Together with

Stay up-to-date with AI.

AI won’t replace you, but a person using AI might. That’s why 500,000+ professionals read The Rundown– the free newsletter that keeps you updated on the latest AI news, tools, and tutorials in 5 minutes a day.

Sign up today.

Jaron, Tom, and Joe - the three founders of Bro Glo started a self-tanning company for men during the pandemic, in 2021.

They started their business by selling one product - a men’s face tanner.

Despite most people laughing at their idea, their face tanner turned out to be a pretty big hit.

Over the months, demand grew, so they expanded our product line to include a body tanner and tanning accessories.

Their primary customer base is males in the range of 24-35.

However, they’ve also begun seeing many women buying our products for themselves and their husbands/boyfriends.

Most of their success was driven by the rapid popularity they gained through their TikTok account - from zero followers to just under 150k now, with quite a few viral videos ranging from 1m views to over 8m views, and a total of 5.5M likes.

The shocking virality is what propelled their business to making average monthly revenues of $300k.month in a two and a half of being in business!

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Entrepreneurship runs in our blood. Joe ran his own business prior to Bro Glo (and still does). Tom and I (Jaron) have had several other online brands that were mildly successful, but just never maintained the traction or experienced the rapid growth that Bro Glo has.

The idea of Bro Glo came from Jaron - I am naturally very pale and I married Tom’s dark Italian sister. Throughout life, I’ve heard my fair share of pale jokes but when I was nicknamed “mayonnaise”, by hotel staff, while on my honeymoon in Antigua, I decided to come up with a self-tanner for guys just like me who just burn, but want to be tan.

I told Tom about the tanning product idea and our research showed a white space in the market that looked like it had great potential if we could come up with the right formula and market it the right way.

For our past businesses, we built social media accounts, one of which had 500k followers on Instagram. TikTok is a relatively new platform that has experienced substantial growth, so we decided to take a shot at content creation with our new brand and it was a good decision - our videos literally blew up overnight.

We started with a small batch of one product - 200 Bro Glo Face Tanners - which sold out in two weeks, exclusively from organic traffic from TikTok.

We started Bro Glo as a side hustle in 2021. We all have “day jobs” so we created this brand as a fun challenge. Because of that, we launched with no expectations. It was the middle of a global pandemic and we were all stuck in our homes. Little did we know how quickly Bro Glo would take off.

Our “aha” moment was selling out of our initial batch within two weeks with a viral TikTok video that garnered over 200k views. When we sold out of the initial batch quickly (and unexpectedly), we all looked at each other and said “Ok, let’s order more… maybe we’re onto something.”

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

We’ve started other online brands before (less successful than Bro Glo), so we had the experience and knowledge on how to source manufacturers/suppliers for products. In the past, we’ve designed products from the ground up, which gave us a pretty good base to help with Bro Glo.

We started our sourcing process at the beginning of 2020. Luckily we were able to nail down a self-tanner lab pretty quickly. We spoke to around a dozen labs and the one we ended up partnering with stood out far above the rest in terms of personalities, knowledge, capabilities, and capacities. Because we never formulated a self-tanner, we had to make sure we partnered with an experienced lab that specializes in self-tanner and could help us develop our own proprietary formula, and also have the capacity to scale with our business.

Once we signed on with a lab, we were able to start the formulation process. As guys, we started with what was most important to us - natural-looking (not too dark), not sticky or greasy, and doesn’t have a strong perfume or chemical scent. We gave these preferences to our lab and they helped us through the formulation process.

After our initial formulation process, the lab sent us a few formulas and we then tested them on ourselves as well as a few men's test groups. From there, we took their feedback and went back to our lab, and fine-tuned our formula. This took several iterations before we came to the final formula that received the best feedback.

Luckily (and thankfully), we finished up this process towards the end of 2020, just before Covid hit. If we hadn’t finished, it would have pushed our timeline back for the better part of a year.

Anyways, after we nailed down our formula, we decided to start with a small batch of 200 units of only face tanner (a formula specifically designed for your face).

Our supplier sent us blank bottles for the first few thousand units we made. Separately, we had the bottles’ labels printed at a printer and sent to us. Once we received the bottles and labels at our warehouse, we manually labeled each one with a cheap labeling apparatus we found on Amazon. We spent hours and hours labeling thousands of bottles.

In the end, our total startup costs were just $974, which is mind-blowing to even us founders. In retrospect, it’s crazy to see how far we’ve come and how much the business has grown in less than two years.