Supergoop.
A brand strategy peer project analyzing a challenger in the sun-care category.
Co-author, design lead
MBA, 3-person team
Spring 2024
Brand Strategy
A thirty-second read.
Subject.
Supergoop, a challenger sun-care brand founded by Holly Thaggard in 2005 after a close friend was diagnosed with skin cancer. Built on the premise that sunscreen should actually feel good to wear.
My role.
Co-author on a three-person team. Led visual strategy and the design system. Authored the identity audit, association map, equity pyramid, persona, position maps, authenticity audit, and recommendations.
Approach.
Keller's brand equity pyramid, a 7-pillar brand authenticity framework, Geoffrey Moore positioning, and a jobs-to-be-done read on where Supergoop is winning and where it can grow.
Key insight.
The founder's story is the wedge. Clinical credibility deepens it. Availability is the ceiling. A toddler line completes the founding premise.
Recommendations.
Become the number-one dermatologist-recommended sunscreen brand. Expand into clean-beauty and adjacent-premium retail. Launch a toddler sun-care line with eczema-prevention claims.
Outcome.
Average brand authenticity score of 4.57 out of 5. Three prioritized recommendations backed by a full Keller pyramid, two positioning maps, a persona, and a 7-pillar authenticity audit.
A category built on products people endured.
Sun-care is one of the few categories where consumers have historically put up with bad products. Heavy, greasy, chalky, smelly. Most people knew they should wear sunscreen. Most people didn’t. The gap between knowing and doing was the whole business opportunity.
Supergoop entered this gap with a simple thesis: make sunscreen people actually want to wear, and the daily-use problem solves itself. Lightweight, non-greasy, cosmetically elegant, backed by clinical research.
Coppertone. Hawaiian Tropic. Banana Boat.
Cheap, widely available, technically effective, cosmetically dated. Built for the beach, not the bathroom counter.
Sun Bum. EltaMD. La Roche-Posay.
Premium positioning, mixed channel strategies. Credible skincare halo but inconsistent aesthetic.
Daily-use, clean-beauty aesthetic.
The only player treating sunscreen as a daily skincare staple. Premium, selective, cosmetically elegant.
A playground, a diagnosis, and no sunscreen in sight.
In 2005, Holly Thaggard’s close friend was diagnosed with skin cancer in her early thirties. Another close friend, finishing her dermatology residency, told Holly about the cumulative damage of daily UV exposure starting young.
Holly, then a third-grade teacher, realized she had never seen a bottle of sunscreen on a school campus. Peak-sun hours every day: recess, lunch, after-school. No protection.
Two years later, she launched Supergoop by getting SPF pumps into private schools in Texas, where state laws didn’t prohibit it. The Ounce by Ounce program, which donates sunscreen to schools across America, still operates today, almost two decades later.
“That founding story shows up everywhere in the brand. It’s not marketing. It’s the actual wedge.”
What Supergoop actually looks and sounds like.
Before analyzing equity, we audited what Supergoop looks and sounds like. Five identity pillars: logo, typography, aesthetic, photography, and product system.
Modern, playful, fashion-forward.
The word “Supergoop” rendered as if hand-drawn with sunscreen itself. Bold, less structured, deliberately un-corporate.
Bold playful serif.
Across the product line. Tone of voice is confident and warm, not clinical. The packaging speaks before you open it.
Yellow as the sun. Navy as the ground.
Bold use of yellow, often as the circle motif, implying the sun. Navy provides contrast and grounds the brightness.
Eye-catching, vibrant, energetic.
People enjoying the outdoors. Lifestyle-oriented, not clinical or sterile. The category sold on feeling, not safety sheets.
What people think about, in three rings.
Associations mapped by strength. Inner ring: high, the concepts customers bring up first. Middle: medium. Outer: low, the friction points worth knowing.
Supergoop.
Keller's four tiers, bottom to top.
Keller’s customer-based brand equity pyramid has four tiers, each a building block for the next. Supergoop performs strongly across all four.
Who you are. Supergoop shows up as sunscreen, skincare, and SPF-infused makeup. Sephora, Ulta, Nordstrom. Category membership is clear.
What you offer. High-performance SPF, dermatologist-tested, mid-premium pricing. Yellow and blue evoke sun and water. Active outdoor lifestyle.
What consumers think and feel. High-quality, less chemicals, scientific experts. Safety. Reduced daily worry. Care for yourself and your people.
The relationship. The founder's story becomes the brand's resonance. Holly's friend's diagnosis is a shared concern the community rallies around.
A specific customer, not a demographic.
Built to align the team around one person, not a demographic. Every subsequent recommendation was pressure-tested against whether Sarah would actually buy the thing.
Sarah Summers.
Age 32 · Sports news editor
Active outdoor lifestyle. On-camera at sunny events. Skincare-literate.
- 01Maintain healthy, youthful skin, especially when on-camera at outdoor events.
- 02Stay up to date on effective skincare products and routines.
- 03Keep her routine simple given a fast-paced work rhythm.
- 01Enjoying the outdoors without compromising her skin.
- 02Finding products for her specific concerns (breakouts, dryness).
- 03Finding sunscreen that protects with minimal reapplication.
Reputation as a leading sun-protection brand. Commitment to high-quality ingredients. Easy application. An educational library that helps Sarah feel informed, not sold to.
Where they win. Where they can grow.
Two maps, not one. A single combined map flattens the argument. Separating “winning” from “growing” makes the strategic implication obvious.
Distribution is the ceiling. Not mass, but adjacent-premium: Target, Kroger, clean-beauty retailers. That is where the headroom lives.
Seven pillars, rated one to five.
We rated Supergoop against a seven-pillar brand authenticity framework. Average of 4.57 out of 5. The weakest links are artifacts of success, not problems to fix.
4.57/ 5
The weakest links, artisanal amateur and market immersion, are artifacts of success. Growth inherently erodes the small-brand feel. These are tradeoffs to manage, not problems to fix.
- Storytelling5 / 5
- Artisanal amateur4 / 5
- Sticking to roots5 / 5
- Loving the doing5 / 5
- Market immersion4 / 5
- One with the community4 / 5
- Indoctrinating staff5 / 5
Prioritized by strategic impact.
Three plays, in order. Deepen the credibility moat. Break the availability ceiling. Return to the founding premise with a toddler line.
Become the number-one dermatologist-recommended sunscreen.
Invest in research and testing to earn dermatologist endorsement at scale. Deepens the Judgment tier, reinforces “backed by scientific experts,” and builds a defensible moat against newcomers.
Expand into clean-beauty and adjacent-premium retail.
Availability is the ceiling. Two paths: clean-beauty retailers (Credo, Follain) to reach values-aligned customers, and adjacent-premium wholesale (Target, Kroger) to reach parents who don't shop at Sephora.
Launch a toddler sun-protection line.
Pediatrician and dermatologist tested. Fragrance-free. Formulated for toddlers' dry, sensitive skin. Returns to Holly's founding insight: kids on playgrounds need protection nobody was providing.
Full attribution, so you can trust the rest.
The deck lists three authors. Here is which work was mine and which was collaborative, so a hiring manager who asks about it in an interview gets a truthful answer.
- Overall deck design and visual system (yellow and navy palette, circle motifs, typography, layout)
- Unique brand identity elements audit
- Brand association map
- Jobs to be done analysis
- Brand equity pyramid (Keller's framework)
- Brand persona (Sarah Summers)
- Position mapping (both quadrant charts)
- Brand authenticity audit (7-pillar rating)
- Three recommendations
- Sammie Christoff and Brian Eck collaborated on the founder's story research and history timeline
- Brand architecture and brand equity statement
- Synthesized executional converter and references
- Writing and analytical sharpening happened as a team across every section
What I would do again. What I would change.
Four calls I would make the same way. Three I would sharpen next time.
Got right
- 01Led with the founder's story. It is the most resonant element of the brand. Structuring the analysis around it gave every subsequent framework somewhere to land.
- 02Two position maps, not one. Splitting winning from growing made the strategic implication obvious. A single combined map would have flattened the recommendation.
- 03Honored Supergoop's visual DNA. Yellow circles, navy contrast, playful serif. The deck felt like it belonged to the brand it analyzed.
- 04Authenticity audit with a numerical average. 4.57 of 5 gives the analysis a punch line. Without the number, the section is seven qualitative paragraphs.
Would do differently
- 01Interview real Sarah Summerses. Our persona was informed by secondary research and assumption. Five 20-minute calls with actual target customers would have sharpened the pain points and pressure-tested the recommendations.
- 02Quantify the partnership recommendation. We said expand to clean-beauty retailers. The sharper version would have modeled incremental revenue from two specific retailers, including margin pressure and SKU tradeoffs.
- 03Test the toddler line. Recommendation 3 is the most speculative. A concept test with parents before proposing the extension would have separated strong intuition from confirmed demand.