☀️ How Vacation Turned Sunscreen Into a $40M Cult Brand Sunscreen should have been the worst product to build a brand around. A commodity. A shelf war. SPF 30 vs SPF 50. Yawn. But Vacation didn’t sell sunscreen. They sold leisure in a bottle. They wrote a 42-page pitch deck styled like it was Xeroxed in 1986. Investors faxed in their checks. They launched not with ads but with a radio station (Poolsuite FM) and fake corporate business cards (“Director of Breakfast Buffet Excellence”). They bottled nostalgia: scents of coconut, banana, pool toys, and sunscreen Lycra. A smell you remember, not just use. They revived discontinued cult products (Orange Gelée) with waitlists of 15,000+ people before launch. They threw office-themed cookouts where 2,000+ fans showed up—for sunscreen. Result: $40M in sales in 2024. Profitable. On track for $80M this year. Distribution in 13,000 stores. What business owners should learn: Commodities don’t exist—only lazy marketing. You can sell escape, nostalgia, or identity in any category. The wrapper is the wedge. People share stories, not specs. Credibility must match the comedy. Behind the piña colada branding were dermatologists, ex-L’Oréal execs, and serious R&D. Community is the moat. A product is replaceable. A world your customers want to belong to is not. Vacation made sunscreen fun again. What’s the “boring” product in your business that could become a movement if you stopped selling the bottle and started selling the feeling? See the deep dive I did on their marketing methods. Very interesting company.