How Tom Rinks Made Magic With Sun Bum

The trick to building great brands, according to Sun Bum co-founder and creative director Tom Rinks? Betting on “people with magic.” When Rinks finds someone who is authentic, unique, and driven, he doesn’t hesitate to make the hire.

“When you hire a magical person, then they attract more magical people,” he says on Inc.’s From the Ground Up podcast this week. “And that’s kind of the game. That’s how you do it.”

Throughout his career as a branding consultant, Rinks has used this strategy to create a successful t-shirt company, a Taco Bell mascot, a tequila brand, and, most recently, rebrand a good-for-you toothpaste.

But surfer sunscreen brand Sun Bum is by far his most well-known endeavor. About 15 years ago, Rinks says, a fellow parent at his child’s elementary school asked if he thought their new sunscreen business, which was bleeding cash, could work, “or if he should just dump it.” 

“I looked at it, then looked at the market and saw the big gaping hole for sunscreen — for an authentic sunscreen brand — and told him we could build one for him if he wanted it,” he says. Rinks and his partner René Canetti then built Sun Bum for a fee and a small piece of equity. Eventually, the owners offered to sell it to them.

To make Sun Bum a success, Rinks recruited a group of surfers to help him build the brand in Cocoa Beach, Florida: the brand’s magic people. 

“They became the authenticity,” he says. “I just put the pieces together, but they are the ones that are testing it. They’re the ones who are calling all the shots, that are doing the events. They know what’s authentic, and they really care.”

SC Johnson acquired Sun Bum in 2019 for a reported $400 million. Rinks stayed on for another year and a half, he says, to build a comprehensive brand guide “because it’s my baby, and some of my babies have been ruined after they sell.” 

Soon after the sale, though, Rinks met Lisa and Vanessa Creaven, the founders of toothpaste brand Made By Dentists — and says he “saw the magic again.” Hear more about the brand, and the rest of Rinks’ career history, by clicking the player above. You can also listen to From The Ground Up on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or other audio platforms.

Full transcript as follows:

Lagorio-Chafkin: Diana.

Ransom: Christine.

Lagorio-Chafkin: It is a great day here, and I am wishing I was at the beach. What’s your most memorable beach story?

Ransom: I’d have to say it was the time I went camping with my family at the beach, and I remember my mom getting horribly sunburned, like horribly, where her entire body was red. And then she had to spend an entire week in a tent with no air conditioning.

Lagorio-Chafkin: For the rest of the week.

Ransom: Oh, right. No, she got sunburned the day one, and it was just like she was just fried the entire week. And I just won’t forget that. I felt her pain in a way that still sits with me today.

Lagorio-Chafkin: So you don’t forget your sunscreen now?

Ransom: Oh no, totally. I’m all aboard on the sunscreen train.

This is From the Ground Up. I’m Inc. Executive Editor, Diana Ransom.

Lagorio-Chafkin: And I’m Editor-at-Large, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. Today’s episode, “The Alchemy of Branding.”

Ransom: So Christine, for today’s episode, I spoke with Tom Rinks. He’s the serial entrepreneur, but you might know him best as the founder of Sun Bum. But he’s also done a bunch of other things, like he’s the branding savant behind the Chihuahua dog, the Taco Bell Chihuahua dog. Do you remember that?

Lagorio-Chafkin: Yo Quiero dog?

Ransom: Yo Quiero Taco Bell.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Wow.

Ransom: He has another company called Made by Dentists. He’s also consulted with many other companies along the way helping them build their brands.

Lagorio-Chafkin: How do you become a branding whiz? How do you get into that?

Ransom: Well, I think it’s true for a lot of people that he fell into it, but what’s interesting about Tom is that he ended up basically cutting his teeth in this branding world by selling furniture, which was pretty bizarre, but if you actually hear him talk about it was in the eighties. He was in his twenties, he had a growing family, and he worked at this furniture store, and he was just trying to raise money to basically survive. He made money on sales commissions, so he was really motivated to sell a couch to whoever walked in.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Sure.

Ransom: But that helped him get a read of people and helped him understand who the person is, what their motivations are, how people tick in a way that was I think foundational for his entire branding career. And so he still leans back on that experience. And though some of his terminology or maybe some of his methodology today might seem dated, it was helpful for him just learning how to basically build a brand and to sell going forward.

Lagorio-Chafkin: That’s great. I can’t wait to hear it.

Tom Rinks: It’s really the most important, probably the most important experience I’ve ever had was just sales experience, learning how to get people to buy something that I needed them to buy to put food on the table. And so really it was a desperation of, okay, I got to figure this out.

Ransom: So what did you do? You learned how to read people?

Tom Rinks: Yeah, learned how to read people, learned what certain words they wanted to hear, certain buzzwords that would click their mind to say, “Okay, this is something I want.” So I used the example, if they were sitting on a leather sofa, I ended up being the manager there and being the architect of who goes in for what person?

Ransom: Oh, wait. So one salesman would go talk to the consumer depending on who it was.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, so if it was-

Ransom: A sales person.

Tom Rinks: So if it was a girl on a leather sofa, I would have a guy go over there, a pretty good-looking guy over there and he would use words like the leather is soft and supple and sexy and all those kinds of buzzwords. I’m going to try to remember some of them, but if it was a guy sitting over there, I’d send to a woman, she would talk about how strong it is and rugged, tough buzzwords that he wanted to have a woman say about his sofa. So that was going to be a reflection of him in his house. And if it was a family, I would send an older guy or an older woman in and they would talk about wears like iron and it’s a great investment long term and all those kind of things. So I quickly figured out some of that, some of the way people’s feelings were, and I turned that into consumer products throughout my career.

Ransom: Gosh, that’s fascinating, and what a great lesson to learn so early. So how did you end up with t-shirts, in a t-shirt company?

Tom Rinks: I was selling furniture and I was at the beach in Holland, Michigan and saw some surfers out there on the lake, and there was really no waves on there. There’s some winds.

Ransom: There were people surfing on a lake?

Tom Rinks: Well, they get wind swells and actually there is a surf community out there. When the wind is right, there’s some breaks. All my kids learned how to surf on Lake Michigan.

Ransom: Oh, wow.

Tom Rinks: I saw that, thought it was funny. I had done some cartooning, so I went home and drew some cartoons of people trying to surf on Lake Michigan. And then I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, put it on mugs or make a calendar, I had no idea. But I ended up putting one on a t-shirt. And then from my furniture store place on my break I called a company called Meijers. It was like a Target before Target.

Ransom: Oh.

Tom Rinks: So they carried groceries, but they also carried a lot of everything else, a lot of apparel, and so they had about a hundred stores. So I told them I was a surf wear rep and I wanted to show them the spring line, and they gave me an appointment.

Ransom: Nice. Fake it till you make it, right?

Tom Rinks: Total fake it till you make it.

Ransom: So you got the appointment, the buyer bought the shirts, bought like 1,800 of them, right?

Tom Rinks: Yes.

Ransom: Some gargantuan number. We’re not going to get into details about how you were able to manage that, but basically how did that one shirt turn into a whole company?

Tom Rinks: I did a couple seasons of that, and then I just got really lucky that the Fab Five, who were the Michigan five freshmen, it was that era and they all went on to pro basketball careers. So they were all there as freshmen. It was the biggest thing. They were changing college basketball as we knew it. They had the longer shorts. They had the attitude. They had the black socks, and I saw that. And I was looking around at Meijer and saw all they had was Michigan basketball shirts with an XXL in the middle or a clip art ball going through a hoop. And I was like, why isn’t anybody doing something with them?

So I went to University of Michigan on a day off and talked to the athletic director who at the time handled the licensing, got the license to do a shirt like that. I was still working at the furniture store, made a shirt called Slamdance that had a guy that looked like Chris Webber hanging on the rim. And I took it into a couple of stores down there, Mo’s and M Den and Oryx Bookstore, and they all loved it and bought it. And I sold about 10,000 shirts that season. That gave me enough to quit the furniture store. And then I started getting other licenses, and I ended up with about 450 college licenses, but it took some time. It was just me.

Ransom: You ended up working with Joseph, right, Joseph Shields?

Tom Rinks: Yeah, I found him. I mean, that’s part of the thing I’ve been super lucky about is finding really, really talented people and spotting them and wanting to work with them. I’ve never really done a whole lot by myself. I’ve always just pulled up next to somebody that I saw that was a super talent, whatever field they were in.

And one day, a few years into, New Agenda was the name of the company, it’s still around, I saw this guy’s artwork being printed on one of the presses. And I was like, “What is this, who is this,” and it was amazing cartooning. And they said, “The guy that just walked out of here.” So I chased him into the parking lot and said, “Hey man, can I come by your office and talk to you?” And so I went to his office, saw the stuff he was doing, and it was like, okay, this guy’s a superstar. And I knew how to sell. He knew how to draw. Okay, let’s work together. You draw the T-shirts and all that and I’ll get them sold.

Ransom: So you two came up with the idea for the Psycho Chihuahua.

Tom Rinks: Yes.

Ransom: That one idea sent you on a path that is so outrageous that I’d love to have you talk about it for a bit.

Tom Rinks: Okay.

Ransom: What happened?

Tom Rinks: Well, he had a couple of other lines that he was doing and as an artist, I wanted to participate. I knew I couldn’t draw it as good as he could, but I wanted to come up with the idea because I was always really good at the creative part. One day I saw Madonna holding, I think it was Chiquita was the name of her dog. And it was the first time, I mean now after Legally Blonde and Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua, they later became an accessory in Beverly Hills Chihuahua and all that. But at the time, Chihuahuas were just hated dogs. Nobody liked them. They were ugly and yappy and you wouldn’t really think of it as a mascot or something anybody would want to wear. But I saw what was happening in the industry and it was all bigness. It was Big Dog sportswear. It was No Fear. It was a lot of tough talk, and I thought it’s about to shift.

And it usually shifts after the dads start wearing it. The cool kids start wearing it, the younger brothers try to copy, and then when the dads start wearing the brand, it’s over. And so I was seeing that across the board on a lot of these big, aggressive shirts, and I thought it’s going to go small.

And so I told him about it. He loved it. He drew up a chihuahua. We printed a bunch of t-shirts and took a few lines out of some of his stuff and some of my stuff. We got some reps across the country. They grabbed it, tested it, and Psycho Chihuahua was just, everybody wanted it. It was really on the point.

Ransom: So you ended up at a licensing show, and then you met a rep from Taco Bell?

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: And then, I mean, I feel like our listeners probably understand what’s about to happen next. So this became the Yo Quiero Taco Bell.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, like right away. They were looking for a mascot. Everybody at the time, all the other fast food places were selling merchandise. Jack in the Box was selling merchandise, believe it or not. There was a line called McKids in Target that was all McDonald’s-

Ransom: Oh, wow.

Tom Rinks: …branded clothing, and it was selling a lot.

Ransom: Oh, my god.

Tom Rinks: So everybody was looking for a way to make extra money in their merchandising. Ed was there scouting around looking for an idea for a mascot, came across us. Psycho Chihuahua, we had a lot of demographics. We were in a lot of big retailers, and our demographics were his demographics, 18 to 24-year-old boys. And we gave him a bunch of merchandise, and he took it home on the plane with the president who was actually at the show as well. I didn’t meet him, but he talked to them about it.

And then we got a call back that said they wanted to talk to us some more. They didn’t want it originally because they thought a Chihuahua hooked to food would be bad, and they didn’t really see the trends, but then they tested it with some of their audiences and it really blew up. And from the beginning, ours was a cartoon, but from the beginning, we know when we started writing the commercials for him that it had to be a live dog. A cartoon would not be funny.

So we took all the characteristics and mannerisms of our character that was a lot of particular things, put that into commercials for them and wrote the first three commercials and storyboarded them and traveled back and forth to Irvine. They came to our place in Michigan. It was an amazing time.

Ransom: Yeah, you were thinking at the time I’m sure that this is going to be it. Taco Bell’s going to be a client and this is going to be huge. And then next thing you know, nothing, radio silence.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, it was talk of Super Bowl commercials, and they gave us the schedule. We designed all the packaging. We designed all the toys. We had designed the tray liners and the uniforms. So it was a big deal, especially for two guys, two black sheep like Joe and I who were still trying to prove our worth probably creatively. Joe came from a really successful family, and he was the artist who went off to be a cartoonist. His brothers, I think, were lawyers and doctors. And I felt the pressure too to do something big.

So we were really excited. And it was scheduled to come out right behind that first Batman. I forget who was in it. And then the phone just stopped ringing, and they wouldn’t pick up our calls anymore. We had an agent out of New York that was handling everything, thank god. So she had been tracking everything and had the contracts and everything, but then they just stopped calling.

Ransom: Right, so then you sued.

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: Wow.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, we thought they weren’t going to do it, and then we saw the commercials.

Ransom: Oh, right, right. They went with another agency and they got the commercials done with the Chihuahua and everything.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, everything. I mean, there were our commercials. And fast-forward in the court, everybody was saying and all the documents and all the discovery, all of our stuff was in the offices of the other creative agency, and they had memos. And the guy that actually met us the first time, his name was Ed Alfaro, and he was a twenty-five-year veteran at Taco Bell. And he ended up quitting over it all in a letter to the president saying it was because he couldn’t believe we were stealing it from these two guys in Michigan. So it was crazy.

Ransom: Wow.

Tom Rinks: And then we never thought we would get through to trial, but-

Ransom: You thought you’d settle.

Tom Rinks: Thought we’d settle, but they never offered us anything or we would’ve settled for sure because we didn’t really have any money to fight it. But a local law firm, Warner Norcross + Judd, took it on contingency so we didn’t have to pay anything. And they saw the evidence and knew if they could get to court, they would win, we would win. So it was an amazing experience. So just all the great lawyers that Taco Bell had from New York and Chicago, and I got some really amazing lessons of how federal court and trials like that work.

Ransom: Wow. Flash forward, you got the judgment. I think you ended up with the judgment was 30 million, and then the judge tacked on another extra 12 million for interest payments, so well deserved.

Tom Rinks: Thanks.

Ransom: And I think it was like five years you had to endure this, right?

Tom Rinks: Yeah, it was brutal, but it was a super good experience. And yeah, we just got the contract. There was no damages for hurt feelings or anything like that.

Ransom: Oh, right.

Tom Rinks: It was just what the contract was that we originally had through our agent.

Ransom: Oh, okay.

Tom Rinks: That’s what they awarded us.

Ransom: So they gave you the money they said they were going to give you, that’s-

Tom Rinks: Yeah, but we had no idea because we got a little percentage of the toys, and I think they sold 90 million of those dogs, those little toy dogs.

Ransom: I mean, it was a real thing. The Chihuahua was everywhere.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, it was a big deal.

Ransom: So anyway, congratulations for getting through that.

Tom Rinks: Thanks.

Ransom: But you also in the interim met Renee Canetti. Your father was a minister, and so you were making these Christian films in that world, and then you met Renee. How did that all work out and how’d you start a branding agency from that?

Tom Rinks: Yeah, I had stopped listening in church a long time ago, but my ex-wife wanted us to have our kids to go there, and she wanted to go so we were at a church and this pastor came and started speaking. He was opening up his own church. He was probably late twenties, and he just was the first time somebody was like me that was actually speaking that was living in my world and knew about the Beastie Boys and knew about skating and whatever.

Ransom: He mentioned Beastie Boys in his sermon?

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: That’s cool.

Tom Rinks: So it’s just like, okay, if we’re going to go, we need to go to somebody like this. I want my boys listening to this guy. So he started a church, and I became friends with him, and then he was wanting to clean up like his cassette ministry. So he was going to hire this guy to get rid of the ums and the ahs. And it was that moment that came through the window. It was just like, now you do it, man. You could do it.

And so I sold New Agenda, the college sports apparel company. And then I spent a couple of weeks, a couple of months that summer behind Steak ‘n Shake parking lot on 28th Street, gazing out my car window trying to figure out, okay, okay-

Ransom: Oh no, this is what you’re doing.

Tom Rinks: …what am I going to do? How am I going to do this? And there was no iTunes or any of that yet, but I knew the attention span was really short so we ended up making on film, shooting film…

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Tom Rinks: It’s really short, so we ended up making, on film, shooting film, little ten-minute videos of some of his sermons. And Renee, I was using him because he was a couple of doors down at an agency, he was helping me with the packaging. And again, it was like, “Wow, this guy is a superstar.” He was incredible. He worked for Adidas back in Copenhagen, and other big brands there, and was just head and shoulders above any designer I’d ever seen, but we couldn’t afford him because it was a non-profit.

So I told him, “This is it. This is my last time I can use you because I can’t afford $400 an hour for an artist.” And he said, “You’re going to hire somebody?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Hire me,” and it was like $40,000 a year, so it was a cut in pay. And I said, “What in the world would you…” He was an atheist. He grew up hating Christians, thinking it was a joke, making fun of them. And he just said, “I like you. I want to work with you. And if there was an on-ramp for me to spirituality of some sort, I know how to do that.” So he was super great to have him in there as an atheist, helping us make these things, because my instincts wouldn’t have been the same as his.

Ransom: Right, right. It’s a good yin and yang, I guess.

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: So that ended up, you all started this Rinks Canetti branding agency, yeah?

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: And you were working with brands like Rock & Republic, even DeLeón Tequila, which probably wasn’t called DeLeón at the time, or maybe it was? Yeah.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, that was from the very beginning, we started that, I started that with Renee, for a friend, Brent Hocking, who asked us to… He wanted to get into the tequila business, and so he asked us to help him build a brand. So we went with him to Mexico, and figured out what we could do to make a go, and it was very successful. And Brent was really smart at the business side of it, so again, he knew that world. He was kind of a mobster himself, kind of, so he fit the bill for a tough-

Ransom: Oh, for the tequila? Yeah.

Tom Rinks: … for a tough brand like that.

Ransom: How did Sun Bum come into existence?

Tom Rinks: Sun Bum, again, was a… We were traveling a lot to Los Angeles, back and forth, for Rock & Republic and DeLeón Tequila.

Ransom: And what year was this?

Tom Rinks: It’s like 2007, 2008, somewhere in there. We were traveling a lot, and I had little kids, and he had a couple little kids. Somebody from my kid’s elementary school knew what we did, and asked me to come in and check out this business they were trying to start, and it was a sunscreen business, but that was not working, and they were losing a lot of money. He wanted me, he was the owner of it, and he just wanted me to look at it to see if there was anything there or if he should just dump it.

So I looked at it, then looked at the market, and saw the big, gaping hole for sunscreen, for an authentic sunscreen brand, and told him we could build one for him if he wanted it. And usually, we would build a brand, and then we would get a little piece of it, and then move on. They’d pay us for the work, and then we’d get a piece of the company, and that was what we did. And then most of the companies, if not all the companies, sold. So it was really a smart way to do it in retrospect.

So they asked us if we’d do it. We built a line for them, we got a piece of it, and then we took it to Surf Expo in January 2010, and it flew, right from day one, off of it.

Ransom: And Sun Bum’s whole ethos was more like surf culture first, and I think that that was probably important, right? While you’re trying to build this brand, you wanted to tap into this subculture.

Tom Rinks: Totally.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: There was no FUBU, if you will. You know, For Us, By Us?

Ransom: Uh-huh.

Tom Rinks: Daymond, the guy from Shark Tank, right?

Ransom: Of course.

Tom Rinks: Started For Us, By Us, but there was no sunscreen that was being made that was made by beach people for themselves, for their family, to protect themselves, and everything was being made for somebody else. So when you do that, and you’re not making it for yourself, it changes everything. So if you’re making it for your own kids, you care about the ingredients, you care about everything about the brand, and so that really shines through. And so the first thing I had to do was find a group of beach people who were living that lifestyle.

Ransom: Okay. You found some beach people.

Tom Rinks: And so I found them, and they became the authenticity. I wasn’t the cool surfer guy, they were. So that’s why I wouldn’t be out front because nothing that I did-

Ransom: Surfing in Michigan doesn’t feel authentic? Sorry.

Tom Rinks: No offense to Michigan’s surfers because they’re a cool crowd, but it didn’t need to come from Michigan. It needed to come from Florida.

Ransom: Okay, so you went to Florida to find your surfers?

Tom Rinks: Yeah, yeah.

Ransom: How’d that go?

Tom Rinks: It went amazing. It was amazing. It was. I mean, that’s just luck.

Ransom: What’d you do? Were you just like, “I’m going to go to a beach and find some…”

Tom Rinks: Yeah. I mean, surfing has so become… What was so attractive about surfing, at least to me growing up, was the counterculture, the long hair, the skinny, the tats, the van life, all that kind of thing. Not the sport, it was just the life that was surrounding, the freedom, the free love of that lifestyle, that they didn’t sell out, they weren’t accountants, they weren’t, they just worked as waiters or waitresses or just made enough money so they could surf and be on the beach, and they didn’t care about houses or cars or any of it.

Luckily, I found that group in St. Augustine, Florida. I saw a photo that a wedding photographer took of one of her friends surfing. She was 19. Haley Welsh was the name of the photographer. I loved it so much. I was like, “Who is this person? And do you know more people like this?” And she said, “Yeah.” I said, “Okay, rent a house in St. Augustine and bring those people and we’re going to have to do a photo shoot.” And she brought all the characters that everybody has seen in Sun Bum since day one, and they all work for the company now still. They all just rose in the ranks and they’re amazing.

Ransom: Right. Sun Bum’s also carried at surf shops. There’s a surf shop in where I go with my family in Duck, North Carolina, and I think that that’s the only brand that they carry is Sun Bum Sunscreen. So it seems legit-

Tom Rinks: It is legit.

Ransom: … surfer-oriented sunscreen.

Tom Rinks: It is. I just put the pieces together, but they are the ones that are testing it, they’re the ones who are calling all the shots, that are doing the events. They know what’s authentic and they really care. They really care.

Ransom: Oh, okay. So the surfers knew where the surf shops were and that’s how you tied into the distribution, in that way?

Tom Rinks: Yeah, you just got surf reps that carried other brands, and then they pick up your brand as well. So when you’re at the Surf Expo in Florida, any trade show, you’re looking for reps. And so the reps see a line they like and they have a bag of stuff, they’re already going to that surf shop or all the surf shops in their area, and so they pick up another line so they can make a little bit more money.

So we were at the beginning, you’re at the bottom of the bag, they’ve got Hurley, and O’Neill, and all the big brands where they’re making their money, and you’re just this little thing to maybe give them a few extra bucks for gas money or food, especially a sunscreen at the time. And then slowly, it just blew up.

Ransom: You mentioned the idea of basically finding good people, people who have this magic, and leveraging those people and that expertise, in a way, throughout your career.

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: How do you do that? How do you know somebody’s magical? How do you create that magic together?

Tom Rinks: Well, the first part, how do I see it?

Ransom: Mm-hmm.

Tom Rinks: I don’t know. I just trust my instincts, kind of like Rick Rubin’s great book, and when he talks about he just has a aesthetic and an ear that other people also really like. You know what I mean? So he just trusts if he likes it, there’s a lot of people that are going to like it, and that’s proven true. And I guess through my career, it’s the same way. I really trust my instincts. If I think somebody’s cool or authentic, and cool doesn’t mean surfer, just in their category, if they’re unique or super driven, I really trust my instincts on that. And so when I see them, I just don’t hesitate, just like Joe, chasing them out to the parking lot, or any of them.

One of my favorite quotes that I look at all the time is, “Sometimes there are no second chances. Sometimes there is no next time, there’s no timeouts. Sometimes it’s now or never.” As a kid, I had some points in my life where I didn’t move, and that was my only chance to move, and I really regretted it. So if I see something I really like, I go after it.

Ransom: Yeah, I think that’s true. You can’t second-guess yourself.

Tom Rinks: No.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Can we stop here for a moment?

Tom Rinks: [inaudible 00:24:18].

Lagorio-Chafkin: I want to explore a little more deeply that comment that Tom made about putting the pieces together and finding authentic people to work with.

Ransom: Yeah, so you could hear from his answer, he’s all about trusting his instincts, and not hesitating, and finding these people, and realizing that this person or this audience or this whoever he’s working with has this stuff, has the magic. And then from there, it’s no second chances, there’s no re-dos. There’s just go.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Yeah, these sound like lyrics to an an old rock and roll song. It’s just go. No second chances. But anyway, it’s interesting. I mean, he’s kind of remained behind the scenes so much and let others represent the brand, even though he’s played such a major role behind the redesigning of these-

Ransom: Well, he’ll be the first person to tell you that he is, he himself is not cool, which I totally admire. You know? He knows he’s not cool, even though probably he is. But in the end, he finds the cool person or he finds the magic, and that’s how he’s been able to cultivate such a branding career.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Yeah. Yeah, it seemed like with Sun Bum though, he did have more of a personal stake.

Ransom: Well, he was very interested in surfing. So he was a surfer in Michigan. He grew up surfing. I didn’t know that one surfs in Michigan.

Lagorio-Chafkin: There are big sand dunes in Michigan.

Ransom: Well, you learn something new every day.

Lagorio-Chafkin: It’s really, really cool. Yeah.

Ransom: Yeah, yeah. So surfing was a big deal in Michigan. And then from there, obviously there’s surfer culture everywhere. There’s in Florida, obviously he went there and found some folks in Cocoa Beach and just made the magic happen. But of course, surfers in California, surfers in North Carolina, surfers on Long Island, there’s definitely surfing culture.

And what I think he did really successfully is just find that group of people that were leading-edge and that really loved the product in a way that spoke volumes.

Lagorio-Chafkin: Yeah, but he did eventually let it go. Right?

Ransom: That’s true. He eventually did sell the company in 2019, but we’ll get into that after the break.

So obviously, Sun Bum worked out pretty famously. The company was acquired by SC Johnson in 2019.

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: What happened to the business? What did you do after it was acquired?

Tom Rinks: I helped put a brand book together for them, a style guide, because they were so great at basically promising, out of all the big companies that were looking to buy us, they were the ones that were like, “We’ll take care of it.” You know, they’re family-owned, so they weren’t worried about short-term, they were worried about long-term brands. They were going to keep our crew going the way it was going. And I know people promise that, but they’ve really lived up to that, kept all the crew, grown it, kept the core group of surfers and beach people and added to it, and it’s just become a really great company.

So I just put a brand guide together for them for a year and a half so that they would know how to carry it because it’s my baby and some of my babies have been ruined after they sell, and then I don’t even want to talk about them anymore.

Ransom: Aw!

Tom Rinks: But they were really beautiful at the time, and then somebody buys them and then wrecks them because they don’t really-

Ransom: Yeah, you want to make sure there’s a good steward.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, they don’t understand what’s behind the public’s interest in the company.

Ransom: I mean, that’s happened a lot, like Honest Tea was a good example of a company that was acquired by Coca-Cola, and then they ended up closing it a few short years later, so it definitely happens and it’s sad.

Tom Rinks: Yeah. So I did that for 18 months and then I moved on because I was too big there too, a little bit, because I was the founder still standing around the leader, and there was new leadership. There was starting to be some grumblings of, “Tom wouldn’t do it this way. Did you ask Tom?” It’s like, “I don’t need to ask Tom. I’m the boss.”

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: So it was time for me to go. I knew it was time for me to go.

Ransom: So after that, did you go back into the parking lot and stare out at the abyss again?

Tom Rinks: No, I went to my house and stared out at the water, relaxed a little bit, started writing a book, which is about some of my experiences, and thought that would be cool, but then I met somebody and a group of people that it was like, “Oh crap, I got to do this now,” but yeah.

Ransom: Yeah, so let’s talk about what you’re doing now, Made By Dentists.

Tom Rinks: Yeah. So everybody asked me that, like, “Toothpaste, really? Oral care, you went into oral care?”

Ransom: Well, I mean, sunscreen, oral care. I mean, it’s not that shocking.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, I mean, sunscreen wasn’t cool when we got there. Now sunscreen is pretty cool.

Ransom: Yeah. So you’re making toothpaste cool?

Tom Rinks: Oh, I think cool is probably… Yeah, I think so. Making it accessible, breaking down some of the barriers, like maybe I did in spirituality, maybe I did in some of the other brands that I’ve created is breaking that down so people that don’t normally want to talk about it will talk about it.

One of my old Sun Bum reps put me down as a reference for this oral care company that was looking to open up in America, and she got the job and then they asked me to be on the board, and I was like, “Sure, four meetings a year, that’s fine. Huh, I can do that for a tiny, tiny little piece,” or whatever. And then I met them, and then I met the two sisters, and it was like, it was-

Ransom: So the sisters who are dentists?

Tom Rinks: Yeah, sisters who are dentists. And then I met them and heard what they were wanting to do and just saw the magic again. You know?

Ransom: Mm-hmm.

Tom Rinks: And if you find, you were talking about magic, if you find people with magic, they bring people with magic. So when you hire a magical person, then they attract more magical people, and that’s kind of the game. That’s how you do it.

Ransom: So what is this? I mean, let’s try to define the magic here for a second. Is it charisma? Is it the fact that they can comfortably speak in front of a room full of people that they don’t know? How do you determine that?

Tom Rinks: Yeah, it is likeability, it’s vulnerability. It’s the things that I think people want in, I won’t say most brands, but what they want in people. So I think it’s being vulnerable, it’s being humble, being confident, being kind and super driven. It takes a lot to be an entrepreneur. It takes a lot to take on big companies. I know from Taco Bell and sunscreen and some of the stuff that the big companies were doing to try to keep us away as we got popular, and so I knew what it took, I knew the energy that it took and the drive and the never-quit attitude.

So you’ve really got to be driven, on top of the being kind and humble and super smart and super talented, and that combination in people, if you can do that for a brand, I think that’s the magic. It’s being the best, but being humble about it and still be really vulnerable. But it’s also I like them, you know what I mean?

Ransom: Oh, yeah.

Tom Rinks: And I don’t like too many people, I hate to say that, but everybody who knows me is like, “Yeah, you don’t have too many friends and you don’t like everybody,” even though, I don’t know, that’s a horrible thing to-

Ransom: Present company excluded, I’m sure.

Tom Rinks: … horrible thing to say about myself.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: But so if I really am engaged with somebody and what they’re doing and they catch my attention, and I want to spend time with them and want to keep listening, and they’re teaching me something that I don’t know, the pastor guy was telling me stuff that I didn’t know, and I’ve been in church my whole…

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:32:04]

Tom Rinks: The pastor guy was telling me stuff that I didn’t know, and I’d been in church my whole life.

Ransom: Well, you weren’t listening.

Tom Rinks: I was. That’s true. But the same goes all the way across. And Joe brought stuff that I’d never seen before, and Renee was telling me stuff about design and how you do these mashups and all this stuff together, and was just like, okay, okay. I can learn something and if I can learn something, I could help get that message out to other people. So Lisa and Vanessa Creaven were the women, and they had a practice that, a really successful practice, and they sold it to take on the industry of oral care. I was like, you got to be kidding. So I really liked that too because going after, I would’ve wanted to go after Coca-Cola or Pepsi, try to take Pepsi, like something, a big challenge.

Ransom: Right.

Tom Rinks: And oral care was a really big challenge, and they really had the magic.

Ransom: That’s great. Also, just I get the impression that you’ve had success with bringing this outsider energy to anything you do, frankly. It’s subculture, it’s counterculture. It’s like we’re going to topple the big dudes and we’re going to win. And kind of finding other people that have that energy too and that kind of want the same things.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, exactly. And I think living in Michigan for so long, I was raised in Southern California, but I spent 30 years in Michigan and flying to, I mean, we designed the Rock & Republic flagship store on Robertson in Beverly Hills, and we had no business, but because we were coming at it from a different place, and I think all of the brands that I’ve done, I don’t really know anything about it or don’t really have any business doing it, but that has been a benefit for me because I’m not in the trade magazines, seeing what’s popular in that industry. So I’m not following what everybody else is doing. I’m bringing surf into religion, or I’m bringing streetwear into sunscreen. I’m bringing different genres in that most people that just do one thing their whole life. So we did an algorithm for Joe Ritchie that sold to SunGard for Wall Street, which is crazy that we would do something like that, but we bring something,-

Ransom: I don’t even understand that.

Tom Rinks: But we bring something fresh to it from the culture that’s not in the culture that the brand is in currently.

Ransom: Okay. So the algorithm was something outside of Wall Street?

Tom Rinks: Yeah. It was on Wall Street. It was Fox River Execution systems. Joe Ritchie, he was the guy, he died about six months ago. He’s the guy that invented the hand signals in the pit.

Ransom: Oh, no way. Oh, wow.

Tom Rinks: And so he came up with an algorithm that would save you like pennies because he was closer, but the people that would, closer to Wall Street. So the button just got pushed a little bit faster. So would save you a penny here and there, but a penny and people are investing billions of dollars was a lot, was millions and million, tens of millions of dollars, so. But he had no brand for it. So he asked Renee and I to help him do that. So we went down to Chicago, put a brand together for it, took it to a trade show on Wall Street, and maybe it was at Javits or I don’t know, remember where it was, and we sold it for him.

Ransom: Wow.

Tom Rinks: So yeah, it was called the Fox, but the look and feel of everything compared to what was out there, it was just a sexy, cool brand in that space. And so people actually wanted it. They wanted to own it. That’s part of the magic,-

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: Was making them want to buy what you have.

Ransom: How do you know what somebody else wants or needs? I mean, you kind of talked about this back in the furniture store where somebody walks in, they’re obviously looking at a leather couch. You have an inkling that they need a leather couch or a couch.

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: So how do you know that they want a really durable couch or what are the things that, like how do you know what somebody wants? Like dental toothpaste, like how do you know that somebody wants toothpaste that doesn’t have toxins in it, for instance, or plastics or whatever it is, whatever it ends up being, like how do you know what the consumer wants?

Tom Rinks: I just studying it a little bit and thinking about myself and why I would do it.

Ransom: Yeah, what’s your process?

Tom Rinks: My process is watching some of it. When we did cosmetics, standing in Neiman Marcus for hours and hours, just watching people’s eyes, what they looked at, what they touched, how far away they stood from the counter, and then just what they were leaning towards, what they were wearing, what their purse was, all the little intricacies of studying that particular customer. Some come really easy, some come really hard. The tequila was easy. That was, if you’re ordering straight tequila, it was really expensive. I think it was 120 a bottle, up to $800 a bottle.

So you’re just sipping it. You’re just ordering. You’re not putting it in a margarita. So anybody that’s ordering tequila straight or whiskey, you’re trying to be hard. You’re trying to be tough. I used to drink strawberry margaritas when I was younger and everybody used to say, “You need an umbrella for that, Tom?” And so you kind of like, oh yeah, this is girly drink [inaudible 00:37:11]. So all the way to the other end, I actually drink tequila now. I’m not trying to be tough, but I got a great taste for it by doing the business.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: But that’s what they wanted. So you make a tough brand, you make a skull and crossbones.

Ransom: But do you create the customer archetype, for instance? Do you have a target customer in your mind when you’re developing a brand?

Tom Rinks: I just don’t have a demographic as much as a psychographic, right, a mentality of what they want, how they feel, what their mindset is. They could be a hippie at 80 or a hippie at 17, so.

Ransom: Can you be a hippie at 80? I love that.

Tom Rinks: I bet.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: I’ll bet you can.

Ransom: Well, speaking of sort of surf culture and being hippies or whatever, I did notice that the packaging on Made By Dentist has like the sort of the Vans, like black and white checkered on the sides. Maybe it’s not Vans in particular, but I wondered, are you trying to capture the similar kind of ethos in the branding? Are you trying to capture the Sun Bum counterculture into Made By Dentists?

Tom Rinks: Oh, that’s a good question. Target asked us to do, we were doing only adult at the time for Target, and they bought our adult line, but then they asked if we could try something in kids because they were not doing super well in kids, and they wanted us to take a crack at it. Again, it’s always a mashup of aesthetics that I pulled together or Renee and I used to pull together. I haven’t worked with him since Sun Bum, but me and another designer pull together and for this kid’s line, looking at it all, it was all Disney, and Star Wars, and Paw Patrol, and My Little Pony, and there was just nothing that I would’ve gotten necessarily for my kid, right, who skates or surfs or all of that. So yeah, pulling from, again, from the surf world over into toothpaste sounds really weird. Pulling in from the skate world, there was a brand called Toy Machine that I’ve always loved and been a fan of, and they have really sketchy children’s, almost art, but it’s become cool. I mean, it was on a skate deck. It’s cool no matter what you’re,-

Ransom: It’s like Kidrobot, right?

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: So pulling all that together and putting it in. So I knew I would get the people who liked that.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: They would recognize it. So yeah. I mean obviously the checkerboard isn’t owned by Vans, but a little hit of that just, you may not know why you’re attracted to this brand, but you’re attracted to it because you recognize that pattern or you recognize that style of art and you know your kid’s going to like that, so. And it’s trying to get the cool kids first and the cool kids generally, I don’t want to say,-

Ransom: Yeah, this is diffusion of innovation, right? So,-

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: This is not just cool kids, but the early adopters.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, exactly. The early adapters, and that’s usually the people that have a little bit more money and are willing to take those risks. So yeah, it’s hard to do that at Target, which is why they’re being super cool with us to give us time. Because generally you got to do that before you go to the masses and the diffusion of innovation, you got to get over that tipping point as Gladwell says, before you can get the masses. So to launch a brand at Target, it’s really, really difficult.

Ransom: Right. Right. I wanted to ask you, how did you end up launching the brand at Target? I mean, this is like an upstart.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, it’s really something you really shouldn’t not normally do, but surf shops had, we were in 8,000 surf shops, so you can kind of learn and make mistakes as you kind of learn what people want and don’t want at a smaller scale. And then by the time you get to mass retail, you’re ready. You’re not going to have these major recalls or any problems. Your brand is set. Tequila, you have restaurants. You could just sell one restaurant at a time and you’re learning. And if the bottles are breaking, oh, we got to fix that before we go to the next step. But if you go straight to these huge mass people you have to learn right there, and being an entrepreneur, starting your own companies, you got to be really flexible and change really fast, change your mind really fast.

Ransom: Right.

Tom Rinks: And be able to be quick about it. So launching at Target was really tough, but there wasn’t really any other little boutiques that you could go into.

Ransom: I guess there used to be corner pharmacies and used to be a lot more independently owned and not so much anymore.

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: And my old buyer from Sun Bum, who was the suncare buyer, just so happened to have moved into oral care. So he was the oral care buyer, so he,-

Ransom: Good timing.

Tom Rinks: Yeah. So he really trusted me to be able to do it. So we did it and it’s just crushing it. And kids is a little bit easier to break into because you’re buying it for your kid and what do you think they would like? Almost like a toy as opposed to adult, something that they’re really used to buying all the time.

Ransom: Right. Right. So obviously you’re selling to a mass market chain, you make a mistake, mistakes can be bigger. What was the mistake you made Made By Dentists?

Tom Rinks: Whew. There was a lot.

Ransom: Yeah. Or name one.

Tom Rinks: There is in every brand. Okay. I thought it would be really cool. Growing up, I love Creepy Crawlers, and I think it was one of Mattel’s biggest male toys ever of all time, was Creepy Crawlers. You had a little metal plate. It was like Easy Bake Oven for boys almost. But you put this goo,-

Ransom: Oh, I know what you’re talking about.

Tom Rinks: In and it bakes them and you have these little rubber worms or spiders.

Ransom: Yeah, and they squirm, right?

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: Yeah. So I loved that and I saw that part of it, and I drew the art kind of, I don’t want to keep saying toy machine style, but just like graffiti a little bit, like a kid might draw it. And then I thought yeah, we should have really wild flavors because everybody, all the big companies that were selling at Target had strawberry, they all had strawberry, they all had watermelon or bubble gum. And I thought, okay, one of the characters we had was, we had an alien, a shark, and a monster. So the flavor was monster slime and on the monster, the shark was eyeball juice and the alien was alien blood.

Ransom: Oh, wow.

Tom Rinks: And everybody’s like, we should put the flavor. Some of our moms want to know. No, no way. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to just leave it like this. They’re not going to know what the flavor is. And we ended up picking caramel for the purple alien, which everybody thought was probably going to taste like grape. And we love the taste and it’s really a great taste, but just not on toothpaste. So everybody hated it.

Ransom: Oh, no.

Tom Rinks: So we thought we were going to do, okay, take the alien blood challenge. Do you love it? Can you take it? Are you a strawberry kid? Are you alien blood? I was trying to be really edgy and we went too far and,-

Ransom: Oh, no.

Tom Rinks: Everybody hated it.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: And so we had to discontinue it. We didn’t discontinue, we just had to change the flavor.

Ransom: Okay.

Tom Rinks: And then we started putting the flavor name in little parentheses underneath it because we were just too smart for our own good thinking we could do that at a mass scale like that.

Ransom: So now it’s like eyeball juice watermelon.

Tom Rinks: Watermelon. Exactly.

Ransom: In parentheses.

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: I get it. That’s funny. And what’s up with the Guinea pigs?

Tom Rinks: The Guinea pigs. Oh my God. Yeah, we do this thing called Save The Guinea Pigs, and we’re going to have a big Save The Guinea Pig week or month coming up in June, I think is,-

Ransom: Is that save the Guinea pig month?

Tom Rinks: It is. It’s when National Guinea Pig Day or something is. And that was one of the things that I learned from Lisa and Vanessa, was all the big guys besides having microplastics and all these other elements that they shouldn’t have in their toothpaste, a lot of them, which are banned in Europe and dyes and artificial dyes, artificial flavors and stuff like that, they also aren’t recyclable. And they all test on animals still. And the Guinea pig when it comes to toothpaste is the one they want. That’s the one that’s most used on toothpaste, happens to be Guinea pig. So we started a Save The Guinea Pig campaign. We’re going to do some really wild stuff to try to bring attention to that and try to get the big guys to maybe make some changes. So yeah, it is about that. Lisa and Vanessa, the dentists who started this, right, so they’re authentic. They’re my surfers. They’re the authority. But everybody hates dentists. I don’t want to say hates, but,-

Ransom: I don’t know. I mean,-

Tom Rinks: I mean, most people,-

Ransom: I trust dentists.

Tom Rinks: I know, but most people don’t like going to the dentist.

Ransom: True.

Tom Rinks: If you ask most people, that’s the least favorite thing they want to do. And because they cause pain, they had childhood trauma or it’s expensive or whatever it is. And I think dentists are one of the top, if not top suicidal occupations,-

Ransom: Oh, Jesus.

Tom Rinks: In the world. It’s because of nobody really likes them and they just cause pain all day.

Ransom: Poor dentists. Hug your dentists, everyone.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, hug your dentists. So they were going to try to take on the industry like that. I thought, okay, I think I can bring a voice to it and give them a voice that would be relatable to people like me. And they just, again, I thought I knew everything about toothpaste and I knew nothing about toothpaste or how to brush or what I should be doing. And it’s just like, you got to be kidding me.

Ransom: Right. And you think if, I don’t know,-

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: Most people probably don’t know.

Tom Rinks: Yeah. I’m 62, how come nobody told me that I’m not supposed to rinse after brushing?

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: Like what? I always rinse after brushing. How are you not supposed to rinse after brushing? You got a mouth full of foam. What are you supposed to do? And that we’re just supposed to spit. No, you’re not even supposed to have foam in your mouth because foam is SLS and people are putting SLS in their mouth every day and swallowing it. Or your mouth is the most absorbent part of your body and everything goes through your bloodstream through there. And so they don’t want to put it on their heads and they don’t want it in these products. They don’t want parabens in any of these products, but they’re putting parabens in SLS and DEA and all these other products in their mouth every day.

Toothpaste is the only product that everybody uses every day in America, everybody every day. Everybody doesn’t drink milk. Everybody doesn’t drink bottled water. Everybody, hate to say it, everybody doesn’t go to the bathroom every day. So toilet paper, no. What other product is everybody in every house using every day? And that’s why it’s such a huge industry that’s now been kind of monopolized by these guys who don’t change and who won’t change because their investors. It’ll cost them more money to put better ingredients in,-

Ransom: But they also maintain this choke hold on the toothpaste aisle for instance. They’re everywhere.

Tom Rinks: It is a choke hold.

Ransom: Yeah.

Tom Rinks: And in every aisle that I’ve ever been into in big retail stores, there’s mandatory, you got to recycled this, you can’t have this ingredient, you can’t do that. You have to guarantee you’re going to move towards this. And in the oral care aisle, you just can’t do it because the power is in the big three and they decide what they’re going to do and they’re so huge that they don’t have to…

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]

Tom Rinks: What they’re going to do. And they’re so huge, that they don’t have to change, because you’re not going to, not carry them, because they have to carry. Crest, they have to carry Colgate, they have to carry Sensodyne. So not to name names, but they have to, so they don’t have to change. And like I say, there’s such a battle of cost. If they stopped doing what they were doing overseas, if they had to make recyclable packaging, if they had to use a better filler than the cheap fillers, and the stuff you can’t even use in Europe, here. Their cost would go too high and they would lose money, and then that’s all about that for them. So it is a huge thing. We’re just really taking on-

Ransom: And that’s what you saw when Lisa and Vanessa came to you, it was like, “Wow, there’s a huge amount of potentially white space here.”

Tom Rinks: Yeah.

Ransom: Or opportunity to potentially take market share. Or maybe you thought, this is batshit and I shouldn’t do it, because taking on the giants could be pretty hard.

Tom Rinks: Yeah, but I have with Taco Bell, we-

Ransom: That’s true.

Tom Rinks: … went against them. And even the tequilas, or any of that, you’re always going after somebody bigger. And the good news is, nobody roots for Goliath. So I like that.

Ransom: So as we wrap up, what would be one piece of advice you would give fellow entrepreneurs? It could be branding advice, it could be just generally advice that you would give entrepreneurs starting up a company, or it could be something that maybe you heard along the way that helped you.

Tom Rinks: Okay, I just learned this along the way. Is to put all of your money into the product, all of your money into the point of sale, how you look on the shelf. Don’t spend your money on marketing or any of that stuff, because ultimately if you have a great product, it’s going to be great. And it’s going to work, ultimately. I could make the coolest restaurant from the outside and has an amazing logo, and amazing name, and amazing servers, and it’s just the greatest mood of all time, right? Great music playing. It’s got a great vibe, but if the food sucks, I’m not going back. And it’s not going to work. So same thing with brands. You work so hard on the looks and the feels and all that, but every product that I’ve ever done, the product itself is really, really, really great. And that is the focal point. If it’s not great, it’s just not going to work.

And if it is great, you can have a really bad brand, could have a really bad logo, and it’s still going to work. So the product has to be there, and you’ll never have enough money to get people’s eyes on anything to, “I remember seeing that in that magazine or in that ad or whatever.” You’re never going to get that. You’re going to be right there at the point of sale. Here’s my choices, which one do I want? And if you can get them at the point of sale, if you’ve got a great packaging, if you’ve got a great product when they get it home, they’ll tell their friends, and they’ll do all the work for you. I would just not waste your money too much on marketing.

Ransom: Sweet. That’s great advice. Tom, thank you so much for your time today.

Tom Rinks: You’re welcome. Thank you. A super pleasure to be here.

Ransom: So after our chat, it was Tom’s last point that really resonated with me. For a man that has made his career in marketing, commercials and branding, it is a little surprising for him to say, “Put all of your money in product.” But if you think about it, he’s 100% right. If Tom works in collaboration with a company, it is because he believes in the product, and the people the product represents, like Sunba. In an era like the one we’re in, when marketing is costly and the channels are noisy, you really can’t beat word of mouth, and the drum beat of repeat customers. So before you create an Instagram page for a clothing line, or a TikTok video from a restaurant with the hottest grilled cheese poles, make sure the quality of your product is great so customers keep coming back.

That’s all for this episode of From the Ground Up. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast platform of choice. Also, if you like this episode or have topics you’d like to hear about, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or reach out to us on Inc.’s social channels on LinkedIn, Blue Sky or Instagram. From the Ground Up is produced by Mariam Kiparoidze and Avery Miles. Editing by Blake Odom. Mixed and sound designed by Nicholas Torres. Our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.