Vacation®

Vacation® is the sunscreen company from the makers of Poolsuite FM, built as if summer 1997 never ended. I was the first full-time hire, six months before launch, when the company was still a pitch deck. I worked one on one with co-founder Lach Hall: he handed me open briefs, I did the research and the concepting, we refined together, and outside designers and agencies executed. I wrote the pricing strategy, architected the site and managed it, designed and coded the wholesale site solo, ran email and SMS end to end, art directed the launch shoot, built the influencer program as a system, and grew the CRM to tens of thousands of "honorary employees." The fake job titles campaign was Lach's idea and the titles were mine: I wrote the vocabulary and the grammar in Tracery, one slot for rank, another for domain, ran every combination and we spiderwebbed off what hit, down to roughly 1,500. I designed the card they printed on. 12,000+ claimed in its first five days. Vogue called it "debatably the most exciting sunscreen to hit the market since Anthelios."

I left in June 2022. The roadmap kept shipping: Baby Oil took Allure Best of Beauty in 2023 and again in 2024, Orange Gelée took it in 2025, After Sun Gel took Esquire's Best After-Sun, Classic Spray took Byrdie's Best Sunscreen. Vacation® reported about $40M in 2024, projects $80M for 2025, climbed from No. 24 to No. 13 in US sunscreen, and raised $70M from VMG Partners at a $210M valuation in March 2026.

ROLE creative direction, art direction, copy, product design, ecomm and lifecycle YEARS 2021 - 2022 AWARDS gq, esquire, vogue, refinery29, shape, gear patrol, popsugar

$0 -> 8 FIGURES IN 18 MONTHS 14 AWARDS IN YEAR ONE 300+ PRESS MENTIONS 29M EARNED IMPRESSIONS NOW $210M VALUATION

$ open vacation.inc # the live site $ open poolsuite.net # the mothership