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The other morning, excavating my inbox as I waited for my first vaccine dose to kick in, I found myself caught in a time slip. Poolside FM, the internet radio station and app, was open on my laptop, dishing up a rotation of synth-pop and summer disco. Early Windows-inspired icons set the scene, along with a backsplash in a shade of Zach Morris purple. In one corner, a grainy video feed cycled through a 1986 Moët & Chandon commercial, footage of swirling inner tubes at a New Jersey water park, and a highlight reel of BMX tricks attempted by a kid in pastel shorts. It was, for a moment, pure escapism. Or, as a fan commented recently in the App store: “Just What the World Needed During Quarantine.”
Poolside FM—first dreamed up by Marty Bell in 2014 as a feel-good stream on Soundcloud, evolving into a website with a splashy relaunch in 2019—has always been about slipping reality. “I was living in my parents’ house in the Highlands of Scotland: very gray, pissing rain every day,” he said over Zoom, describing the genesis. For those early mixes, he reeled in selections like an intuitive fisherman, casting for an emotional hook; the aesthetics paid homage to beach movies from the ’80s—a time when, on camera at least, life seemed deliciously carefree. As the pandemic spread, Poolside FM’s listener base swelled, with mash notes pouring in via email and DM. But with normal life edging closer and closer, it’s not a virtual escape we’re craving. It’s an escape from the virtual. We need a vacation.
That just happens to be the next track on Poolside’s playlist: a nostalgia-laced sunscreen line called Vacation by Poolside FM. Launching by pre-order today, with a full rollout in June, the brand is a collaboration between Bell and sunscreen entrepreneurs Lach Hall and Dakota Green. The mission, as their vintage waterskiing ads make clear, is to “really make sunscreen far more than just a chore—something that can actually enhance leisure,” Hall said.
At this point in the conversation, the two men—Bell with his brogue, Hall speaking in an Australian twang—explained how they paired up: in a Slack community appropriately called Jacuzzi Club. Bell, who launched Tens eyewear with Richard Branson before cofounding the home-finance startup Nude, created the Slack group for fellow brand business people—more for a fizzy hot-tub exchange of ideas than anything stuffy. “I posted in there, saying, ‘What the hell can I do with Poolside FM? It’s getting really big; I don’t have time to work on it.’” Hall chimed in with his idea, already in the midst of SPF development. A few weeks later, in late 2019, Bell was on a flight to New York to hatch out their business plan.
What they came up with defied all the rules about wooing investors. Never mind the succinct proposal that can override short attention spans. The team drafted a 42-page pitch “novella,” Bell joked. Under the auspices of the “Poolside FM Institute of Leisure Opportunities,” the pitch is dressed in a 1980s corporate suit, down to the royal blue cover and stylized palm tree logo. Inside, they paint a sunny vision of opportunity in the SPF landscape—moving forward by looking back—which apparently proved hard to resist. VCs like Brand Foundry Ventures and BFG Partners signed on; so did angel investors like Kat Cole and Trevor McFedries (the CEO of Brud, which oversees Lil Miquela). “What initially drew me to the Poolside FM concept was this incredibly rich brand world and community which they have created, and once I heard they were expanding into the sunscreen business it just instantly clicked for me as an investor,” Maisie Williams, another investor, wrote by email. “The world they’re building around the Vacation products has that same feeling of being a sort of escapist fantasy.”
If the hedonism of the early suntan brands is the spiritual lodestar, Vacation’s formulas are rooted in the present: modern, efficacious, and overseen by dermatologist Elizabeth Hale, M.D., a vice president of the Skin Cancer Foundation. The first launch is the SPF 30 Classic Lotion, the kind of iconic cream sunscreen that you imagine a summer lifeguard rubbing into his neighbor’s shoulders. The broad-spectrum protection comes from chemical actives (avobenzone to guard against UVA; homosalate, octocrylene, and octisalate for UVB)—a combination Hale deems to be “the best you can achieve in the U.S.” More importantly, it disappears into skin. “The effectiveness of sunscreen often comes back to whether the product was created in a way that makes people want to use it as directed,” she wrote by email, teasing a mineral formula to come. (Future launches will lean into leisure innovations, stretching the whimsy of the category.) “Anything that can make this conversation more fun and engaging is music to my ears!”
The QR code to Poolside FM on the backside of the tube makes speedy work of that. For another sensory hit, the team tapped Carlos Huber, of the niche fragrance brand Arquiste, and perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux to turn hyperbole into reality: concocting the “world’s best-smelling sunscreen.” Huber, raised by a sun-loving Mexican family, fused the team’s references with his own cache of memories. “The coconut ice cream in Acapulco and the piña coladas we drank while we played domino with cousins. The orange flower and monoi flower in French tanning oils my mom would use. The swimmies and inflatable pool toys of childhood, but also the scent of wet lycra and decidedly naughty references to warm, tan skin,” Huber said of the aromatic mood board for the scent. “Just because it’s attached to a functional product doesn’t mean it can’t be sexy and cheeky.”
For cofounder Hall, who grew up in Australia, where alarming skin-cancer rates sparked nationwide prevention efforts beginning in the 1980s, the fun-loving brand remains grounded in purpose. After all, the Slip-Slop-Slap campaign is seared into his brain: “Every kid will remember that, and policies at school like ‘No hat, no play’ and big tubes of sunscreen outside of the door of every classroom.” It’ll be interesting to see how Vacation rolls out its own PSA: enhancing leisure at music festivals and pool parties, all while performing the good service of public health. Hall is waiting for the day when the advanced SPF filters now available in Australia will clear the backlogged regulatory hurdles in the U.S. “The FDA here is massively behind, in terms of the best active ingredients for protection,” he said. But knowing this crowd, a 42-page congressional memo—illustrated with jet skis along Miami Beach—could help get the job done.
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