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 Health & Beauty | February 2005 
To Tan or Not To Tan in PV? part 2
Bob Cohen - PVNN
With all the health concerns versus personal vanity, what is one to do when visiting Puerto Vallarta and spending time in our sunny paradise?
 These guys, who will temporarily be unnamed, decided that they could better enjoy the spring break if they made a few extra bucks, and decided to mix up a batch of oils in their motel bathtub, put it in glass bottles and peddled it on the beaches. They not only met girls, but earned some money to wine them and dine them. They did have the insight however, at a young age to realize that this could be a full time business. They stayed together for a short time and each of the three developed their own ideas on how to market the products and started their own small companies. A fourth guy tagged on and went into the business himself as well.
Thus, four new tanning products began to hit the market, but only in the Daytona Beach area at the time. This brings up quite an interesting point; Daytona Beach became the home of, and still is the home of a majority of the tanning products in the world. If you look at the name of the product you are using, it could have the name Hawaiian, Australian, Caribbean or some other tropical location. Turn the bottle around and more often than not you will find that it is made in Daytona Beach or somewhere in central Florida. Some people made their own; others hired chemists and opened manufacturing plants. The method of distribution and sales strategies they employed are the interesting part.
The man that I eventually starting working for had quite a novel idea and since many of our readers have obviously traveled to sun drenched resorts, might have experienced the method we developed and utilized. I came on board a few years later when the products reached Miami Beach. I graduated college with a degree in accounting and began to work in the business field, which I totally found tedious and boring, left my job and decided to ponder about the rest of my life on the beach one day. This guy my age approached me trying to sell me suntan lotion, and laughingly told him I never used it and never would, due to my olive completion. He finally took no for an answer and moved on to his next potential victims as I watched him sell this stuff to others. Calling him back, I asked him what this was all about and the next day I was hired as a suntan lotion salesman/lifeguard. This went over like a lead balloon when I told my Dad, a Jewish father who believed that I was tossing away my college education to play in the sun. Well, he was right.
There was a solid business and marketing strategy behind selling this “snake oil”, as it is so often put. We approached the owners or managers of small hotels and offered to run their pool decks at no cost to them, the only provision was that we had exclusive rights to sell our products at the hotel. In those days, people came up to the pool desk to sign in for their lounge chairs and towels and that’s when we “pitched them” on our products; how superior they were and we were how to point out the flaws in other products. This is how it started in Daytona and soon spread throughout the state of Florida. Not only did we attempt to sell them one bottle, but insisted they needed a “kit” of three different products, and those kits depended on their skin type and tone, as well as they type of tan they desired.
A normal kit was a lotion for all over ones body combined with a sunscreen for those sensitive, easy to burn areas. This gave one an even pink color all over, and the closer was the after sun care, and the introduction of the Aloe Vera lotion, magic with all its healing properties. The product line grew from two lotions, a sunscreen and two oils to seven lotions with various SPF factors, six oils with and without sunscreens and three Aloe Vera after tan lotions. Everyone started making money and didn’t need an education to do it. We worked strictly on commission and tips and generally spent it all on the beach style evening and late night activities.
The hotels were happy with us and wrote letters of recommendation for us in order for us to begin to solicit larger resorts. Contracts started getting signed and the savings to resorts went from $20,000 for a one man employee to over $300,000, when we began to sign with Hiltons, Sheratons and Hyatt’s with large occupancy rates and 15 person staffs. Successful sales mean competition is around the corner and one of the other men that started this new concept of tanning products decided to enter the same end of the market, and we began to negotiate contracts against each other. Of course we had to sweeten the pot in an attempt to outbid each other so we began to include $1 million insurance policies in the package and gave them back 10% of our sales.
All of a sudden, we were expanding to every resort town in the United States and began to invade Hawaii. This was a big business, capitalizing on people’s vanity. It was only two years before I was sent out to Las Vegas to start operations in “Sin City.” Our company wound up leasing pool decks from eight of the ten largest resorts and in Las Vegas alone our first year brought in close to $2 million in sales. A year later, I found myself the vice president of field operations and traveled almost each and every day to a different resort destination, to open new accounts and work with existing clients.
The object was to become so well known that there became a demand for us to open accounts in retail outlets. We found that due to the competitive pool business, almost all of our profits were paid out, or “off.” Retail was where the future was, and has been since the early 1980’s. Our concept became extinct, as we began to lose money and receive complaints for high pressure sales from guests. Our founder was smart enough to develop a mail order business and we put pins on a huge map in our Daytona Beach corporate office with each order. When an area had enough pins, we attacked the retail end and sold distributorships successfully. Ego, however kept him at the resorts and needing financing meant bringing in new investors. Corporate business meetings became wars, and eventually our corporation was forced into bankruptcy. Our annual sales topped $20 million and we still went belly up.
Not all companies faced the fate that we did, although many did. Two of the original four men became extremely successful, rich and famous.
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