Holly Thaggard, the founding father of Supergoop!, says she nonetheless goals about SPF and getting sunscreen into extra folks’s day by day routines, even after stepping away from the corporate earlier this yr.
Subsequent week, Thaggard will probably be inducted into the Texas Enterprise Corridor of Fame. She’ll be the one San Antonian and girl inducted on this yr’s class.
On this week’s episode of the bigcitysmalltown podcast, Bob Rivard sat down with Thaggard to speak about Supergoop!’s origins and what comes subsequent.
Thaggard grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and frolicked in Dallas earlier than transferring to San Antonio along with her household. Although Supergoop! has now grown into a world model, she says that the guts and soul of the corporate is in San Antonio.
Thaggard’s ardour for sunscreen began along with her 29-year-old good friend’s pores and skin most cancers prognosis. She thought again concerning the lack of sunscreen use in her youth, and the way it simply as simply may have been her receiving the prognosis.
As a 3rd grade trainer on the time, she additionally began searching on the faculty youngsters taking part in outdoors within the sweltering solar with no pores and skin safety. The younger youngsters had been studying the fundamentals of well being and caring for themselves, like washing their fingers, however training about solar safety was disregarded.
“We offer a fence across the playground to guard them from ongoing site visitors. And but the solar within the sky is the primary carcinogen on this world,” Thaggard mentioned. “Whereas we find it irresistible and embrace it and need to encourage everybody to get pleasure from their time outdoors, we weren’t doing our job as academics in defending our youth from that hazard.”
She initially set out on a mission to coach folks about solar safety and serving to get the merchandise in additional mother and father’ fingers. She thought-about going the nonprofit and advocacy route. However as she realized extra concerning the sunscreen market, she noticed a niche in good-quality sunscreen formulation.
Many sunscreens had been and nonetheless are made with substances which have query marks round their security, like oxybenzone and parabens. Researchers are nonetheless gathering information on whether or not these merchandise negatively affect our well being, however many firms have began advertising their merchandise as oxybenzone- and paraben-free.
“How may I encourage everybody to put on one thing … that would presumably be one other cancer-causing method?” Thaggard mentioned. “Formulation wanted to evolve, they usually wanted innovation if we had been actually going to encourage folks to put on it on a regular basis.”
So Thaggard switched course. She got down to develop sunscreen merchandise free of those substances however that also felt and regarded good on folks’s pores and skin.
She based Supergoop! in 2005. After rising the corporate into a world model, Thaggard stepped down earlier this yr from the day-to-day operations after promoting Supergoop! to funding agency Blackstone Inc.
Now an investor and startup adviser herself, Thaggard is on the lookout for her subsequent massive undertaking, together with serving to assist her son’s imaginative and prescient to rid the world of microplastics in ingesting water.
“As a founder … you naturally like to create and construct,” she mentioned. “And when a enterprise will get to the scale that Supergoop! is right this moment, among the magic of constructing and creating and figuring issues out and doing issues in another way … it’s similar to the place your candy spot is.”
