Chihuahua Manolto dog?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it never went past the trade show, but we, but we talked for quite a while at the trade show about it. And just other companies, you know, they're just looking for who is the demographic, who's our demographic? Our demographic was young, high school, college boys, you know? I don't remember who else, other than the big one, you know? Taco Bell came by.

• 26:57Guy Raz?

  Taco Bell. So Taco Bell comes to your booth, to senior reps from Taco Bell, and they were like, this is awesome, we love it, like, right away?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  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 for it 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, to.

• 27:40Guy Raz?

  Irvine?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Irvine. And we knew we were over our heads a little bit with this thing, so we got Agent Arlene Scanlon.

• 27:48Guy Raz?

  Just like a creative, like a licensing agent?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, she was a licensing agent. She'd worked, like, she'd gotten the deals for like Pink Panther, and Owens Corning, and Snoopy.

• 27:56Guy Raz?

  It's like a talent agent for people like you.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. So she could represent us and, and strike the deals, and make sure we're doing everything right. Because, you know, just as we were just talking to them, 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 them for 18 months. We were on the calendar of when it was going to happen. They were planning on testing it.

• 28:21Guy Raz?

  What kind of designs were you working on?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:33Guy Raz?

  And but it wasn't a cartoon Chihuahua, right? You moved to like a real Chihuahua?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  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 turned into a real cat. So that's what we did.

• 28:58Guy Raz?

  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.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  It was the most exciting. It was creatively, it was just, it was over the moon. Yeah, designing the toys that, that they would give away, the little dogs, we're just, we were just, it was, yeah, it was getting good.

• 29:26Guy Raz?

  So anyone who was, was like 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're working on this thing, and you're working on what, what is going, about to become, and you didn't know, like, an iconic concept, and they stopped taking your calls one day.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:48Guy Raz?

  They just stopped answering your calls in 1997.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:02Guy Raz?

  Like, nothing happened? He wasn't like, no blowout fight? They just, just nothing?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  They just.

• 30:08Guy Raz?

  Just ghosted you?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Completely ghosted us. And we were getting nervous.

• 30:12Guy Raz?

  I mean, yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just thought they weren't going to go with it. We just thought they were gonna, we just thought they've had another idea because we knew they were working with some other agencies on some different ideas, too.

• 30:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  And so we thought, okay.

• 30:23Guy Raz?

  So you just figured, okay, that's it, we're...

• 30:26Speaker 01

  That's it, but it would've been cool if they had called us. Come on, Ed, what happened? You know, we were your best buddy and now you won't even say goodbye.

• 30:33Guy Raz?

  And so presumably, I guess you guys just figure, well, I guess we just move on.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  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 knew, everybody was asking about it. We were, we were high-fiving daily.

• 30:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:53Guy Raz?

  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."

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:05Guy Raz?

  And what do you remember when you saw that ad? What do you remember thinking?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they tested that ad in the Northeast, which has 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, like we had storyboarded and shared and sent. So it wasn't a, it was, it was, everything was the same.

• 31:32Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  And it was just like a knife to the chest.

• 31:37Guy Raz?

  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.

• 32:02Guy Raz?

  When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see: tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it.

• 32:47Guy Raz?

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• 33:31Guy Raz?

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• 34:15Guy Raz?

  The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. Netsuite.com/built. Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right.

• 34:56Guy Raz?

  Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together. The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply.

• 35:34Guy Raz?

  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.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  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 LA in-house and Grand Rapids. They had so many.

• 36:12Guy Raz?

  It's intimidating.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Super intimidating.

• 36:14Guy Raz?

  This would take five years of your life. Let's just start by saying that. Actually, longer, but, but five years until a final decision was made. But in 99, in a US District Court in Michigan, they did grant summary judgment to Taco Bell.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:29Guy Raz?

  And so essentially, basically denying your claim.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 36:32Guy Raz?

  And that could have been the end of the story, but you decided to keep fighting to appeal that.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:39Guy Raz?

  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.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  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, so.

• 37:03Guy Raz?

  How were you focusing, Tom? How were you and Joe continuing to do your work, your business?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Well, we kind of, it kind of pulled us apart a little bit.

• 37:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 37:42Guy Raz?

  Meantime, everyone around you in Grand Rapids knows you're in this lawsuit.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:46Guy Raz?

  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? You'd think, oh, Tom, I heard that Taco Bell thing. How's that going?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was super distracting. I was the guy suing Taco Bell. And everybody hadn't known before, or everybody, my friends had known that we were doing it. So when the commercials 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 that we got everything, all the congrats in the mail and phone calls all the time. It's so exciting. I was like, yeah, that's not us. They took it.

• 38:25Guy Raz?

  I can't, I don't know what I would do. I would be so mad and stressed and anxious and, and then like just people talking to me about it all the time. I would just hate that. I'd hate it. And I'd hate that Taco Bell wasn't settling this. I'd hate it, you know?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they'd never, they'd never, if they would've, we met with Sidley in Austin, their lawyers, in Chicago. We drove down there with our lawyer. And if they would've offered us, they're gonna hate to hear this right now, but if they would've offered us $200,000, we'd have taken it. If they would've, 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 anybody to even say it was our.

• 39:02Guy Raz?

  They wouldn't even settle for that.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  They didn't offer us one dime. And if they would've, 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.

• 39:21Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's a cliche to say, but it's the ultimate David and Goliath story.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 39:26Guy Raz?

  All right, so meantime, you're fighting this.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:29Guy Raz?

  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.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  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 like, 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 moved, referenced movies that I liked. And he was a real dude. He was a real guy that I would like to hang around, that actually believed in God. He was somehow making it work. 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.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  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 of 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 it just hit me like, you can do this, Tom. Why don't you step up and do it?

• 41:17Guy Raz?

  All right. So you start working on this, this new product, basically, which is going to be these kind of Christian inspirational videos. Was the idea from, from this video business to, I mean, how was it going to make money? Was it, did you see a path there to build a big business?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  No. In fact, I made it a nonprofit business.

• 41:36Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  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. So made it a nonprofit and started to try to think about how to make this thing happen.

• 42:12Guy Raz?

  All right. But meantime, you're, you're not done with, with Taco Bell because, as we, as we said earlier, you and Joe decide to appeal that case. And

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:22Guy Raz?

  And this goes to, this is a federal court and, and now you have to focus on the trial. And what do you remember, like, getting cross-examined? What was, do you remember just being nervous, you know, about testifying and all that stuff?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  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's just before it started. They had lots of lawyers on their side. We had our little three lawyers on our side. And

• 42:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Judge came out, everybody rose, the jury was in. And, and they went up and said they'd like to see everybody in chambers. And so the judge asked us all to come in and Taco Bell, I don't remember the number, but, because I was dazed, but they offered us a few million dollars to settle right there.

• 43:09Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  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 the, looked at our lawyers and they're like, oh, please, oh, please do not say yes. Please, we've worked five years to get to this moment to take these guys on.

• 43:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Don't say yes. And I, I looked at him and said, no, let's go. And we walked back in and three and a half week trial. It was hairy. It was super hairy. I was, you know, I was crazy cross-examined. And, but they, they really, they didn't have anything. And I think it helped us being in Grand Rapids. I think our lawyers were so good and their lawyers were super slick.

• 43:49Guy Raz?

  So you testify at this trial.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:52Guy Raz?

  And eventually you're brought back in to hear the judgment.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:57Guy Raz?

  Tell me what happened.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Well, we got notice that the verdict was in. So we all went back to the courthouse and judge came in, jury came in. We all were standing there, holding hands. And, and they read guilty on all counts.

• 44:16Guy Raz?

  Wow. Did you cry? Did you collapse? Did you?

• 44:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:31Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And awarded us what we asked for, which was the contract. You know, we'd, at one point, we'd given them the contract. They'd asked, obviously, what kind of price they were, we were going to want. 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. And so the claim was just a implied contract claim. So it was, you know, we were asking for that contract and the jury agreed that we deserved that contract.

• 45:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  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 side just dropped their heads, packed their bags. And we just looked at them, scowled at them and they walked out.

• 45:14Guy Raz?

  The jury awarded you guys $30.1 million plus another $12 million in interest. And did Taco Bell pay that right away? I mean?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  No, no, they appealed right away. And then, and then a few months later, they settled.

• 45:30Guy Raz?

  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.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 45:38Guy Raz?

  But, but when that Taco Bell money came in, like, you were in pretty great shape financially for your, I mean, now you could really kind of, I guess, breathe a sigh of relief a little bit, right?

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I could breathe a sigh of relief. But it wasn't as much money as everybody thought. You know, everybody thought I had $40 million

• 45:56Guy Raz?

  No.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  under my mattress.

• 45:57Guy Raz?

  No.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  I got, you know, the 33% of the lawyers, plus hard costs, 25% of my agent. Me and Joe split the rest. Taco government took the rest.

• 46:07Guy Raz?

  Taxes.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  You know, it was not, it was not as much.

• 46:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So in the end, you might have five, six million bucks, right?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're, you're right on the money. But that was still absolutely gigantic for a family like mine.

• 46:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Meanwhile, while you were working on the Christian videos with, with this nonprofit, I guess you met this guy who would wind up helping you with, with that project. And then who would become your next business partner? His name is Renee Canetti. Who, who was Renee Canetti? Or who is he?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  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 nonprofit.

• 46:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  But, you know, 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, he was basically, grew up an atheist. You know what I mean? He hated the church. He hated, he didn't believe any of it. And, 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 spiritual or anything, because there was no on-ramp for me, a person like me.

• 47:29Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  And Renee helped open my eyes to what needed to be said to create those on-ramps.

• 47:34Guy Raz?

  I guess you, I mean, this reminds me of the story with Joe, right? This is a guy you meet in the, in the t-shirt printing shop and then you start something with him. Renee is a guy you meet a couple of 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.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:54Guy Raz?

  In 2007. You called it Rinks Canetti.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes.

• 47:59Guy Raz?

  And you were going to do branding work for whoever. But how, how did you even get those accounts?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  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'd brought with him from Copenhagen. So the accounts that we worked on, that we got initially, were The Rock and Republic, The Daily on Tequila. And the idea was we'll make, we know how to make brands. We'll make a brand for you and you pay the fees for us to do that. And you give us a piece of your company.

• 48:39Guy Raz?

  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.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was my best friend growing up. He was also a pastor's kid. And we kind of saved each other's life by sneaking out and going out to clubs together. And my childhood was great because of Brent.

• 49:05Guy Raz?

  His name's Brent?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  His name's Brent Hocking, yeah. And he ended up being a mortgage guy and just crushing into the mortgage businesses and just one of the best in the country. But we were just getting tired of it and, and wanted to start a tequila company. He wanted to get into the, into the spirits business.

• 49:21Guy Raz?

  What else do two children of ministry do but start a tequila brand?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:26Guy Raz?

  It's the natural path.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  It is. So he, he wanted to do that. He knew what I did. He knew about me and Renee doing this thing and some, and some of our work.

• 49:34Guy Raz?

  I mean, the, the whole point of this was to take this liquid and turn it into a brand. And so you guys were doing, your job was to make the bottle and to make the logo and to make the, to style this thing.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:49Guy Raz?

  That was what you were charged to do.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 49:51Guy Raz?

  Did he know about tequila? Like, was he experienced? Was he a distiller?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  He, he wasn't, but man, he fit the bill, you know? It's all about feeling when you build a brand, right? Every, people buy things because the way they make them feel, right? You buy Louis Vuitton because you think it makes you feel rich. You buy Old Sir Fan because you think it looks cool. You buy athletic shoe, Nike because you think you look more athletic or whatever the type might be. I know there's other things, but everything you do is based on how this product or brand makes you feel about yourself or think other people feel about you. So when it came to the 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, you're trying to be a badass a little bit.

• 50:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  You know, you're not, you're not ordering a cosmopolitan. And so he fit, he fit that bill. He was, he had just such a great aesthetic. He was, but he was a big guy, tough. He's great in the clubs. He knew lots of people. He was a great businessman.

• 50:57Guy Raz?

  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.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Correct. He found a Fabrika plant, a place where they make the tequila down in Jalisco somewhere, which is where they make all the tequila down that state in Mexico. And, and he, he got that and then just needed a brand behind it.

• 51:21Guy Raz?

  Did you have a name for it?

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. They were, they were from Lyon. So, which means lion. So we called it De Lyon. Brent actually came up with that name.

• 51:30Guy Raz?

  De Lyon Tequila.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  De Lyon Tequila.

• 51:33Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  And had Bill Wall, you know, make a cork. Bill Walls was like a jewelry to the stars, all the, all the. Skull and crossbone and all that stuff for rock stars. He was the guy that made them all. 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 badass. It looked like something, I think the cheapest bottle was $125 a bottle, all the way up to $850 a bottle.

• 52:06Guy Raz?

  Wow. And you guys, as part of the sort of agreement, you also got a piece of the company.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:12Guy Raz?

  So you were incentivized to make this work because it was your company now.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:22Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  So that's what Rings Canadian 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.

• 52:32Guy Raz?

  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. And then in the midst of all this, while you're launching De Leon Tequila, somebody else comes to you with a concept for, or an idea for sunscreen.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's around 2009.

• 52:58Guy Raz?

  Who approached you? What was the story?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  It was a friend from my school that my kids went to in Michigan. And he wanted to get, be in the sunscreen business, him and a couple of his friends. And so asked me to come and take a look at what they were dealing in, 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.

• 53:21Guy Raz?

  And they figured out how to finance this or that's what they're working on?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  The guy was super rich, so he could handle the money part of it.

• 53:28Guy Raz?

  So they come to you and they say, hey, we want to do, and they had no name? They had no concept at all? It was just like, they just knew where they could make sunscreen?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  No, they were trying to do sunscreen. They had some different names out there doing it and it was failing and they were losing money. So they, they wanted me to come and look at it and see what they were doing wrong, basically.

• 53:47Guy Raz?

  What did you think when you got there?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  They were doing it wrong.

• 53:50Guy Raz?

  What was it called?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  They had three. They had Race Face, which was for NASCAR, for NASCAR people. They had Game Face, which is for colleges, which would never approve it. And then they had Sun Bum, actually, that was, had a little carabiner on it and a little clip art hammock guy on the cover of the bottle.

• 54:12Guy Raz?

  And what about their concept appealed to you?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 54:16Guy Raz?

  Nothing?

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Nothing. It was, it was, I told him, he was, it 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.

• 54:37Guy Raz?

  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?

• 54:47Speaker 01

  It was local, so that made it easy. We didn't have to travel as much. And I knew the surf world, I knew the beach world and I liked it. And, you know, I just didn't say yes right away. I looked at the industry. I looked at what was happening in the space and I saw just gigantic hole that you could drive through. It was, Playtex had just bought Hawaiian Tropic a couple of years earlier. So it was just all these big players. There was no authentic sunscreen brand. Only thing that was out there were stuff that my kids didn't want in the car or on their towel. It looked like their mom left something in their car behind if, if it was, you know, there was nothing that fit their world. And I knew I could create that. And I knew, like I said, there was a space for it.

• 55:29Guy Raz?

  What was the first thing you did? You said ditch these NASCAR and college brands and focus on Sun Bum?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  No, I said ditch it all. And then we started our process and it's.

• 55:39Guy Raz?

  Tell me how you did it there.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  It's a three month process. So it's, the first month is research, looking at the industry, looking at the holes, looking at how to do it. Second is ideation, just creative thinking together, Renee and I. And then the third month is laying down the design work. And so that's, that's how it began.

• 56:00Guy Raz?

  All right. So tell me what you, you started to think about building this brand and what it was going to be.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  At first it was just, we were, 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 and ottoman sitting there. I looked at it, I saw the wood grain, I saw the curves and I was like, wood, like wood grain? That's, that's good. And Renee 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 and we liked it. It felt good, it felt natural.

• 56:35Guy Raz?

  You were thinking?

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Wood grain bottle.

• 56:36Guy Raz?

  Wood grain bottle.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  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, but yellow is the first color I sees, you know? That's why caution tape is yellow. It's, it's great for brands. We hated the name Sun Bum, 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, and then the other thing about when you're naming a brand, which it's good when the brand is in the name.

• 57:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  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, Draino is the perfect name. Or if you need home products, Home Depot is good. Or office products, Office Depot. And if Office Depot is taking Office Max, you're already saying the name. So it's good. And I mean, I went to a haircut place called Quaffeteria and they had a plan on quaff in cafeteria and nobody knew what they did there and they went out of business. So.

• 57:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:05Guy Raz?

  So you had, of course, a lot of experience, your previous iterations with characters, obviously Psycho Chihuahua. And, and did you, did you think about, like, we need a character, like a mascot for this as well?

• 58:20Speaker 01

  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, they could keep going.

• 58:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:58Guy Raz?

  How come monkey?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Well, everybody likes monkeys, eh?

• 59:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  And then, you know, as part of the mashup, you need everybody to like it. I think if surfers would have made this brand, they would have had two cross surfboards and called it Woody's and it'd still be in surf shops today and that would, or maybe it wouldn't be.

• 59:14Guy Raz?

  And it would be a wooden bottle, we called Woody's.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Woody's and cross surfboards and that's it. But, but to do what we did and to do what you need to do to be like a global brand, you got to have a wider demographic than just a niche.

• 59:30Guy Raz?

  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.

• 59:57Guy Raz?

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• 1:00:42Guy Raz?

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• 1:01:00Guy Raz?

  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.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  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 was 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 Renee 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.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Next page would be Japanese and 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. 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.

• 1:02:34Guy Raz?

  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?

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  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 then 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, he was too sexual. You could have had a film him above the waist, right? And so then he came out with a gospel album. And the parents that had been, you gotta burn their records or you can't go to an Elvis concert, which is what made people want to go to the concert more.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Once he did the gospel albums and did, showed that side, they were like, oh, he's a good boy. It's okay to listen to Elvis, he's a good boy. And so it's this juxtaposition of edge, sex, good, kind, humble, like mashing all of that together. It's kind of what people want. It's that combo is what's 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.

• 1:04:06Guy Raz?

  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 Renee design that or you?

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Like I was sketching stuff and he was sketching some stuff. And a couple of times he thought he had it and was fired up and looking for a high five and I hated it. But 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'd 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 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.

• 1:05:04Guy Raz?

  How did you know it was perfect when you saw it?

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Cause 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 Boots, 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 gonna graffiti market the shit out of this thing, so we.

• 1:05:50Guy Raz?

  You could literally take just the image of that ape and not even put Sunbum on it and the idea was people would know that was Sunbum?

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Correct. And you could put it on anything and make them think about, not Sunbum necessarily, but think of sunscreen. So we put it on footballs and frisbees and paddleball sets and towels and hats, no word Sunbum 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 it. We stickered the crap out of every surf town in California. And then we decided to take it to the January 10th Surf Expo.

• 1:06:29Guy Raz?

  This is the Surf Expo in Orlando?

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:40Guy Raz?

  And what happens at that trade show? Do you get a lot of orders?

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  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, the people were sticking and they were, and the kids were coming by asking if we had more stickers of just the Sonny guy, just the character, just the monkey.

• 1:07:05Guy Raz?

  Just the ape, yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Guy Raz?

  It's an ape or a monkey, I'm sorry.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  It's an ape. Monkeys have tails, so.

• 1:07:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah, let's say ape. I'm sorry.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Oh, it's okay.

• 1:07:13Guy Raz?

  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 or maybe on their surfboards?

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:39Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  So immediately it was this, it's like, okay, this is not normal, this wide of a demographic, it's really hard to get that. And I knew we had it that first day of that show.

• 1:07:50Guy Raz?

  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.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Correct. And we did have a better product because we were making it for us, you know? And that's basically what you do, you should do all the time, is not make it for other people, you make it for yourself. And so it had to be safe, it had to be clean, it had to be great, everybody had to like it. I couldn't just have my kids like it. I needed my wife to like it, my wife's friends to like it, I needed my kids' surf friends to like it. I needed that wide demographic.

• 1:08:29Guy Raz?

  I guess at that trade show, when you saw the enthusiasm for it, you and Renee decide to shut down your brand agency and to put all your effort into Sunbum and to basically become employees to join it?

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. The guy that owned the company asked me if I would take over. But actually for me to take charge, he asked if I would come work for him. And so I went to Renee and talked to him about it and we had a long talk about it. It was a tough decision, right? Cause all of a sudden I was gonna be the boss and not as much partners anymore.

• 1:09:04Guy Raz?

  And you saw the potential in it.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  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 Sunbum.

• 1:09:16Guy Raz?

  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.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:23Guy Raz?

  So now you are, you're Sunbum. I mean, you're not Rinks Canetti anymore and you are running this business. And you had, it was a small team at first, just like four or five people. And based in Grand Rapids?

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  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. Because I was just planning on, Renee and I were just planning on, you know, 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.

• 1:09:55Guy Raz?

  One interesting things I came across was that it never said Grand Rapids, Michigan on the bottle. It said, I think, Cocoa Beach, Florida?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, Cocoa Beach was the, you know, it 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.

• 1:10:13Guy Raz?

  Cocoa Beach.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  It sounded like internationally, I kind of want a sunscreen that's made in Cocoa Beach, kind of cocoa butter, all that.

• 1:10:20Guy Raz?

  Oh my gosh, yeah. If you're going to, back to Tokyo after your trip to Hawaii, you're like, yeah, this place is made in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Cocoa Beach, exactly. Not sound good? So we liked 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, yeah, we had.

• 1:10:37Guy Raz?

  You mean the customer service calls?

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, customer service calls.

• 1:10:40Guy Raz?

  They were getting transferred up to Grand Rapids?

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  To Grand Rapids, yeah.

• 1:10:43Guy Raz?

  Like in the middle of winter?

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  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, 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 so eventually we thought we'd all be moving down there.

• 1:11:21Guy Raz?

  So would you go back and forth between, all the time?

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a Florida brand through and through. It was made in Florida, our 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.

• 1:11:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard for me to just to realize that it only launched in 2010 because it 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?

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  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 LaSara. If you can get Michael LaSara, 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, he on the phone, and sent him some product. He wanted to test the product in the water. He was a surfer. He'd done Vans and a bunch of other big brands.

• 1:12:20Guy Raz?

  He was a sales guy.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  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 LaSara, we wouldn't have made it. He was relentless. He was hopping fences. He was sticker-ing every off-ramp with stickers and every sign and every--

• 1:12:38Guy Raz?

  I've seen pictures of SunBum stickers on like, the nozzle for like, gas tanks, like, when you fill your car.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  That's him. That's him, man. 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 nobody really knew until they did. But he was amazing. And we had great displays.

• 1:12:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah, would you send the display? Because you had like, these plastic apes and like, a whole-- like, sometimes it'd be like, a life-size cutout of an ape. Would you send it to every store that sold the product?

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  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 or something, these tall bookcases. And we redid the holes 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.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  So if you wanted to carry SunBum, you had to carry this whole, big display. But then, that's what everybody looked at. That's what drew everybody to it. Because it seemed like something, and not just two bottles of sunscreen on the bottom shelf.

• 1:14:07Guy Raz?

  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?

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  Year two, we did $1.1 million. So yeah, so that was a nice jump. But it was in the right, it was in the right stores, right? It was the best surf shops. It was the best hotels. It was Casa de Estes, The Breakers. Some of those people early took it. Richard Branson and Joan. The end of the first year, they 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 then all those just started falling, one at a time, and then you're rolling.

• 1:14:52Guy Raz?

  A few years into SunBum, 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?

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:15:06Guy Raz?

  And then in 2019, which is 10 years after it was started, really nine years after its launch, SunBum 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 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.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was the idea. And I'd 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 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.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  And he was getting ready to start a sunscreen business. And he saw SunBum in Hawaii and said, you know, I can't beat these guys. I gotta 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.

• 1:16:38Guy Raz?

  You think that you did not have the skills, your skills were better suited for branding rather than managing a company?

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:16Guy Raz?

  I think at a certain point, SunBum was doing, you know, 70 million annual sales. 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?

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  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 FDA's 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.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:25Guy Raz?

  You know, it's interesting, because you also, this is one of the first interviews you've ever done in your life.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:33Guy Raz?

  Probably the first really intensive interview you've ever done.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:18:44Guy Raz?

  And you're basically, you don't even exist online, barely.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:48Guy Raz?

  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?

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  I grew up so probably insecure, poor, maybe, not feeling accepted. Kind of like the furniture store, right? The furniture store, you know, 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, the, I didn't think I could help in a lot of the circumstances, you know?

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:11Guy Raz?

  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, which 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.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  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 I was the, that's what people wanted to talk about. And that would hurt the brand that I was trying to promote and not help it. I didn't want to flex. I let other people flex. I flexed by doing the work, and I felt really good about that.

• 1:21:04Guy Raz?

  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?

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  I think it's a combo. Obviously, probably everybody says that. I think there were so many lucky breaks, right? Vivian Dryer, back at Meyer, you know, giving me those, that order for 1,800 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, and 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 gotta 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?

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:22:27Guy Raz?

  That's Tom Rinks, co-founder of SunBum, and the mind behind many other brands, including Made by Dentists, which was, in fact, founded by two dentists. Two sisters, actually, from Ireland.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  And they were killing it in Ireland. But they tried to come to America, and it wasn't working.

• 1:22:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 1:22:53Guy Raz?

  Just like SunBum. Basically.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:23:09Guy Raz?

  Not a dentist, but Tom did do all the design work for the new brand. And one place he got really creative was around Made by Dentists line of 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 guyraz.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. This archived episode was produced by Kerry Thompson.

• 1:23:51Guy Raz?

  Our production staff also includes Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, John Isabella, Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, and Elaine Coats. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.