Sundrop is Australia’s first socially responsible media company that helps to reduce Australia’s world-leading skin cancer rates.
It does this by installing and maintaining digital sunscreen dispensers at popular venues throughout Australia and in doing so provides free community sunscreen. Revenue is then generated by selling advertising space on the dispenser screens including a branded shell (or skin) and a personalised activation message each time the dispenser is used.
Seeing a similar idea being rolled out in the United States to fight melanoma, co-founders Jimmy Downey, Ed Moyse, Avi Silverberg and Lachlan Crane thought that Queensland could benefit from a similar initiative.
“We assumed surely it’s happening in Australia or is planned to, but we just couldn’t find anyone who was doing it or even trying to do it,” Jimmy says.
“So we thought well this is a chance for us to have a go and make a difference.”
There are two problems that Sundrop aims to solve.
Firstly, and most importantly, is health.
“Australia is the worst in the world when it comes to skin cancer and melanoma. One Australian dies every five hours from it, which is a crazy and sobering statistic around skin cancer. And Queensland is by far the most affected,” Jimmy says.
“So setting up in Brisbane and in Queensland made the most sense.”
While this problem is an emotional one, there is also an economic aspect.
“It is rumoured that across all of the governments in Australia it costs about a billion dollars a year to treat skin cancer, which is a fairly large problem for a cancer that is mostly preventable,” Jimmy says.
“People wearing more sunscreen has been proven to dramatically decrease the risk of skin cancer so that's an obvious one for us. Provide sunscreen where people are outside getting exposed to the sun.”
Sundrop also provides a solution from a business perspective. As advertising with Sundrop is an affordable and socially responsible way for local businesses to promote their products or services, while making a positive impact in their community.
“We are really about engagement. We wanted to consider the outdoor home advertising space, the difference with ours being that people come up and actively use the sunscreen, interacting with the device, which is very engaging compared to what you get with a normal billboard for example,” Jimmy says.
While still new on the scene, having only been founded in 2019, the team has seen many highlights.
“The community feedback has been great, we have seen nothing but support, which is really encouraging,” Jimmy says.
“We get a lot of good feedback from mums and dads down at the pools and other places the dispensers are. When they forget sunscreen, we are there and act as a reminder too.”
As with any business there have also been challenges.
“The biggest challenge is trying to make people - mainly sponsors - aware of and understand what we do,” Jimmy says.
“When we say would you like to support our initiative and you can promote your business on our digital sunscreen dispenser, they just think what on earth is that.
“That misunderstanding of what it is we are providing and trying to really make it make sense to the business from an economic standpoint as well as a moral standpoint has been the main challenge. Mainly because nothing like this exists, I touched on the United States, but they’re not actually doing this either, they are providing sunscreen via non-digital methods, meaning we are very new in terms of what we are trying to do with it.”
While they are only rolling out at the moment and have been self-funded up to this point, they will look at raising in the future.
“We are fairly new and have grown pretty quick in the sense of what we’ve learned, where we sit in the market and how we have reacted to and tailored our business model around that,” Jimmy says.
“Initially we started with a health mission, but we didn’t really understand how we were going to properly commercialise it and that is what we’ve spent the last year doing, which is where all of our funds have gone. We have been testing and piloting, and all the equipment and hardware that is involved has been really expensive, not to mention that we’ve spent a tonne on sunscreen as you can imagine. Those are the big costs.
“If we want to have the impact that we want to have, we need a footprint and so right up until now it has been testing the model, testing locations, getting people’s feedback, collecting data and then saying how do we efficiently and effectively scale this out. That will be when we need to bring on funding from a range of channels.”
While they started out by focusing on pools, it has now expanded to golf clubs, surf clubs, sporting clubs, yacht clubs and shopping centres.
“Now we are looking at strategic partnerships, we are looking to align with some established businesses in the various areas we are across.
“We partner with a local charity, Danger Sun Overhead, which specialises in the sun safety education space in construction, mining and outdoor workers. We have a sunscreen partner called Ochre Sun, who are an Indigenous-owned and founded sunscreen company from regional Queensland, who are also focused on mining, construction and government industries. We are now looking at aligning ourselves from an advertising and media space.”
From here the goal is to be Australia-wide as quickly as practical.
“Then we can reassess at that point, but there is nothing really stopping this business from being international, but we know we have to get it right here first,” Jimmy says.
