Supergoop!

Before sunscreen, there was a harp. Holly Thaggard taught third grade, then left teaching to perform professionally as a harpist, and that second career turned out to be the unlikely engine of everything that came later — when she started preaching sun protection, the schools and institutions where she had played already knew and trusted "Holly the Harpist," and they opened their doors to her.

What sent her there was a friend's melanoma diagnosis, which turned a performer into a one-woman crusade to get sun protection and education to children. She bootstrapped the effort on roughly $30,000 charged to a maxed-out American Express card, personally pitching parent groups and grinding through fifteen to twenty formula iterations before she had something she believed in. The early years were a slow, unglamorous slog of school hallways and skeptical buyers.

The inflection point came in 2011, when the brand reached Sephora's shelves — and Thaggard fought to keep it there year-round. Retailers wanted to treat sunscreen as a seasonal beach item; she refused, insisting on permanent placement to hammer home the everyday-SPF gospel that was the company's entire reason for existing. That stubbornness paid off as the catalog ballooned from a single product toward dozens of formats — sticks, mists, tinted screens, glow-and-protect hybrids, powders — each engineered around wearability rather than seasonal use.

The defining insight, repeated across every launch, is that the barrier to sun protection is sensory, not informational: people skip greasy, white-casting SPF, so the fix is cosmetic elegance good enough to make daily reapplication a habit. That thesis reshaped how a generation thinks about facial sunscreen, turning a chore into a step people actually want — the company's most durable contribution, well beyond any single bottle.

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