Go Get Your Elephant

Government regulation forced sunscreen entrepreneur Holly thaggard to pivot—and think big.

- Amy Feldman

For Holly Thaggard, the moment of truth arrived in 2010 when she was celebrating Thanksgiving with her family. The business she’d started four years earlier to sell sunscreen to schools was going nowhere. Desperate, Thaggard decided she needed $25,000 to pitch her product at a trade show in New York, an expensive gamble for a company with just $45,000 in annual sales. “It was tears,” Thaggard recalls. “Ultimately, my dad leftme a check on the counter and said, ‘Go get your elephant, honey.’ ”

With a combination of pluck and luck, Thaggard did just that. While the trade show itself didn’t jump-start the business, the push from her fami

ly did. Today Supergoop, which is based in San Antonio, is distributed by Sephora, Bluemercury, Birchbox and Nordstrom, and its sales could reach $20 million this year. The fast-growing company has been plowing cash into marketing and is not yet profitable, but Thaggard says she expects profitability to be on the agenda at the next board meeting.