Tom Rinks not only understands the art of branding, he can explain it with the passion and precision of a master teacher. In 2009, he came up with the look of Sun Bum sunscreen, drawing on influences as disparate as American surf culture, Scandinavian furniture, and Japanese streetwear. He then mashed them up into a brand represented by a stone-faced gorilla staring out from a woodgrain background. Within ten years, Sun Bum was acquired by SC Johnson at a reported valuation of $400 million. But even before that, Tom helped launch a wildly diverse range of brands, including a line of tequila, a series of Christian videos, and even the “Yo quiero Taco Bell” chihuahua campaign. All were huge successes, though it took a five-year legal battle for Tom to get paid for the Taco Bell mascot. This month, yet another brand he designed—Made by Dentists—launched in 1,800 Target stores across the U.S.




This episode was produced by Casey Herman, with music by Ramtin Arablouei

Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Katherine Sypher and Susannah Broun.




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

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?

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

welcome to how I built this a show about innovators entrepreneurs idealists and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how Tom 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.

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 1 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 2 similar products.

And this might help explain how a sunscreen brand called Sun Balm 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 Rinks launched Sun Bum he thought about every inch of its design.

A now iconic woodgrain 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.

And 1 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 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.

And they were opening 1 in Grand Rapids, and I was 1 of the first ones to apply and actually open that store in Grand Rapids on 28th Street.

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

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.

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.

So you're working at this, at the furniture store, and you're a young guy, and you're in your mid-20s.

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?

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.

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, I think those years, those 5 years at Artvan, it was called Artvan Furniture, were just hugely, hugely important for my career.

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, as they had different people on different types of furniture, what to do.

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 old-timer in to talk about what a great investment it is, 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.

We'd say, you know, customer pickup for Johnson, door 3, customer pickup for Smith, door 5, just to get a frenzy going with nobody picking up anything.

Oh, you would just get on the loudspeaker and say that?

Customer pickup, door 5, even though there was no customer pickup.

Just to kind of create the impression that...

I guess while you're there, you start to like, just play around with sketches that you turn into a t-shirt.

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.

Yeah, they were on longboards, and I was just in shock because there's no waves, really.

I would learn later that there actually was waves.

Most of my kids learned to surf on Lake 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 1.

You thought it was funny being from California?

And then I ended up deciding to make a t-shirt with it.

And I made it 1 t-shirt on a Hanes Beefy t-shirt, big neon letters on the top chest that said Surf Michigan.

And then it had the drawing and then a little caption underneath it waiting for the big 1.

And, you know, without really even knowing what I was doing 1 day at Art Van Furniture, on my break I called Meijer, which is a chain of about a hundred stores.

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.

You said you were a rep from a surf brand.

And then on my day off, I went to that appointment.

And they told me to wait and over here in the lobby and there was guys with rolling racks And I think somebody had 1 of those big huge cell phones at the time and and I had 1 t-shirt In a little suit bag.

I was sitting there my bad corduroy suit I almost left when they called my name and said to go set up in 1 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 show it all together And so I just put my 1 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 Dreyer walked in as the buyer.

Yeah, she changed my life Yeah, she yeah she walks in and looks at me and looks at the wall and sees that 1 t-shirt sitting there And I just came clean.

And I just said, hey, I work at Artvan Furniture.

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 no 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

Wow she ordered 1, 800 surf Michigan t-shirts

I got them printed at a place called Perron Screen Printing, a guy named Carl Perron in Grand Rapids.

I just found him in the phone book and he was cool enough to make me 1 t-shirt,

And you just bought, he just bought like 1, 800 Hanes t-shirts and then...

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 back into the Hanes BVT box and put the right name on them and delivered them myself and then went back to work.

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

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

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

the meantime, 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.

They were like freshman starters who were just incredible players.

Some of them would go on to have these amazing NBA careers like Jalen Rose and Jawan Howard and Chris Webber, right?

Yeah, yeah, they were kind of like just changing college sports as well.

They were Rebels and they were cool and they were wearing black socks and they're the ones that started wearing the really long shorts.

And I was at Meijer and I was looking for a Michigan shirt and the only shirts with Michigan with basketball was just said Michigan XXL basketball or Michigan and with a like a clipart ball going through a hoop basketball And you know, there was nothing cool and I couldn't believe it.

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 in with the athletic director there?

And at the time, he was the 1 that ran the licensing.

It would go to, you know, there's 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.

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

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 pay them a royalty, which was like 10 or 20 percent 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.

It just said big navy blue letters, it said 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 on 1 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 1 design

So yeah, so I went to Moe's Sport Shop in Ann Arbor, right on campus.

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.

Because you're doing this a few months before March Madness.

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

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

I started adding some schools, but I wasn't making serious money, not enough to think that I could support my family forever.

What schools did you go to after Michigan?

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, what it really took to have a business.

And I guess around 92, you meet this guy named Joe Shields.

I guess you meet him in Grand Rapids, who you would go on to start a new kind of design business with.

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

I was a goofy little doodle cartoonist, right?

So I saw some of his designs that he was working on for t-shirts and said, hey, I know how to get reps and stuff.

And then I felt like I wanted to bring some to the table.

1 was called Mosh, the other 1 was called Caveman that he drew.

But these shirts 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?

It was just a stylized version of these people dancing on the front of shirts in

It just said Mosh on the top, right, which is kind of cool because of mosh pits and

Well nobody, nobody, nobody would wear those shirts guy, actually.

Nobody would buy, no I don't think 1, I don't think 1 person wore those shirts.

But while we're getting ready to do them, I saw an article in a magazine that had Madonna, this is like in 94, with her Chiquita, her Chihuahua.

It was a photo of her holding her Chihuahua.

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 T-shirt world?

And when a line gets popular, it's popular by the cool people, the college-age kids, the high schoolers, right?

They start buying it and then their younger brothers see them wearing it and then they wanna buy it.

And so then that's the first sign it's gonna 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 gonna be looking for something new.

So I saw that kind of happening, and I saw Madonna and Chiquita, and I was like, took that to Joe, and we called it psycho chihuahua.

You took that picture of Madonna and a chihuahua and you said, let's do something with a chihuahua.

Yeah, let's do something with a chihuahua.

So not just those 2 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 bad ass little small shaking chihuahua And we put words on it.

So it was psycho chihuahua, you know, 1923 or something, and then these Mexican colors.

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

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

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 him 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 the temperature was, and called me back and said, everybody wants Psycho Chihuahua.

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Sun Bum: Tom Rinks