Sun Bum: Tom Rinks

(soft music) - Coco Beach just sounded like a good place for a sunscreen company, right? - Yeah. - Like Coco Beach. - Coco Beach. - So we got a PO box. Coco Beach. And then we, you know, all the calls were getting transferred up, you know, and then we-- - They were getting transferred up to Grand Rapids. - To Grand Rapids, yeah. - It's like in the middle of winter? - Yes. So we would be on the phone. I, you know, nobody ever lied. But we did say, you know, if they call and ask how the weather is, just tell them it's unbelievable. Even if it's snowing outside or whatever, 'cause then you're not lying, it's unbelievable. (upbeat music) - Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. They built. (upbeat music) I'm Guy Raazan on the show today. How Tom Rank's knew that a yellow gorilla on a wood-brained background would be the perfect mascot for a sunscreen brand and built sunbum into a $400 million business. (soft music) A few years ago on this show, we interviewed the founders of method, the cleaning supply brand. And if you heard that story, you might remember that one of the co-founders, Eric Ryan, talked about how they spent most of their seed money on designing a bottle for the liquid dish soap. They wanted that bottle to look cool enough to make people leave it on the countertop, rather than hiding it under the sink. And even though Eric and his co-founder, Adam Lowry, also focused on the quality of what was inside the bottle, they knew that wouldn't really matter if they couldn't capture the attention of a casual shopper. And the way to do that was through better design. A well-designed product can have a massive impact on the decisions that consumers make. In fact, this was the exact conclusion reached in a study published in 2013 in the journal Psychological Science. The researchers found that brand design is more important than price when the average consumer has to decide between two similar products. And this might help explain how a sunscreen brand called 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, Nutrugina, and Hawaiian Tropic. More than a year before co-founder Tom Rinks launched sunbum, he thought about every inch of its design, a now iconic wood grain pattern bottle with a yellow Gorilla face staring right at you. That bottle, as you will hear, drew on inspirations as disparate as 1960s surf culture, mid-century modern furniture designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Northern European typography and Japanese streetwear. But even before Tom launched that design, he was already deep into the mechanics of branding. He had designed and sold t-shirts, a luxury brand of tequila, even produced a line of Christian videos, all made using principles of design thinking. And one of his most iconic contributions to the world of branding, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, as in Yokeiro Taco Bell, an ad campaign you might remember from the 1990s. At the time, Tom did not get credit or compensation for the Taco Bell Chihuahua. So he sued Taco Bell and ended up in a five year long legal battle, which you will hear about because it is a wild story. Anyway, for now, what you need to know about Tom is that he grew up in Long Beach in Southern California. His mom was a teacher and his dad was, as Tom describes it, a Christian fundamentalist minister. Tom's strict Christian upbringing eventually turned him away from organized religion and toward his true passion, drawing and painting. He ended up studying art at Hope College, right outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. He got married pretty young and after college, he and his wife settled in Grand Rapids, where Tom went to work as a salesman at a furniture store. - Yeah, it was just a big chain store. They're out of Detroit and they were opening one in Grand Rapids and I was one of the first ones to apply and actually open that store in Grand Rapids on 28th Street. - So you were like a floor sales rep? - Yeah, it was just a full commission. No, sorry. You-- - Wow. - Yeah. - It was really known in Michigan as like the shark infested waters because the sales people 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. - Wow. - So they did everything they could to sell you. And as retail, so it's crazy hours every weekend, which is brutal on my wife for sure. - Yeah. All right, so you, you're working at this at the furniture store and you're a young guy and you're in your like mid 20s. So-- - Yep. - 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? - Yeah, I wouldn't say I was happy doing that, but I was being successful. I was supporting my wife. We 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 Olga V. Olga V. 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 gonna make it, you know? You have to be able to sell your ideas. So I think those years, those five years at Art Van, it was called Art Van Furniture, were just hugely, hugely important for my career. - Yeah. - I ended up becoming sales manager there because I was getting so good at it. And then people would come to me and ask me, you know, as they had different people on different types of furniture, what to do. And I give you an example, like if somebody was on a leather sofa, if it was a woman, I would send a guy, sales person over there and he would use words like soft and sexy and smooth. As he touched the leather, and if there was a man customer on the same leather sofa, I would get a woman, sales person 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 old timer in and to talk about, you know, what a great investment it is, and how it wears like iron and it's easy to clean. So just knowing what those customers wanted to feel about what they were purchasing. - She was almost like a game, like it, right? Sounds like. - It was a total game. - Yeah, yeah. - We'd say, you know, customer pick up for Johnson, door three, customer pick up for Smith, door five, just to get a frenzy going with nobody picking up anything. Just to- - Oh, you would just get on the loudspeaker and say, "Can you have a customer pick up door five?" Even though there was no customer pick up, just to kind of create the impression of it. - People are buying stuff. - Yeah, exactly. - But yeah, anyway, learned a lot. It was a great experience. - I guess while you're there, you start to like, just play around with sketches that you turn into a t-shirt. Tell me what was that all about, how'd that start? - Yeah, I was with my wife at Holland State Park, which is a really nice beach there in Holland, which is 45 minutes from Grand Rapids. And there was surfers in the water. - Wow. - Yeah, there were on long boards, and I was just in shock, 'cause there's no waves, really. I would learn later that there actually was waves. Most of my kids learned to surf on Michigan, but these guys were out there and I thought it was funny, and I commented to my wife about it, and I went home and started sketching some cartoons. And I made like an old guy sitting on a long board with a beard and really skinny and cobwebs on him, and it said, "Surf Michigan, waiting for the big one." - You thought it was funny being from California? - Totally, I thought it was funny, it was just kind of a joke. And then I ended up starting to make a t-shirt with a 9-metre one t-shirt on a Haynes Biffy t-shirt. Big neon letters on the top chest that surfed Michigan, and then I had the drawing and then a little caption underneath it waiting for the big one. - Surf Michigan? - Yeah. And without really even knowing what I was doing one day, at Art Van Furniture, my break I called Meyer, which is a chain of about 100 stores. - grocery stores, right? - And they're like a target. - Targeting, yeah. - So I called there, asked for their surfwear buyer, and got a hold of an assistant or somebody, and I said I was a rep from a surfwear company, I want to show a surf line. - You said you were a rep from a surf brand? - I was a rep for a surf brand, I had one t-shirt, so I got it appointment. And then on my day off, I went to that appointment. This is big, huge corporate offices, super impressive, and then they told me to wait and 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 with my bad quarter-roy 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 it has this big grid on the wall, where you can put all your sweat shirts and t-shirts and hats and everything you can just make, you can show it all together. And so, I just put my one t-shirt on the thing, a little wire hanger, hung it up, turned the lights on, and it spread the drawings out, and waited, and then Vivian Dreyer walked in, as the buyer, and she. - You still remember her name? - I still know her, I still talk to her. - Wow. - Yeah, she changed my life, yeah. She walks in and looks at me, and looks at the wall. and sees that one t-shirt sitting there and I just came clean. I had one only one choice just to come clean and I just said hey I work at Art Van Furniture I'm not a surfer. I just was at the beach a few weeks ago and saw this. These guys surf and thought I was funny and I'm so sorry for wasting your time but here it is and she looked at me and said oh let's take a look so she looked at the shirt looked at the drawing spread them out a little bit smiled and ordered 1800 t-shirts. Wow she ordered 1800 surf Michigan t-shirts. Yeah which for me at the time was a ton and at the time you know. Where did you get them printed? I got printed a place called parent screen printing. A guy named Carl, parent in Grand Rapids I just found him in the phone book and he was cool enough to make me one t-shirt you know and you just bought like 1800 haines t-shirts and then yeah I did all the art took them there printed them and I at the you know you can't do this anymore but I put them in back into the haines bft box and put the right name on them and delivered them myself and then went back to work. Wow so you had a bonafide legitimate side hustle going while you were selling furniture. I did I did that for a couple of years and you you turn into a business you call it new agenda. That's right and and meantime this is like this is like the early 90s and an opportunity would come up which is the basketball team in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan is about to blow up. This was the era of the fab vibe they were like freshman starters who were just incredible players they got a ton of media attention some of them would go on to have these amazing NBA careers like Jalen Rose and Juwan Howard and Chris Weber right. Yeah they were kind of like just changing college sports as well they were rebels and they were cool and they were they but we were in black socks and they're the ones that started wearing the really long shorts. Yeah and I was at Meyer and I was looking for a Michigan shirt and the only shirts with Michigan with basketball was just a 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 again on a day off I drove to University of Michigan and talked to the AD and actually got the license for Michigan. How did you get it in with the athletic director there? It's a big job I mean. I just walked in and at the time he was the one that ran the licensing that was part of his job later it would go to you know there's this college licensing company now they just handle all of the licenses for all the schools but at the time it was done in house at the school. Wait you went there with designs saying hey I could do a better search for you guys. No I didn't. I showed them nothing I just asked what it would cost to get a license so 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 how much was the license? It was nothing for the license it was just a percent I just had to pay them a royalty which was like big 10 or 20 percent. Yeah I was insane so I got the license and went back and I came up with a shirt called slam dance that I did on my living room floor. And what did it look like? It 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 it was a huge M and a guy that kind of looked like Weber swinging from the room and I had Carl make it at parent screen printing and he thought it was cool and I on one of my couple of days off I took it to University of Michigan. And I guess you what you just like walked into different stores on campus and and sold it to them like like the managers just ordered your t-shirts based on that one design. So yeah so I went to most sports shop in Ann Arbor right on campus it's it was really cool it's not there any long rose institution there for so many years. Showed them they bought it and they know Rex is the bookstore there and sold it to them and they sold 10,000 shirts that season. 10? Because you're doing this a few months before March Madness. Yes. I mean they get to the finals you sell 10,000 of these shirts to say slam dance. Yeah yeah it was huge. So that that clearly was the impetus for you to leave your job selling furniture because you're making serious money selling t-shirts. Well I knew it 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 yeah support my fam forever I didn't know if it was a fluke. What schools did you go to after Michigan? I mean obviously the ones that were close by. Yeah. Michigan State, Notre Dame, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgetown but I had I didn't really know business. Yeah. So I was I had huge inventory and huge fees from parent for the printing and you know I just didn't have any concept of margins and what it really took to have a business. So while I have the end I had 400 and some licenses. Well I had lots of licenses. I wasn't super profitable. And I guess around 92 you meet the guy named Joe Shield. I guess you meet him in Grand Rapids who you would go on to start a new kind of design business with. Yeah I was at parents' green printing and I saw all this guy's work that was also being printed there and it was really cool and it was these these characters and I thought it was super cool. I just saw it as art. I was a good 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 company ourselves and then I felt like I wanted to bring some to the table I was putting getting the reps together it was for the line it was there was two lines one was called Mosh the other one was called caveman that he drew but these shirts were were like kind of abstract humans or like cartoon characters kind of animals and they would say would it say something on the shirt? No just said Mosh it was just it was just a stylized version of these people dancing on the front of shirts and just said Mosh on the top right which was kind of cool because of Mosh pits and who and who would wear those shirts? nobody nobody nobody would wear those shirts guys actually nobody would buy none I don't think one I think one person wore those shirts but while we're getting ready to do them I saw article in a magazine that had Madonna this is like a 94 with a herchakita of her Chihuahua there was a photo of her holding her Chihuahua it was a photo of her holding this new dog that she just got called Chakita and at the time right because I've 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 when 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 just 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 yeah I saw that kind of happening and I saw Madonna and Chakita and I was like took that to Joe and we called it psycho Chihuahua you took that picture of Madonna and the Chihuahua and you said let's do something with a Chihuahua yeah let's do something with a Chihuahua let's do one more line so not just those two lines that we're going to do let's do this Chihuahua line because I think and here's why he loved it he drew this really badass little small shaking Chihuahua and we put words on it so psycho Chihuahua you know 1923 or something in these Mexican colors it was supposed to be funny like look at this little psycho Chihuahua yeah that's fierce but not really dangerous 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 dog suck big dog suck and so we sent the we made some shirts apparent and we sent them out I got found some reps they said they would they liked them they would take them and try to sell them in and if it's all they would take the line if it didn't they wouldn't and these couple of rep groups took it out to see what it see what the temperature was and called me back and said everybody want psycho Chihuahua everybody want psycho Chihuahua and how like do you remember how many orders you guys got this is like 94 95 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 new agenda to a show a trade show called the Super Show which is no no longer around but it used to be the biggest trade show in the world at least for a peril and I got a booth space and psycho Chihuahua just was blowing up explain that to me you're standing at a booth yep when you say blowing up everybody passing by was like oh my god I have to have this psycho Chihuahua dog I know it sounds stupid and no not everybody guy but but enough people compared to the other booths right by blowing up most booths you're kind of looking for people to talk to our booth had people there. We were doing interviews. We couldn't write the orders fast enough. - All on the strength of the psycho-choa-wa teacher. - Totally. - This is, I mean, it wasn't like you were like, yeah, we have, we've got like nuclear fusion. We've achieved it here at this booth. It was, it was psycho-choa-wa, and it was just, that was the thing that people were like, oh my God, this is so cool. It was fresh. It was so fresh. And we thought, we had discovered gold. We thought it was fusion. - So I guess you guys decide around that time to see if you go to license this product. And I guess there was a convention that was like a licensing convention where you bring a product to see if anyone wanted to license it. - Yeah, that was part of the timing, right? I knew we had to make as much money as quickly as we could. - Yeah. - So there's a show called The Licensing Show at the Javits in New York. - New York, yeah. - You show your stuff and if I had a lunchpale company and I wanted to put power rangers or teenage mutant engine turtles or Baywatch or Snoopy on my lunchpales or my sleeping bags or my mugs or whatever kind of company I have, I go there and I see all of the licenseable properties that people own, company's own, and I make a deal with them. So that's what that show was. We got a booth, I got us a really great placement next to the first Jurassic Park and Rugrats. - And what happened? Was it similar to the previous Treycho? Was there a lot of buzz around this little dog? - There was, yeah. People had started to see it around a little bit. I forget all of the people that came, but Minolta came by, they were making a little small camera. They were interested in licensing it for their small camera. So they'd have a little mascot for it. The psychochoa and Minolta dog. (laughing) - I mean, it never went past the Treycho, but we talked for quite a while at the Treycho about it and just other companies. You know, they're just looking for who is the demographic, who is our demographic, our demographic was young. High school, college, boys, you know? - Yeah. - I don't remember who else other than the big one, you know Taco Bell, came by. - Taco Bell. So Taco Bell comes to your booth to senior reps from Taco Bell and they were like, "This is awesome, we love it," like right away. - Yeah, Ed El Faro was the main guy. I don't remember who he was. He was like in charge of brand at Taco Bell in California. They were actually there looking for a mascot. They were looking for something to license. They had been looking forward and working on it with different ad agencies for a while and it sent Ed there. And so they were just looking for ideas and when they stumbled upon our booth and we had a great conversation, we got obviously super excited about the possibility of that. We sent them home with some T-shirts and all the information and all the stuff that we had and we spent some time with them talking about it. We flew to Irvine. - Irvine. - Irvine. And we knew we were over our heads a little bit with this thing. So we got an agent Arlene Scanlon. - Just like a creative licensing agent. - Yeah, she was a licensing agent. She'd worked like she'd gotten the deals for like Pink Panther and Owens Corning and Snoopy. - It's like a talent agent for people like you. - Exactly. - She could represent us and strike the deals and make sure we're doing everything right. Because you know, just as we were just talking to them even on the phone and through email, we knew it was getting, we needed some help as far as what this was gonna 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 gonna happen. They were planning on testing it. - What kind of designs were you working on? - We were doing our trail liners. We designed their uniforms, we designed their hats, we designed their posters. We wrote the commercials, I wrote the commercials, Joe's storyboard at the commercials. - And it wasn't a cartoon show hour, right? You moved to like a real show hour. - 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 gonna be for TV, there can't be a cartoon anymore. It has to be a real show hour. 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. - All right, so you're working with Taco Bell. And this exciting is a big deal. I mean, for a tiny little shop like you guys to have a massive brand like Taco Bell, say yeah, do our campaign. I mean, that must have been super exciting. - It was the most exciting. It was the creatively, it was just, it was over the man. Yeah, designing the toys that they would give away, the little dogs, we were just, it was, yeah, it was getting good. So anyone who was like conscious being in the late 90s would know what this is going, which is the famous Taco Bell Chihuahua ad, which is amazing. I mean, it was incredible. You were working on this thing and you're working on what is gonna be about to become, you didn't know. I get an iconic concept and they stopped taking your calls one day. - Yeah. - They just stopped answering your calls in 1997. - Yeah, they did. We were just rolling so well along with everything and like I said, everything was slated to go. And all of a sudden, Ed stopped calling us back. - Like nothing happened, he wasn't like no blowout fight. They just, - No, they just, they just, just go to you. - Completely ghost of us and we were getting nervous. - I mean, yeah. - Yeah, we just thought they weren't gonna go with it. We just thought they were gonna, we just thought they've had another idea 'cause we knew they were work with some other agencies on some different ideas too. And so we thought, okay. - So you just figured, okay, that's it. We're, 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. - And so presumably, I guess you guys just figure, well, I guess we just move on. - Yeah, sadly, sadly we didn't know what else to do, but to move on. But yeah, we were, that took the wind out of ourselves for sure 'cause we told everybody about our families knew everybody was asking about it. We were high-five and daily. - Yeah, yeah. - All right, then about three months later, all of a sudden, a commercial and ad campaign comes out with a Chihuahua and at the end, the Chihuahua says, yo, Kiero Taco Bell. - Yeah. - And what do you remember when you saw that ad? What do you remember thinking? - Yeah, they tested that ad in the North East, which has happened to be where I was in Michigan. And I just lost it, you know, 'cause it was the commercial that I'd written. You know, the first three commercials were our commercials. But we had storyboarded and shared and sent. So it wasn't a, it was everything was the same. - Wow. - And it was just like a knife to the chest. - When we come back, just a moment, have a 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 Ross and you're listening to How I Built This. (soft music) Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Ross. 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 is basically stolen their mascot for a national ad campaign, which by the way, is going to become huge. So Tom and Joe are furious and they file a lawsuit against Taco Bell, citing breach of contract. - Taco Bell had like the best law firm in New York. I forget the name of it. And it's Sidley and Austin and Chicago, big one. LA, in-house, and Grand Rapids, they had some-- - Intimidating. - Super intimidating. - This would take five years of your life. We'll just start by saying that, actually longer. But five years until a final decision was made. But in '99, in a US District Court of Michigan, they did grant summary judgment to Taco Bell. - Yes. - And so essentially, basically denying your claim. - Correct. - And that could have been the end of the story. But you decided to keep fighting to appeal that. - Yeah. - Now, it was kind of a crazy risk that you were taking, right? 'Cause I'm sure that it was really stressful on you and your family. And probably hard to focus on your business while you're fighting this lawsuit. - Yeah, it was the Chihuahua in me, I guess you could say, right? It was fighting for the little guy. And the big guy was just taking advantage. And I'm pretty relentless when it comes to that kind of stuff. - So how were you focusing, Tom? How were you and Joe continuing to do your work, your business? - Well, it kind of pulled us apart a little bit. - Yeah. - It was stressful and we had done all this work. 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 stop selling because everybody wanted to talk about 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 consulted each other all the time. We were still friends, but we stopped working together. - Meantime everyone around you in Grand Rapids knows you're in this lawsuit. And was that what people talked to you about every time you saw them, didn't that just get tiring? 'Cause you knew that you'd go to school pickup or whatever, like the grocery store. You'd be like, oh Tom, I heard that Taco Bell thing. How's that going? - Yeah, it was super distracting. I was the guy suing Taco Bell. And everybody had known before or everybody, But my friends had known that we were doing it. So when the commercial I was so excited. I was like, yeah, that's not us. They took it. I can't, I don't know what I would do. I would be so mad and stressed and anxious and, and then like just people talking to me about it all the time. I was like, yeah, I'm so excited. And to Taco Bell pay that right away. I mean, now, now they appealed right away. And then, and then a few months later, they settled. And were you, I mean, you had up until this point, not necessarily been, you were making a decent living, but you weren't rich. No. But when that Taco Bell money came in, like you were in pretty great shape financially for your, I mean, now you could really kind of, I guess, breathe a sigh of relief a little bit, right? Yeah, for sure, I could breathe a sigh of relief, but it wasn't as much money as everybody thought. You know, everybody thought I had $40 million under my mattress. No, I guess, no. I got, you know, the 33% of the lawyers plus hard costs, 25% of my agent, me and Joe split the rest. And then Taco Bell was not as much. Yeah, but it was in the end, you might have five, six million bucks. Yeah, right. You're right on the money. But that was still absolutely gigantic for a family like mine. Yeah. Um, 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 Kennedy. Who, who was Renee Kennedy or who is he? Uh, Renee worked at an agency, a little design agency. There was a couple of doors down from a little office that we had. He had just gotten here from Copenhagen, he grew up in Copenhagen. And he was just an amazing brand designer and he was, they were expensive. He was like $200 an hour, which was a lot for a nonprofit. Yeah. But, you know, as I realized, so 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, he, and he was basically, you grew up in atheist. You know what I mean? He hated the church. He hated it. 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 out of anything, because there was no on-ramp for me, a person like me. Wow. And Renee helped open my eyes to what needed to be said to create those on-ramps. I guess you, I mean, this reminds me of the story with Joe, right? 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 doors down and it starts working with you guys in these films. And clearly you see talent, a lot of talent in him. And the two of you decide to basically join forces and build a branding agency together. Yes. In 2007. You called it Rinks, Kennedy. Yeah. Yes. And you were going to do branding work for whoever. But how did you even get those accounts? Um, well, when we do - The kid, Rings Canadi, the word was kind of getting a little bit around about us on the brand side of things, this 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. - Right, so somebody would come to you and say, "Hey, I want to do this," or "I want to do that." And I guess one of those things was, somebody came to you, maybe it was a friend of yours, who came to you wanting to make tequila, high end tequila. - Yeah, he was my best friend growing up. He was also a pastors kid and we kind of saved each other's life by sneaking out and going out to clubs together and my childhood was great because of Brent. - His name is Brent. - His name is Brent Hawking, yeah. And he ended up being a mortgage guy and just crushing it into the mortgage businesses and just one of the best in the country. But he was just getting tired of it and wanted to start a tequila company. He wanted to get into the spirits business. - And what else do two children of administrative right start a tequila brand? - Right, it's the natural path. - It is. - He wanted to do that. He knew what I did. He knew about me and Renee doing this thing and not sent someone some of our work. - I mean, the whole point of this was to take this liquid and turn it into a brand. And so you guys were doing your job was to make the bottle and to make the logo and to make the style this thing. That was what you were charged to do. - Correct. - Did he know about tequila? Like was he experienced? Was he a distiller? - He wasn't, but man, he fit the bill. You know, it's all about feeling when you build a brand. Right? People buy things because the way they make them feel, right? If you buy Louis Vuitton because you think it makes you feel rich. You buy old surfant because you think it looks cool. You buy athletic shoot. Nike because you think you look more athletic or whatever the type might be. I know there's other things, but everything you do is based on how this product or brand makes you feel about yourself or think other people feel about you. So when it came to tequila and looking at the tequila business when Brent called me, it was pretty easy. If you're ordering tequila at a bar or whiskey at a bar, just straight up tequila on the rocks, you're trying to be a bad ass a little bit. You're not only a cosmopolitan. And so he fit that bill. He was, he had just such a great aesthetic. But he was big guy, tough. He was great in the clubs. He knew lots of people. He was a great businessman. And so he could basically source tequila. Like that wasn't hard. Like he knew he could get it distilled from like a white label distiller to his specifications. Correct. He found a febrika plant, a place where they make the tequila down in Holesco somewhere, which is where they make all the tequila down that state in Mexico. And he got that and then just needed a brand behind it. Did you have a name for it? Yeah, they were from Leon. So which means lion. So we called it daily on. Brain actually came up with that name, daily on tequila. Daily on tequila. Right. And I had bill wall, you know, make a cork bill walls. It was like a jewelry to the stars, all the skull and crossbone, all that stuff for rock stars. He was the guy that made him on. He had a shop in Malibu and renamed 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 bad ass. It looked like something. I think the cheapest bottle was $125 a bottle, all the way up to $850 a bottle. Wow. And you guys as part of the sort of agreement, you also got a piece of the company. Yes. So you were incentivized to make this work because it was your company now. Yeah. My company was Brent's company, but yeah, I was totally incentivized because that would be the bigger, the larger payoff. Right. So that's what Rinks, Kennedy did. We just kind of got paid for making brands, but then you had these little chips you were putting down on this roulette wheel. And if one of them hit, you got a bigger hit. All right. So we've talked about T-shirt, 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 daily onto Kila, somebody else comes to you with a concept for an idea for sunscreen. Yeah, that's around 2009. Yeah. Who approached you? What was the story? It was a friend from my school, where my kids went to in Michigan and he wanted to get me 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 him. And they figured I'd have to finance this or that's where they worked their work. The guy was super rich. So he could handle the money part of it. So they come to you and they say, hey, we want to do this. And they had no name. They had no concept at all. It was just like, they just knew where they could make sunscreen. Now they were trying to do sunscreen. They had some different names out there doing it and it was failing and they were losing money. So they wanted me to come and look at it and see what they were doing wrong, basically. What did you think when you got there? They were doing it wrong. Yeah. It was a call. They had three. They had race face, which was for NASCAR. For NASCAR people. They had game face, which was for colleges, which would never approve it. And then they had sunbomb actually that had a little carabiner on it and a little clip art hammock guy on the cover of the bottle. And what about their concept appeal to you? Nothing. Nothing. It was I told him. He was never going to make it. None of them were going to make it. They were horrible. Like NASCAR people don't use expensive sunscreen. They had to be licensing with colleges. It was just horrible design, horrible ideas. They didn't know what they were doing. Given that the branding was so terrible and you already had a bunch of different accounts you were working on, brands you were building, what appealed to you about this idea of working and sunscreen? It was local. So that made it easy. We didn't have to travel as much. And I knew the surf world. I knew the beach world and I liked it. And 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 again a hole that you could drive through. A playtext that just bought Hawaiian tropic a couple of years earlier. So it was just all these big players. There was no authentic sunscreen brand. Only thing that was out there was stuff that my kids didn't want in the car or on their towel. It looked like their mom left something in their car behind it. There was nothing that bit their world and I knew I could create that and I knew like I said there was a space for it. What was the first thing you did? You said ditch these NASCAR and college brands and focus on sunbum? No, I said ditch it all and then we started our process and it's. Tell me how you did it there. It's a three month process. So it's the first month's research looking at the industry, looking at the holes, looking at how to do it. The second is ideation, just creative thinking together, Renee and I and then the third month is laying down the design work and so that's how it began. Alright, so tell me what you started to think about building this brand and what it was going to be. At first it was just. We designed it, Renee and I's office was in Grand Rapids and we were walking to some subway for lunch and we passed a contemporary museum of art and there was a 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 good. And Renee liked it as well so we kind of developed a little wood grain pattern and we realized nothing in the market was wood grain and we liked it, felt good, felt natural. You were thinking. Wood grain bottle? Bottle. Bottle. And it would be. You know, there was every color in the rainbow already there and you kind of want to own the block. And then my son Drake's bill-a-bong thrift store T-shirt was yellow and brown, I brought that in one day and we liked those colors, yellow is a good color, got brighter over the years but yellow is the first color you're eye sees, you know, it's my caution tape is yellow, it's great for brands. We hated the name Sunbomb but then when I came up with trust the bum, you know, for a tag line for it and then protect your lazy ass, it kind of all started to come together and the name didn't matter and then the male thing about when your name and a brand which it's good when the brand is in the name. 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 is like if your drain is clogged, drain is the perfect name or if you need home products, home depot is good. Office products, office depot, 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 Kwaw Fateria and they play on Kwaw in cafeteria and nobody knew what they did there and they went out of business so. Yeah. So Sunbomb kind of grew on us and then we started figuring out how the rest of it would look and how to mash it up. So you had um. Of course, a lot of experience in the previous iterations with characters, obviously psycho-chuawa. And did you think about, like, we need a character, like a mascot for this as well? Yeah, it's crazy that sounds like such an obvious idea, it just wasn't. But realizing the strength of a character, realizing the Budweiser frogs, the M&M guys, the energizer bunny, they live forever, Mickey Mouse, right? They don't get old, they don't get DUIs, like founders of celebrities, right? They could just keep their good, they could keep going. So, and then figuring out, you know, initially we were drawing, you know, surf characters and guys would look like hippies. And then we kind of landed on animal, and then it went to monkeys and then ape. How come monkey? Well, everybody likes monkeys, eh? 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-surf boards and called it "woodies", and it'd still be in surf shops today, or maybe it wouldn't be, but it wouldn't bottle, we called "woodies". Woodies and cross-surf boards, yeah, that's it. But to do what we did and to do what you need to do to be like a global brand, you gotta have a wider demographic than just a niche. And then we come back in just a moment. By Tom and Renee decided 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 Ross, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. So it's around 2009, and Tom and his partner, Renee, are working on the packaging for Sunbum. The colors, the fonts, the facial features for their gorilla mascot, and for inspiration, they print out a series of creative panels and hang them on the wall, kind of like storyboards, and each panel has a different theme. The first panel would be hippies, van life, skinny, long hair, tattoos, that whole freedom feeling that you think when you think surf counter-culture, the beach culture. So as that, the second one was seeing this furniture, right? The Scandinavian mid-century modern furniture design that led the way for the wood drains and the curves and 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 evening ingredients, just the way they're laid out. Everything was considered and spaced all the Bauhaus fonts and those types of things. Next page would be Japanese in New York Street, where lines like Supreme bathing ape undefeated, and then the last page was collectible vinyls. Renee had a lot of kid robot stuff up on our shelves and the graffiti world and brought that into the somehow. So looking at all of those pieces, I think, sunny, who's the logo, the gorilla logo, that was led a lot from Japanese street art. You know Tom, this reminds me a little bit of something that you mentioned to be before this interview started called the Elvis Principle that you mentioned. What's the Elvis Principle that you, what is it, and how do you use it to develop a brand? The Elvis Principle is kind of similar to the mashup that I talked about, except this is more on the personality. I was watching an Elvis special or something about him and then I got really intrigued with him. And he came out, when he came out on the scene in the 50s, he was, you know, 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 to film him above the waist, right? And so then he came out with a gospel album and the parents that had been, you got to burn the records or you can't go to an Elvis concert, which is, which made people want to go to the concert more. Once he did the gospel albums and did so, 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. 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. So basically an oval, a yellow oval with a brown line through it for the mouth and a next for the nose and like sunglasses and a little sort of, it's a very simple design to renead, design that or you or? Absolutely. Like I was sketching stuff and then he was sketching some stuff and a couple times he thought he had it and was, you know, fired up and looking for a high five and I hated it. 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. How did you know it was perfect when you sat? Because I loved it. I just, as soon as I saw it, I loved it. I knew how strong it was. I knew how powerful that logo mark was, you know? That's the other thing. If you take sunny into the logo, the A-plogo and you put it next to all the other big brands out there, right? Forget about the copper tones but anabones, those are just names. But if you put it next to, you know, the Nike swish, 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 and sunglasses staring at it with stone-faced. I knew it would be great sticker. I knew it would be great, everything. And we knew we were going to graffiti, mark the shit out of this thing. So we. You could literally take just the image of that ape and not even put sunbomb on it and the idea was people wouldn't know that was sunbomb. Correct. And you could put it on anything and make them think about not sunbomb necessarily but think of sunscreen. You know, we put it on footballs and frisbees and paddle ball sets and towels and hats, no words on bum on it. It just was that. We did ads, we did billboards, we. and just had the ape on there and people didn't know that we sticker the crap out of every surf town in California. And then we decided to take it to the January 10th surf expo. It's the surf expo in Orlando. Yeah, so that would be the first show. So all the surf shops in the country come and high end hotels that are on the beaches and stuff come to buy products. And what happens at that trade show do you get a lot of orders? It was not so much the orders, it was just the buzz. I mean, it was the skaters that were there because all the skate brands were there as well and all the surf brands were there. So the skaters were coming by and taking the stickers and a walk over to the skate, Bert Ramp and see our stickers on the ramp itself. On the ramp. And the kids were coming by asking if we had more stickers of just the suny guy, just the monkey. Just the ape. Yeah. And then. It's an ape or a monkey, I'm sorry. It's an ape. Monkeys have tails, so. Yeah, let's ape. I'm sorry. Yeah, let's okay. Pay some respect to something. Okay. So the sticker, but the sticker, you just have 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 skateboard or maybe on their surfboards. Yeah, exactly. And so they were doing that and then women that owned boutiques up in Antarctica 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. Wow. So immediately it was just like, okay, this is not normal. This wide of a demographic. It's really hard to get that. And I knew we had that first day of that show. It was basically validating your assumption here that this would appeal to people. This yellow ape and these colors and this wood grain, but it was at the end of the day, suntan lotion, right? And so people had to feel like it was better, a better product. Correct. And we did have a better product because we were making it for us. 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. It had to be clean. It had to be clean. And it had to be clean. It had to be clean. And so it was a good product. And so it had to be clean. partners anymore. And you saw the potential in it. Just saw the huge potential and there was really good money behind it to be able to do it the right way. And so we closed down Rings Canetti and took over Sunbomb. And the founding partners were sort of silent partners. They were happy with the direction you were taking it in. They were like, "Go for it. You do your thing." So now you are your Sunbomb. I mean, you're not Rings Canetti anymore and you are running this business. And you had it, it was a small team at first, just like four or five people. And based in Grand Rapids. Based in Grand Rapids, it went and bob the owner's offices that he let us use and just through four of us. But then just had to figure out the whole thing. Because I was just planning on, for an an eye, we're just planning on making the brand for them and saying, "Here you go. Good luck like we had done before." But with this one, all of a sudden we had to take it on. One interesting thing that came across was that it never said Grand Rapids, Michigan on the bottle, it said, "I think Coco Beach, Florida." Yeah, Coco Beach was the, you know, there was a direct flight to Orlando and Daytona was up the beach a little bit. But Coco Beach just sounded like a good place for a sunscreen company, right? Like Coco Beach. Coco Beach. It sounded like internationally. I kind of want a sunscreen that's made in Coco Beach, kind of Coco Butter. Oh my gosh. Yeah. If you're going to back to Tokyo, after you're trip to Hawaii, you're like, "Yeah, this bus does make Coco Beach Florida." Coco Beach. Yeah. So, we like that, so we got a PO box in Coco Beach. And then we, you know, all the calls were getting transferred up, you know, and then we had a call. You mean the customer service calls? Yeah, customer service calls. They were getting transferred up to Grand Rapids. To Grand Rapids, like in the middle of winter? Yeah. 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 you're unbelievably good, but it's unbelievably bad. And if they pushed it on anything or waves or any of that, just say that you were up at the Great Lakes office, actually. Yeah. So, we were that. And then we really quickly got a house down in Coco Beach and made it a legitimate office. And that was our first office, and we hired some people to work there. And then eventually we thought we'd all be moving down there. So, would you go back and forth between all the time? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a Florida brand through and through. It was made in Florida. The first real office was in Florida and our reps were in Florida. Our first stores and everybody that took a chance on us were in Florida. Yeah. I mean, it's hard for me to just to realize that it only launched in 2010 because today feels like such a dominant sunscreen brand. Like, you see an airport store, as you see a target everywhere. But to get to that point, right? What got it to, like, how did you creep the awareness around it? It was hard. 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 Acerra. If you can get Michael Acerra, he can take it. He's done it before. And so while there was other people that wanted to potentially take the line, I got a hold of him. He on the phone and sent him some product. He wanted to test the product in the water as a surfer. He did, he'd done vans and a bunch of other big brands, right? He was a sales guy. He was a sales, his independent sales rep. So he'd done it for a lot of other brands, but then he single handedly, you ask how we did it. It started with him. Without Michael Acerra, we wouldn't have made it. He was relentless. He was hop and fence as he was stickering every off ramp with stickers and every sign and every pictures of sunbum stickers on like the nozzle for like gas tanks. Like when you find a car, like that's him. And he would, he, we had all-size stickers. So everybody, I mean radio stations were getting calls. What's the ape? What's this ape we keep seeing around? And they nobody really knew until, until they did. But he was amazing. And we had great displays. Yeah, would you send the display, like, because you, you had like these plastic apes and like, yeah, a whole, like sometimes there'd be like a life size cut out of a, of an ape or would you send it to every store that sold the product? I mean, a lot of it from the beginning was you had to buy the whole thing. We weren't, 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, we went to IKEA and got these big bookcases that they had on sale for like 50 bucks or something. These tall bookcases and we redid the hole 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, say, 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, the footballs, the frisbee's, the t-shirts, the sunscreen, the guy on top, and you got the display. So if you wanted to carry sunbomb, you had to carry this whole big display. But then that's what everybody looked at. That's what drew everybody to it because it seemed like something and not just two bottles of sunscreen on the bottom shelf. So this really, I mean, this, the growth of this business really, so year one, $100,000. So was it like doubling or tripling or quadrupling by year two? You're 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, they saw it and bought it for to be their exclusive sunscreen on Necker Island. Wow. And we use that like crazy. It's an exclusive on Necker Island. Yeah. And then the four seasons and the standard and all those just started falling. What are the time and then you're, then you're rolling. A few years into sunbaugh, I know that the original owners got out of it and sold it to you and you know, you guys left Michigan, right? Like you moved the company to California in 2014, right? That's right. And then in 2019, which is 10 years after it was started, really nine years after it's launch. And then the first time I was, was purchased by SC Johnson and reportedly for $400 million amazing, incredible exit after just, you know, nine years that from what I understand, it was, it was planned all along, right? Like the tequila brand and the other brands that you worked on to basically build it and then eventually to sell it. Yeah, that was the idea. And I've, I've made mistakes before with this because I was basically running it. I was the CEO. And I had heard about that Harvard business model that says, you know, creatives usually start companies and then they, and they're really good at creative. That's why they make companies and, and then they start hiring people and doing the PNLs 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 about, it was about year three or four when I got called from Adam Francis, who was a guy in Australia, who's ex-processor for you went to Harvard, his wife Tegan was a lawyer and they had done a lot of good businesses and, and he was getting ready to start a sunscreen business and he saw a sun bomb in Hawaii and said, you know, I can't beat these guys. I got to try to join them. So he called me out knew who I was talking to. I was talking to my next CEO. So I said, would you be my, our CEO? And I got out of his way. Do you think that you did not have the skills, your skills were better suited for branding rather than managing a company? I don't think I know. Yeah. I was even 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. You built anything to that scale. And it's hard to give up the CEO role. Most founders don't, but I had, I knew I had to do it. I think at a certain point, the sun bomb was doing, you know, 70 million annual sales. I mean, significant company growing. You know, you could have kept going and built a billion dollar brand. So why did you decide to sell in 2019? Oh, 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 and we always thought we'd go international. We had all the trademarks and we were trying to go international, but sunscreen is 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 that are all different rules and regulations of what ingredients and what you can do and can't do. So we were hitting that wall and we wanted to go international. We were being asked from day one to go international. So we realized to keep growing, we would need a partner that had boots on the ground, manufacturing facilities, offices in all these countries that could handle that and land it on, SC Johnson. You know, it's interesting because you also, this is one of the first interviews you've ever done your life. Yes. Probably the first really intensive interview you've ever done. Yeah. Other than the depositions for the Taco Bell trial, which were more intense than this, trust me. But yeah, but I've not done this before. And you're basically, you don't even exist online, barely, right? It's really hard to find anything about you and you've been through this very public trial around Taco Bell and why did you not want to be in the public eye at all? I grew up so probably insecure, poor, maybe not feeling accepted. Kind of like the furniture store, right? The furniture store, you know, it was a hard place to work and I kind of felt like maybe even my wife's parents were, were like, "Why'd you marry this guy?" I'm not saying they thought that, but like you're dating all these really rich guys and then you married this artist guy and he's like, "Works at this furniture store." And I just didn't want to ever make anybody feel that way. So I was very conscious about bragging and I just didn't like braggers or about being out in front of something. And this quite frankly, I didn't think I could help in a lot of the circumstances, you know. I wasn't, I wasn't the brands that I was creating necessarily. I wasn't the big surfer. I wasn't the big tough guy for tequila. I wasn't the big Christian guy, you know. There were people like that that were better than me at it. I suppose if I would have done like a brand of T-shirts for tall skinny guys, I probably could have gotten out in front of it or something or a picky eater food brand. If I would have done that, I could have probably been that guy. It sounds like what you were saying was you didn't want to be out in front because you weren't the tequila guy, you weren't the surfer guy, you weren't the Christian guy. And that would sound like we between the lines what you're saying is like in your mind you felt like consumers maybe would expect that the brand would come from a person like that. And so maybe that's why you didn't want to be out in front. Yeah. And when I had the Taco Bell lawsuit, I went from being this creative guy to the guy that sued Taco Bell. So any interview, the only thing you could find at the time was Taco Bell lawsuit. So that's what people wanted to talk about. And that would hurt the brand that I was trying to promote and not help it. I didn't want to flex. I let other people, let other people flex. I flexed by doing the work and I felt really good about that. Tom, when you think about all that you've done, I mean you're 60, you've got a new venture you're working on. I think you're probably going to have worked till you drop dead just knowing you from this conversation. How much of what's happened to you and this success do you think is because of all the work you put in and all the sweat and how much do you think has to do with some of the just the lucky breaks? I think it's a combo. Obviously probably everybody says that. I think there were so many lucky breaks, right? Vivian Dreyer, back at Meyer, you know, given me those at order for 1800 t shirts, like all the people that I met, all the stores that said yes, all the buyers, it's really the lucky breaks of people taking a chance on me and believing in wanting to take the ride with me. But I also, it's also a ton of work. It's also doing it more, like Kobe said, you've got to practice more. So practicing more than anybody else makes you better than anybody at it. And I've practiced a lot because I love it because it's kind of my art. It's kind of my paintings. You know, these brands are kind of my paintings. So it's like the extension of what I was doing my whole life. So I just absolutely love love it. It's art to me. So yeah, it's both. That's Tom Rinks, co-founder of Sunbum in the mind behind many other brands, including one that just launched in Target this month. It's called Made by Dentists and it's a line of oral care products, which was in fact founded by two dentists, two sisters actually from Ireland. And they were killing it in Ireland, but they tried to come to America and it wasn't working. Then they thought maybe I could help them. So I told them I would if I could just blow it up and start it from scratch. Just like Sunbum. Yeah. I mean, the products were great because they're dentists. They're so authentic and they're so passionate and they're, you know, again, you went back to that question, you know, why aren't I in front of this brand? Right? Because I don't. I'm not a dentist. Not a dentist, but Tom did do all of the design work for the new brand of toothbrushes and toothpaste. And one place you really got to be creative was made by Dentists' line of toothpaste for kids with flavors like alien blood and eyeball juice. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to contact our team, our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at how I built this in mind is @guyRoss on Instagram or at how I built this and I'm @guy.Ross. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with Music composed by Rhymteen Aireb Lui, who's edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Cipher and Susanna Brown. Our production staff also includes JC Howard, Kiro Wachim, Alex Chung, Harry Thompson, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Ross and you've been listening to How I Built This.