How Three Friends Built a Multimillion-Dollar Brand by Making Sunscreen Fun Again

Vacation co-founders (from left) Dakota Green, Lach Hall and Marty Bell sold their first bottle of sunscreen in 2021. Target says the brand is one of its top sellers in the category.

Vacation, a pandemic-born personal-care startup, has pursued a simple strategy to make some room in its core category: putting the fun back in sunscreen.

The brand design looks like the love child of Club Med and Margaritaville. Discount pop-ups on its website evoke magazine coupons from 1986, down to the dotted lines for scissors. Its SPF 30 mousse comes in a whipped-cream canister. And the handle on its new 20-ounce “jug” detaches to be worn as a bracelet.

The result has been some serious business.

Vacation, which first began selling directly to consumers in 2021, reported $40 million in revenue last year. It is projecting its revenue to double to $80 million in 2025 and says it turned a profit this year.

It captured 1.1% of all U.S. sunscreen sales in the 12 months ending June 30, putting it at No. 13 in the category, according to consumer research firm Numerator. The year prior, it ranked 24th with a 0.4% share, Numerator said.

The brand this year also expanded its retail footprint into CVS, Costco, Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s. And Target, one of its biggest accounts, recently moved Vacation from the dusty bottom shelves onto coveted aisle-end and front-of-store displays. “Vacation has become one of the top-selling brands across our suncare assortment,” said Amanda Nusz, Target’s senior vice president of merchandising, essentials and beauty.

Vacation has raised more than $21.2 million to pursue its strategy, including $10 million in a Series B funding round last year led by investment firm True Beauty Ventures. Hollywood’s Emma Stone and Janelle Monáe also participated in the Series B raise.

The company arrived at an opportune time. Consumers are moving from purchasing sunscreen seasonally in the summer months to using SPF products as part of their daily skin-care routine, according to market research firm IBIS World, which predicts sales will increase 2.2% over the next five years despite the category’s maturity. Growth is being led predominantly by newer brands offering consumers new formats and formulas.

Vacation’s ads are often inspired by the print magazines and catalogs of yesteryear.

Days of tanning past

Vacation’s founders give the on-brand impression that they’d rather be on the beach than in the boardroom. Lach Hall, an Australian, and Marty Bell, from Scotland, dress in an unofficial uniform of Casio watches and silk shirts while U.S.-born Dakota Green favors T-shirts and caps.

None had worked in personal-care products before this. Hall and Green spent the first part of their careers building other people’s brands at advertising agencies and living together in Brooklyn, where they uncovered their mutual adoration of 1980s branding and aesthetics. They began developing the bedrock of the Vacation brand before they knew what kind of product they wanted it to sell; it was only when the duo moved to Mexico’s Playa del Carmen in 2017 that they settled upon the idea of sunscreen.

The two connected with Bell after becoming followers of Poolside FM, his retro internet radio station that later rebranded to Poolsuite and shared Vacation’s “la buena vida” philosophy, Hall said. The trio brought the brand into the world as “Vacation by Poolside FM.”

The founders’ key hunch was that sunscreen had become boring after people stopped using tanning mirrors and started worrying about cancer.

To summon the allure of an earlier era, they invested heavily in the visuals and on-shelf appeal of their offerings. Vacation’s bestselling products today include its canned, aerated Classic Whip and a reformulation of Bain de Soleil’s discontinued, gelatinous and fragrant Orange Gelée.

Vacation has also gotten comfortable handing out products for free. It offers select event organizers free sunscreen to distribute among attendees and mails around 1,500 products a week to social-media creators and other influencers.

“Our strategy overall is, how do we get products into as many people’s hands as possible?” Hall said. Even if recipients don’t post about Vacation on social media, they will “use it in summer and tell their friends,” he said.

One of Vacation’s bestsellers is packaged in a whipped cream bottle, designed to catch eyes on the shelf and on TikTok.

Screen time

The sunscreen category remains largely saturated, and competition is increasing. U.S. brands face stiff competition from South Korean and European rivals that boast more advanced UV filters and formulas, according to IBIS World.

Edgewell’s Banana Boat and Kenvue’s Neutrogena lead the category in unit sales and dollar sales, respectively, the household and personal products trade publication Happi has reported, citing market research company Circana.

But Vacation’s branding resonates with younger consumers’ obsession with nostalgia and desire for photogenic products, said Allison Collins, a former beauty editor and co-founder of advisory firm the Consumer Collective. Newer releases diversifying into areas such as body mists further the Instagram and TikTok appeal, she said.

“Fragrance is the hardest category to create visual storytelling around on social media, but mists are less expensive than other fragrance formats, so it feels less silly to be spritzing it about,” Collins said.

Vacation’s virality and kitschiness have led some consumers to interrogate the efficacy of its products online, including in a Reddit post titled “Vacation sunscreen—is it *really* legit?”

The brand, like many other startups in the industry, sends its sunscreen to dermatologists for review and advertises its dermatology-approved credentials.

Vacation plans to stick with its brand personality as it expands, Hall said, citing an ongoing brief for “wild” ideas.

“No one,” he said, “was going to tell us that sunscreen mousse was the next big thing.”