Turning a lifelong passion for creating characters into a brilliant brand that sold for 400 Million Dollars. Oh, and sued Taco Bell.

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Dave Young:
Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young, and Steve Semple is here with another topic for me. Well, and you. It’s not just a conversation between Stephen and I. We invite you to participate.

So today’s topic, I’ve not heard of this product, I don’t think, unless it’s… It’s a sunscreen called Sun Bum. Is that what you said, Sun Bum?

Stephen Semple:
Yep. B-U-M.

Dave Young:
So I’m not familiar with it. I hesitate to guess… Let’s hear the story.

Stephen Semple:
The reason why you want to listen to this story, so let me tickle your interest because there may be a bunch of people who may not have heard about this business. It was founded in 2009 and nine years after its founding, it was sold to SC Johnson for the tune of $400 million.

Dave Young:
Nice. That’s a cool payday.

Stephen Semple:
Do I now have your attention?

Dave Young:
Oh, absolutely. Tell you why I haven’t heard of it. I came indoors in 2009 and I haven’t gone out again since. Yeah, that’s it.

Stephen Semple:
That may be it. So I said, founded in 2009, nine years later, sold to SC Johnson for $400 million. So when you see something like that, it catches my attention.

So one of the main players behind Sun Bum is this guy by the name of Tom Rinks. Tom grew up in Long Beach, California, and then he moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he studied art at Hope College. After graduating from college, he worked at a chain furniture store where he was on straight commission. One of these eat-what-you-kill stores.

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Semple:
But he did well enough, he was able to support his wife. She was able to stay at home with the kids, and he talks about, in interviews, that this was really important because he learned how to sell, and it’s so important knowing how to sell. And he really learned how emotional the sales process is.

So five years after being at Art Van’s Furniture, he becomes a sales manager. And part of the reason he becomes a sales manager is he learns what to do to make sales. So an example is, if you have a woman sitting on a leather couch, he would send over a guy to talk to the woman and talk to her about how soft, sexy, and smooth the leather is. If there was a man sitting on the couch, he would send a woman over to talk about how strong, cool, rugged, and sexy the couch is. But it would use that language. If it was a family, he would send over you, Dave, an older guy, to talk about how good an investment it is.

Dave Young:
Wait a minute.

Stephen Semple:
He would send over an older guy to talk about how great an investment it is and how easy to clean.

Dave Young:
Oh yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Same couch.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Three different messages, right?

Dave Young:
No, Steve, this would never work because we are completely rational beings.

Stephen Semple:
Correct. Absolutely.

Dave Young:
These kinds of things would never fool anyone.

Stephen Semple:
Never fool anyone. But what he keyed into onto, it’s what the customer wants to feel.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
So it’s what they want to feel about the product. He would even do things like, he would do announcements of furniture pickups, even if there was none. Furniture pickup in bay three for the Johnsons, just to create this impression of things selling. And he found when he did that, they sold more.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
So he learned all of these things about creating impressions and what the customer feels, which informed him later in life. So he started doing this side gig as T-shirts. So he’s at a beach one day in Michigan, and he sees these surfers on the water, which being from California was a big shock. He’s like, “People surf in frickin’ Michigan.”

Dave Young:
Surfers in Michigan?

Stephen Semple:
And so he decides to sketch this cartoon of an old guy on a surfboard, waiting for the big one, right? And he titled it Surf Michigan.

So he created this T-shirt called Surf Michigan, and the whole thing was waiting for the big one, with this old guy aboard. One day, on his lunch break, he decides to call Meijers, which is a big store in the Michigan area. It’s like a Target, right?

Dave Young:
Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
He asks to speak to the surfwear buyer because he’s a rep for a surf line, which is how he positions himself. And he gets a chance to do a presentation.

He’s in Meijer, and he goes into the room where he’s supposed to… And there’s this great, big, huge rack where you can put all your wearers out to show the buyer, and he has this one T-shirt that he hangs up on the rack. And when the buyer comes in and looks at the one T-shirt, he’s like… He comes clean with the rep and he says, “I’m not a rep for a line. I was just at the beach and I created this one T-shirt.” But you know what? She decides to look at it, anyway. She looks at it and she buys 1800 of the shirts.

Dave Young:
There you go.

Stephen Semple:
He then goes out and buys 1800 Hanes T-shirts and takes them over to the local maker.

Dave Young:
Yeah he’s got to make them now, yeah. They’ve been sold.

Stephen Semple:
Has them printed, and he has done this for a couple of years.

Dave Young:
Okay.

Stephen Semple:
And the next thing he notices, he’s in Ann Arbor and the basketball team, the Michigan State basketball team, is doing really well, and it’s really blowing up. And he looked to buy a Michigan shirt with a basketball and he couldn’t find anything. So he goes to the University of Michigan, and he gets the licensing, which today would not be possible.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
He literally went to the university, because at the time it was done in-house at the school.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Today, it’s now all centrally run. But he creates a T-shirt called Slam Dance for the University of Michigan, which is a guy swinging from a rim. And he took it to the university and he sold a bunch of them on campus.

He went to the campus stores and he ended up selling 10,000 shirts. He does this with a couple of other schools. And in the process of doing this, he meets a guy by the name of Joel Shields, who’s also making shirts and doing these really great designs. So they decided to start a company together, but the stuff wasn’t selling all that well. Then one day he saw a picture of Madonna with her chihuahua called Chiquita.

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Semple:
And so they decided to make this line of shirts called Psycho Chihuahua. So they make this psycho-looking chihuahua and they put these words on it, things like, bite me, big dogs suck, stuff along that lines. And they end up selling tens of thousands of them. So they go to this superstore for apparel and it’s just blowing up. And then they decide to go to a licensing show in New York.

So it’s one of these shows, it’s held in the Travit Center in New York. And they get a booth, and it’s one of these shows where everybody goes to, who wants to do licensing, and there’s lots of buzz around it. And Taco Bell come to their booth and they decide to do a licensing deal with Taco Bell. So they do these designs, they create these commercials, they create toys, all sorts of stuff. And one day, all of a sudden Taco Bell stops taking their calls and they’ve been designing these TV commercials and all sorts of things for them. This is 1997, and so they thought the idea was dead until one day the ad runs. Do you remember the whole Taco Bell?

Dave Young:
Yo quiero Taco Bell. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
They created that idea.

Dave Young:
Okay.

Stephen Semple:
And the first three commercials were exactly what they created, but Taco Bell cut them out of it. So they decide to sue Taco Bell, and it takes them five years and they end up suing Taco Bell for $40 million.

So my recollection of that campaign, and correct me if I’m wrong, it didn’t actually bump Taco Bell’s sales, but it did spike the sales of Chihuahuas in the US.

Stephen Semple:
And you’re right, but the other thing it did is it actually killed their T-shirt business. Because they had that psycho Taco Bell T-shirt business, and suddenly it’s the knockoff and people wanted the real stuff, right? So their business literally died and ended up shutting it down. They do sue Taco Bell, and in this process, Tom Rinks meets René Canetti, and they become partners. And René’s from Copenhagen, and he does these great brand designs, and they get involved with this nonprofit that they’re working with. And from the result of the nonprofit in 2007, they decided to start a branding agency together. The deal that they did in this branding agency was that they would always get a piece of the company.

Dave Young:
Okay.

Stephen Semple:
So they would do the work for a fee, plus get a piece of a company, and they did all sorts of brands such as high-end tequila. Then in 2009, they were approached to do sunscreen. And it’s a friend from school days and they’re asked to take a look at it, and there’s quite a wealthy backer to this whole business. And they had a name and a concept, but it was losing money and the name was terrible. The names were terrible, the concepts were terrible. One of the names was called Sun Bum, and it was clip art of this guy hanging in this hammock. And basically, Tom Rinks says to them, “These ideas are absolutely terrible. Absolutely terrible.” They asked him to look at it, and he knew the beach world, and he saw this gigantic hole.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
There were all these big players, but there were no interesting authentic brands. So at first, he ditches all the names. At first, he ditches them all. And here’s how his process is. It’s a three-month process. They do a month of research, a month of thinking, and a month of design. And one day they’re looking around, and they’re going for lunch, and they pass by a museum of contemporary art. And they saw furniture, and they were really attracted to the woodgrain and curves. And so they decide to put a woodgrain pattern on the bottle. And if you look at the bottles today, it’s got this woodgrain pattern.

Dave Young:
Yeah, so while we were talking, I googled them just to see the images of the product. Yeah, and once I saw that, I knew I’d seen this product before. Do go indoors in stores and Walmarts and things like that, and it’s like, oh yeah, there’s the sunscreen stuff. Oh yeah, I recognize it.

Stephen Semple:
And what often happens with you and I, Dave, and we were sharing earlier about how there’s a new client that we’re working with, where I started off hating the name, and then all of a sudden something happens and you end up loving the name because you can create a campaign around it.

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Semple:
He hated the name Sun Bum until he came across this idea of Trust The Bum, protect your lazy bum.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Then it all came together. He’s like, “Wait a minute. We can make this work, but we need a character.”

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Semple:
He was like, “We need a character,” and not a surf character because that’s too on the nose. And again, we often talk about these things where if it’s too on the nose, it’s not interesting. They created a monkey and then it ended up becoming an ape, and they looked at all sorts of different art designs and it ended up landing on Japanese street art.

Dave Young:
Okay. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
And so they looked at it, they created this monkey that’s this… Or not this monkey, this ape, that’s kind of this Japanese street art, who’s this badass ape wearing glasses that just stands out.

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Semple:
Just totally stands out. So what they started to do is they created the image of the ape, no words, but could be put on anything. Didn’t even say, “Sun Bum,” no words. You could put it on footballs, you put it on hats, you could put it on towels, had no names, and they would go to a surf area and just sticker the crap out of everything. They would put the stickers wherever they could find it. And so they went to this surf expo in Orlando and there was this great buzz for Sun Bum. People kept coming up saying, “I want more of the stickers. I want more of the stickers.” And this created this whole buzz around Sun Bum because people were asking… Literally radio stations would be getting calls going, “What is this ape that we keep seeing everywhere?”

Dave Young:
Oh, wow. That’s awesome. So just guerilla marketing. Literally gorilla marketing.

Stephen Semple:
Literally. Here’s the part that was really, really interesting they would create these ones without the name. They were bold enough to do it without the name, and this created this real buzz.

Dave Young:
Uh-huh.

Stephen Semple:
And in the first year, they sold a hundred thousand dollars worth of product, in year two, 1.1 million.

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Semple:
Nine years later, they’re selling enough that they get bought for $400 million. At this point, Tom had shut down the advertising agency and he was actually brought on to run the business. So he had done that pivot. But here’s one of the other things that they did that was also interesting, he understood display and the idea of needing the scene bigger. Remember the lesson they had from the furniture store, about selling out the back, making it seem bigger?

Dave Young:
Oh, sure. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
So when a store approached them to run their line, they couldn’t just pick up a couple of things. They had to take this entire display. So they built this display that had frisbees, and footballs, and a gorilla on the top of it, and all sorts of products. They really held their own on that. No, you’ve got to take the entire display. So everything seemed bigger and more glamorous, stronger, and whatnot, and they ended up really blowing up the sunscreen business and being this huge success.

Dave Young:
That’s an amazing story. And I think what’s cool about it is there are loads of industries where there are so many products, and such a wide diverse range of products, that there’s an opportunity for somebody to come in and just shake things up and stand out, right?

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
To just do things differently. Be bold about your marketing, be bold about how you’re getting yourself recognized in your core demographic. This has got to be in a textbook somewhere. This is exactly how you do this.

Stephen Semple:
Well, what I found very interesting, was this whole idea of the original stickers that they made did not have the company name on them.

Dave Young:
If you do a Google search for the Sun Bum logo and look at images, you’ll see loads of these stickers that yeah, you’re right, it is just the gorilla face, no logo, nothing.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Right.

Dave Young:
And it’s just mostly stickers.

Stephen Semple:
And what they knew is if people got fascinated with it, they would figure it out.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
And when you figure it out, you feel involved.

Dave Young:
It became one of those, if you know, you know.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
Right, it’s an insider thing. People who know, know, and they recognize the stickers, and you wouldn’t know if you weren’t part of the sun-seeking crowd. I didn’t know.

Stephen Semple:
And it made it cool.

Dave Young:
Right?

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Dave Young:
I was not part of the sun-seeking crowd at that time.

Stephen Semple:
Would you put that sticker on your surfboard if it had the company name on it?

Dave Young:
No.

Stephen Semple:
Probably not.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Would you put the sticker on your surfboard where it’s this cool gorilla with this attitude? Absolutely.

Dave Young:
Yeah. You’d put it on the back window of your car.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
Right, and you’re saying to other drivers, I’m one of you.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
If you know what this is, I’m one of you.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
We are like-minded. We go to the beach, we surf, we do all the things that take place in the sun.

Stephen Semple:
Meanwhile, so many customers are like, “Oh no, I got to get the logo and I got to get the name. And I got to also… Oh, geez and I also got to let them know what it is I sell and do.” And it’s like, not necessarily. Not necessarily.

Dave Young:
And then all of a sudden you’re at the store, just looking for some sunscreen, and, yeah, there’s all the Coppertone crap, there’s all the other stuff. And it’s like, oh, look at this. The gorilla, the product range. I’m going to feel like I’m a little bit cooler than I really am if I buy one of these.

Stephen Semple:
See, and here’s where you’re brilliant, Dave, and this is where this campaign was brilliant. If we put the stickers around, what we know is a person buys sunscreen in the store. When they go walking into the store, they’re now going to see… Because remember again, they insisted on the big display.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
They’re going to see the big display and go, “Oh my God, I didn’t realize that was sunscreen. I’m going to buy some.”

Dave Young:
That’s what that is, yeah, they’re going to connect the dots.

Stephen Semple:
That’s what that is.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
You’re going to connect the dots, and at that moment, you’re going to feel like, oh, I’m now part of that hip, in the crowd.

Dave Young:
And when you connect the dots, you’re going to get a little bit of a dopamine rush.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
You’re going to feel a little sense of accomplishment.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
Right, you’re going to feel like you’re part of it. And so what you’ve done is they gave the consumer an opportunity to participate in this little quest of finding something out.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
Right, you keep a little bit of mystery hidden, and when people find it, there’s a delight factor to it that you can’t plan that, and you… Well, you can plan it, but you certainly don’t want to say it in your ads.

Stephen Semple:
Yes, right. Well, as soon as you say it, the mystery is gone. So to me, it was a brilliant marketing campaign, a brilliant marketing campaign, and a bold marketing campaign. And again, what Tom learned a lot this from, it’s about how you make people feel. He learned that in his experience in the furniture business, and then creating these really cool ideas like the chihuahua and whatnot, he knew, okay, if we create this thing and people connect with this thing, they want it. When I came across, I was like, “Wow.” And to start a business and then nine years later to be selling it for that type of price, you’ve done something. You’ve really moved mountains.

Dave Young:
Mm-hmm. Very cool story. Maybe I’ll go outdoors now. I live in Texas and we’re recording this in August. I’m probably not going out.

Stephen Semple:
No, not for another couple of months.

Dave Young:
No. No. We’ll see you at happy hour in October.

Stephen Semple:
All right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, thanks David.

Dave Young:
Thank you Stephen. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.

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