Sun care brand Sun Bum is working with rewards platform Rediem on The Bum Club, a loyalty program that netted nearly 14,000 sign-ups during a recent soft launch. The Bum Club looks to trade the transactional nature of traditional loyalty programs for a fun, community-building approach.
“Loyalty is something that we thought about for a really long time,” said Vanessa Lhotsky, executive director of digital, direct-to-consumer and e-commerce for the brand. “The challenge was that the big ones out there seemed very transactional and not very customizable or unique, and, honestly, just felt really boring.”
Sun Bum wants to break the mold of loyalty programs by rewarding points (or “bananas,” inspired by its ape mascot) to consumers for a range of activities beyond simply purchasing its self-care products, including: sharing pictures of a sunset, educating themselves about skin cancer prevention, participating in website scavenger hunts and even doing nothing at all. Rewards include a personalized welcome kit, discounts on partner brands and an appearance on a billboard in the brand's hometown of Encinitas, California.
The actions and rewards elevate what the brand has already done and seen its customers do. It previously put a 12-year-old super fan on a billboard and has seen fans tattoo its logo on their bodies. Plus, the focus on skin cancer prevention allows Sun Bum to build its core brand values into the program.
“Doing things that are definitely different in terms of loyalty, but knowing that our consumers were already doing that kind of stuff… how do we fold that into a loyalty program that truly feels unique?” Lhotsky said.
Building a loyalty program for the brand also presented a challenge faced by other CPG companies: how to capture consumer attention for a product sold at major retailers, including Walmart, Target and CVS, as well as its own direct-to-consumer channels, while being true to a “be big, feel small” ethos.
“Having that really direct, one-to-one consumer connection is really important to us as we grow and scale,” Lhotsky said.
A platform optimized for mobile
To meet its loyalty program needs, Sun Bum tapped Rediem, a rewards platform launched in 2023 that raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding, led by Ivy Ventures. The company was founded to address the lack of brand alignment with many loyalty programs, especially in an era when storytelling-forward brands like Liquid Death and Oura are ramping up consumer engagement.
“All you can do with your points is cash out for $10 on your next order, which doesn’t really foster any sense of loyalty. It’s this passive, turn-and-burn, collecting dust in the [website] footer,” said Regan Plekenpol, a Rediem co-founder. “We’re still in punch card land.”
To that end, Rediem created a platform that serves as infrastructure for community-first, omnichannel loyalty programs like The Bum Club, especially for brands like Sun Bum that are not online-only but retail-everywhere.
“We have this mechanism of rewards, actions and challenges, and then the brand can go crazy,” Plekenpol said. “If they want to reward you for doing jumping jacks in Times Square, they can do that.”
Whether doing jumping jacks or writing messages in sunscreen, Rediem’s loyalty program turns consumer actions into a community feed of user-generated content. It also can turn the experiential activations that are having a post-pandemic revival into measured traffic and traceable consumer data, from purchases to SMS numbers.
Around 85% of usage was mobile during the soft launch of The Bum Club. For now, Sun Bum will keep it that way, rather than joining an app-based landscape that is crowded with some great but many bad loyalty apps.
“The integration with our current tech stack really helped, in terms of Shopify, SMS and email,” Lhotsky said. “We do have a pretty small, lean marketing team, so I think it’s something we’re always going to look at… How do we continue to improve it?”
