Vacation built its identity around a feeling most brands would never think to chase.

The sunscreen category spent thirty years making itself feel necessary. From the moment the dangers of UV exposure became widely understood in the early 1990s every major brand in the space migrated toward clinical language, medical authority and SPF numbers as the primary signal of value.

The aesthetic followed the argument too. White packaging, dermatologist endorsements and fear dressed up as responsibility. The fun that had characterised beach culture through the 1960s, 70s and 80s was designed out of the category entirely, on the assumption that consumers needed to be frightened into wearing the product.

Vacation looked at that history and drew a different conclusion. The clinicalisation of sunscreen was an industry decision, not a consumer one. People were already convinced. What nobody had thought to do was make them glad about it.

Lach Hall and Dakota Green had been working on the concept of a leisure-enhancing sunscreen for years before the brand existed, partly shaped by Hall's Australian upbringing and the urgency around sun protection it instilled, partly by a more fundamental observation: sunscreen is used exclusively in the best moments of people's lives and had been made to feel like a chore.

When Hall and Green connected with Marty Bell through a founder's Slack group in late 2019, the missing piece arrived. Bell had spent years building Poolsuite, an internet radio station and community constructed entirely around a very specific feeling: the permanent 1980s summer. Golden hour and the aesthetic of a decade rendered in perpetual afternoon light, an audience that had gathered around a mood before any product existed to accompany it. The two projects belonged together in a way that required almost no argument. 

Sunscreen is the most occasion-specific, most sensorial product imaginable, and it smells of summer before you've opened the bottle, which meant it was already inside the world Vacation wanted to build.

What the three founders did next is the part most brand builders would have handled differently. Before there was a product, there was a world, and the world was specific enough to tell them exactly what it needed.

The fictional corporation that Hall, Green, and Bell constructed is not a campaign. Its the operating logic of the entire brand.

Vacation Inc. presents itself as a company that has existed since the 1980s. The social media doesn't post product shots or influencer endorsements. It posts dispatches from inside the corporation, naming employees, publishing internal memos and documenting events at the imaginary Club Wyndman with the same deadpan sincerity as actual company communications. 

Bell has described the brand world as "The Office crossed with Jimmy Buffett's brand world," which is precise in a way that most brand descriptions aren't. It's a workplace comedy set inside a resort that exists only in the 1980s imagination, and every piece of content the brand produces is a scene from that world rather than a message about a product.

The pitch deck the founders produced to raise their initial funding was 42 pages long, designed to look as though it had been Xeroxed in 1986, complete with photographs of pool parties and an instruction at the close to fax a cheque to "1-800-Invest-Now." It attracted serious investors and was described by Roth Martin, co-founder of Rothy's, as "one of the most captivating pitch decks" he had ever seen. The world they had built was already doing commercial work before a single unit had been manufactured.

Every product Vacation has launched is designed to feel as though it was retrieved from the fictional corporation's archive rather than developed by a contemporary beauty brand.

The Classic Lotion SPF 30, developed with board-certified dermatologist Dr Elizabeth Hale and scented by fragrance house Arquiste, who have worked with Clinique and Tom Ford, carries notes of coconut, banana, pool water, pool toy, and swimsuit Lycra. Vacation calls it "the world's best-smelling sunscreen." The claim is a joke constructed around an exceptional product, which is exactly how the best jokes work.

The Classic Whip SPF 30 comes in a can designed to look like a whipped cream dispenser. The Chardonnay Oil is packaged like a wine bottle. The Orange Gelée, a revival of the cult Bain de Soleil product discontinued in 2019, was developed through what Vacation called the Orange Gelée Revival Project, a process documented publicly through newsletters and blog posts that built a waitlist of over 16,000 people before the product launched. None of these products describe themselves through their formulas. They perform the world they belong to, and the world is what makes people want to own them.

Vacation generated its initial wave of attention without a single dollar of paid media. It’s stocked not just at beauty retailers but at Kith, The Standard, and Ace Hotel Miami, cultural destinations where the brand belongs as naturally as sunscreen belongs at the pool.

No competitor has successfully replicated what Vacation has built and the reason is structural rather than creative. A brand can study the packaging aesthetic, reverse-engineer the retro colour palette, and hire a copywriter who understands deadpan humour. What they can't manufacture is a fictional corporation with its own thirty-year history, its own named employees, its own internal culture and its own accumulated lore. The world is the moat, and the moat deepens with every piece of content the brand publishes.

Lach Hall has observed that the best brands in the world are true personifications of their founders. Vacation is the most complete example of that principle the beauty industry has produced. Vacation began as a world three people wanted to live in, and the remarkable thing is that everyone else did too.

The category spent thirty years building an argument while Vacation built a world, and the world turned out to be more persuasive.

Shot of the good stuff.