This Brand Whiz Shares How to Sell Boring Products That Nobody Likes Everything Tom Rinks touched turned to gold until he took on a brand launch at Target that fizzled. Then, he found a creepy doll on Ebay, and he saw a way forward.
By Liz Brody
This story appears in the March 2024 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
In 2021, when Tom Rinks was asked to rebrand an oral care company, he had a few thoughts: The name sucked, for one. The market looked impenetrable. And the product was boring as hell.
It was right up his alley.
Rinks is an unusual guy, with an even more unusual skill set. Intense and given to obsession, he studiously maintains an invisible profile online and wears his lucky Tupac socks to every important meeting. He's also developed a reputation as a brand savant — with a specialty in turning unexciting things into fun, cool merch.
His largest hit was Sun Bum, which he cofounded and sold for around $400 million. And he's credited with popularizing the chihuahua — the dog once just seen as an ugly, annoying rodent — by turning it into a countercultural clothing brand and inspiring the iconic Taco Bell campaign (although, it's complicated; we'll get to that).
All of this is to say, Rinks was a good match for Spotlight, the oral care company. Three dentists, including two sisters from Ireland, had poured their hearts and money into products with high-quality ingredients and recyclable tubes, all free from animal testing. It was doing well in the U.K. but not meeting their goals in the U.S. "We wanted to be a mass brand," says cofounder Lisa Creaven.
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Rinks agreed to help. To come up with the rebrand, he researched the market, which was dominated by Crest, Colgate, and Sensodyne, and stood in store aisles for months, scrutinizing shoppers and scavenging for clues. In Target, he watched people grab their favorite brand without even moving their eyes over the shelf. "Nobody's looking for a new toothpaste," he says. "It's like, you go get the Coca-Cola, you get the Hellmann's. You're not like, 'Hmm, I wonder if there's a cooler mayonnaise.'"
Thinking about why, he realized something: If customers did try new toothpaste, their families would probably complain — which meant that, with his new branding, he had to answer that objection. He needed a reason to switch.
This led him to the insight he was looking for: Great brands start on the inside. An athlete and track coach started Nike. Computer geeks started Apple. Bikers started Harley-Davidson. But Crest and Colgate came out of giant corporations. So Rinks renamed Spotlight for its founders: "Made By Dentists."
"If someone's partner goes, 'Why did you buy this toothpaste?' they can say, 'Because it's made by dentists — I thought it would work better!'"
He designed the packaging to feel like a prescription from a doctor, and the new look launched in March 2023.
Unfortunately, after all of that aisle stalking, early sales were disappointing. "I missed it," Rinks says.
He wasn't the type to sit around and hope things worked out, so he began ruminating on his past work, searching for what he'd done wrong. The first thing he realized was that the brand had no humor — the very skill that had launched his entire career.
He'd been 26 and working at a furniture store in Grand Rapids when one day, he stood on the shore of Lake Michigan and saw surfers. As a Southern California native, he couldn't believe his eyes. Surfers. On a lake? He went home and drew an old Castaways-style dude sitting on his longboard in the middle of the calm water.
He printed the cartoon on a shirt with the words "Waiting for the big one." Then he called Meijer, the Midwest supercenter chain, and pretended to be a surfwear rep. It got him a meeting. When Vivian Dryer, a buyer there, walked into the room, she found Rinks in a suit with a single shirt and some artwork to show. Even so, it struck her as incredibly fresh. "Let's do it," she said, and put in an order for 1,800 shirts. It was the beginning of a thriving apparel business.
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That taught him something valuable: Underwhelming things can be flipped into valuable ones, especially if you poke some fun at them. In 1994, he saw a similar opportunity. He'd been reading a magazine, and saw a photo of Madonna with a chihuahua. "At that time, it was all about big dogs and top dogs and No Fear brands," he says. "There was no Legally Blonde. No Paris Hilton with an accessory chihuahua. People hated them. But Madonna is now holding a chihuahua — a rat dog? I thought that's just in itself gonna make it cool."
Rinks partnered with cartoonist Joe Shields, who drew a raggedy cartoon dog character they called Psycho Chihuahua. When accompanied by captions like "Bite Me!" it became a new hit on T-shirts. From there, Rinks and Shields allege a direct line to the famous "Yo quiero Taco Bell" campaign that was out by early 1998. They filed a lawsuit over it. In court documents, a Taco Bell employee admitted that he saw the Psycho Chihuahua character at a trade show and asked Rinks to develop promotional ideas around it, which led to months of work together. But the actual chihuahua campaign came from the ad agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, which said it conceived the idea independently. After lots of legal back and forth, the case was settled in 2005.
Rinks doesn't love talking about it. But it taught him a lesson: "If you're trying to create brands," he says, "you really need to understand people's feelings." And people love a funny underdog.
That fed into the second major insight of Rinks' career: A company shouldn't just have character; it should be a character. "You're creating a person that other people like," he says. "Not a brand that people like."
This was the guiding principle behind Sun Bum. In 2010, Rinks and his business partner René Canetti had a branding agency, when a client asked: Could they create something new in the sunscreen aisle? It was a tough category. Nobody enjoys wearing sunscreen, and brand loyalty was scarce.
Like a novelist imagining his protagonist, Rinks drummed up a detailed persona for Sun Bum. It was Tommy Lee from Mötley Crüe — edgy, tatted, and bad-boy sexy — but this Tommy was also the best dad ever and volunteered at the soup kitchen. This Tommy had the cool of an idiot at the beach who might get tangled up in their boogie board cord and is unbothered by it all — the type to say, "Hey, come hang with us at the bonfire."
"He was what I want people to think a Sun Bum guy was like," says Rinks. "And so they go, 'OK, I like that guy. And if I like that guy, I like the brand.'"
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Of course, they couldn't actually use Tommy Lee from Mötley Crüe. So Rinks and Canetti created a mascot named Sonny: He was an ape wearing shades and exuding an amiable chill, who appeared in ads that said things like, "We don't care if you use ours. Just use sunscreen." The packaging was a "mash-up style"–of '60s surf culture, Japanese street art, and the wood grain of an Eames lounge chair — to bring everyone together at that metaphorical bonfire. "No one was doing anything fun and disruptive like this," says Lisa Motzko Hamilton, a merchandising exec at Ulta Beauty when Rinks brought the brand there.
Eric Carl, who was at Target for 13 years, agrees. He remembers taking meetings with Rinks back then, and being in awe at how large his thinking was. "Brand people think very transactionally," Carl says. But not Rinks. For example, Sun Bum expanded with a kids' line — "and Tom's there ready to create Nickelodeon shows around his Baby Bum characters," Carl recalls. "He's going on, out of left field. And the buyer's like, 'Wait, so which SKU is going to go on the shelf?'"
So that's what Rinks missed with Made By Dentists: It had no humor or character. He began to fix the problem by designing a new kids' line for the toothpaste, which looked like a mash-up of Creepy Crawlers, graffiti, Vans checkerboard, and skater streetwear. He drew an alien character and a great white shark, and offered flavors like "eyeball juice" and "monster slime." He posted zany videos on Instagram called "In-Sink Entertainment," with little characters and funny, snarky plots. It all had a knowing nod to parents — as if to say, "Anything to make the kid brush, right?"
In the first nine months, the kids' line crushed, doing $5.5 million in sales. But the adult line lagged with $3.3 million — not the traction he wanted.
Rinks knew what he needed to do, but not how — until finally, one night at 2 a.m., he got an idea. He was in bed scrolling through eBay when he came upon a clone of a 1962 Ben Casey doll from Hong Kong. "He just looked at me like a villain from a James Bond movie," Rinks recalls. "And I said, 'Man, who is this guy?'"
Then he knew: It looked like "the dentist everyone loves to hate." This would be the humorous muse of Made By Dentists. He outbid himself all night to win the thing.
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On his first attempt, Rinks realized, he played it too safe. He had tried to show people why they should care about toothpaste by making it an official, dentist-approved thing. But he should have done the opposite — and made the dentist the bad guy! Just like chihuahuas and sunscreen, nobody likes the dentist. "I learned this long ago," he says. "If you can hit on the truth of something where people go, 'Yeah, I agree,' you're getting them that much closer to buying. Because you're not changing anybody's mind. You're connecting with all the people who already think like you. And then you show that, 'Hey, we're vulnerable enough to poke fun at ourselves,' and they're with you."
With that vibe in hand, Rinks did a second rebrand. Will the new dentist scheme work? We're about to find out — it launches in stores this March.
In the meantime, Rinks prepares himself, thinking about a tattoo he has on his chest. It says "37," Paul Newman's prison number in Cool Hand Luke. There's a poker scene in the movie, where Newman's character gets dealt a terrible hand — but bluffs his way into winning. "Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand," he tells the group. For Rinks, with his product résumé of unexciting cards, that resonates. "I've always told people it's not the hand you're dealt, it's how you play it," he says. "Same goes for brands."
