Introduction

Sun Bum has always been about more than sunscreen. Born from a love of the beach and the people who live for it, the brand has grown into a broader world of sun care essentials. But as the business evolved, its website hasn’t quite kept up.

Our goal was to build a digital experience that makes the kind of splash Sun Bum is so well known for. Together, we reimagined the website as a place of discovery, education, and connection—not just another catalog of products.

The Challenge

Less than 1% of Sun Bum’s sales happen on its own website. It’s not all that surprising—sunscreen is the kind of thing you pick up at Target, on Amazon, or wherever else you happen to be when you realize you need some.

At a glance, Sun Bum is a category leader with an e-commerce platform that doesn’t have a reason to exist. Our job was to give it one. So, we set out to answer a single question: what can a website do that a shelf can’t?

The Opportunity

When a product is already available everywhere people shop, its online presence has to earn their attention in a different way. If the shelf is where people buy Sun Bum, the website can be where they get to know it.

We began by working from the ground up. A new sitemap shifted what was once a collection of individual products into a unified ecosystem with options for every adventure under the sun. Instead of treating each SKU as its own destination, we used bundles, bestsellers, and relevant recommendations to help shoppers move across the breadth of Sun Bum’s offering.

Education was another opportunity to give the website a role that retail couldn't play. Rather than isolating resources to a single page, we looked for ways to incorporate useful information into the shopping experience itself—and, in doing so, help people make more confident choices.

The same thinking extended beyond the purchase. We repositioned the loyalty program and its rewards to give customers better reasons to return, not just more reasons to buy. And, because Sun Bum’s community is always on the move, we designed the digital experience to be fast, intuitive, and especially impressive on mobile devices.

The result is a website that gives Sun Bum something a shelf never could—a place to tell the whole story. Complete with a custom typeface and support in over 12 languages, it acts as an online home that can scale alongside the brand as it enters new markets, launches new products, and brings more people around an even bigger bonfire.

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