The Reef Repair Story
It can be difficult to know where to start a story for the most dramatic and impacting effect on a reader. Whilst we don’t want to bore you with endless walls of text, we do want to tell you our story, and we hope that you find it informative as well as enjoyable.
In The Beginning
Before the dawn of man there was a fiery ball of helium in the sky which we humans called “the sun”. The sun is essential for life on our planet, but too much of it is a problem, because the sun’s ultra violet radiation damages human DNA. As men and women became less hairy and in some parts of the world, more fair skinned and less tanned, the sun has become an even bigger threat.
Recently human life has begun drowning in problems and pollution caused by our race toward advancement. We have turned our waters and oceans more acidic, and peoples skin has become ever more sensitive to the toxins in our environment whilst the sun bares down on us ever more relentlessly.
In mans darkest of hours Reef Repair has stepped forward. We promise to lead a revolution in both human safe and reef safe sun care for a healthier you, and a healthier ocean!
How Did We Get Started?
Reef Repair started with a very simple idea …
We can do reef safe sunscreen better than the current available options
At the time, early 2018, the reef safe and chemical free sunscreens that we had been importing and testing for the diving industry in Thailand, were difficult to use and extremely expensive.
Each reef safe sunscreen that we were able to import, was sadly very disappointing and not customer friendly. As scuba divers and avid conservationist’s we were doing our best to provide local scuba diving centers with reef safe alternatives to the chemically toxic sunblock’s that people unknowingly bring with them everyday to our boats, beaches and dive sites.
Many of the natural reef safe sun creams we tested suffered from the similar deal breaking negatives. These sunscreen’s would simply make your skin as white as newly painted picket fence and were extremely sticky, thick or excessively oily. Some even smelled so bad customers would immediately rinse or towel them off.
That was quite a heartbreaking scenario for us as dive instructors working to protect coral reefs.
The Real Setback
It’s one issue if you can’t convince holiday makers to use an environmentally friendly product, but even worse was the issue of trying to convince dive professionals to wear reef safe sunscreen. Many employee’s of dive shops and liveaboard’s would complain to us about the thickness and skin whitening effects of these imported reef safe sunblock’s. No one really liked them, professionals wouldn’t use them, customers wouldn’t buy them, dive shops couldn’t sell them.
It was a very serious issue, there seemed absolutely to be no way we could convince day trip divers or even dive professionals to use reef safe products. The creams were just to hard to use and would utterly refuse to rub into your skin easily, if at all.
Plus, you’ll never get thick yucky sunscreen on your children either so even parents were not onboard!
If You Want Something Done …
An old saying that most people know very well is …
If you want something done right, do it yourself
We couldn’t in good conscience allow sun creams that contain toxic reef killing chemicals to persist in our industry. Chemical sunscreens were helping to devastate coral reefs in our local environment and diving areas. Something drastic had to be done.
One day, we simply sat down and started mixing a viable, retail friendly, all natural and reef safe sunscreen from scratch. It was a big jump, from being scuba diving professionals, to actively producing Thailand’s first truly reef safe sunscreen. But back then it seemed like no one else was willing to do it, and so it needed doing.
What we were about to find out the hard way though, is that all natural sunscreen is certainly not easy to make like soaps, moisturizers and other skin care products. Some hard lessons were about to come our way.
Failure After Failure
If you think rocks are hard, try creating and testing 42 different recipes for a reef safe sunscreen. None of which met our basic performance requirements. The hardest part of any business is failure. After so many near misses and utter failures with our sunscreen it might have been easy to believe that what we wanted to create was not actually possible.
It also would have been simple at that time to have given up the whole ordeal and to stop investing our meagre dive instructor salaries into ingredients for sunscreen. But our love for coral reefs and eco-friendly scuba diving compelled us to persist.
Batch Number 43
In all honesty we had very been close to a viable reef safe sunscreen a few times. We had made batches (sun creams) that were very easy to rub in and didn’t paint you white. We had made sun creams that were very effective against the harmful effects of the sun, were non-oily, moisturizing and just nice to use. We had actually solved most of our problems individually, but never together in a single cohesive sun cream.
This final problem, which seemed insurmountable at the time, of combining all the desirable sunscreen effects into a single product was mind-bending. At one point we strongly considered producing a range of creams with different properties. One for moisturizing, one for diving (waterproof) and one for kids. Mainly because we couldn’t get all the properties we wanted into a single cream.
Against all the odds we put the gloves back on and mixed up batch number 43. I’m not going to tell you exactly how we made batch 43 or what magic we had to call down from Asgard to get it to work the way we wanted. But, what I will say is that with the help of some truly amazing sun care science and lots of hard work, it appeared as if we had finally created a truly revolutionary “winner take all” sunscreen that did everything we needed.
Essentially we found our holy grail in batch 43, it was revolutionary, absolutely revolutionary. Reef Repair sunscreen based off batch 43, had almost no whitening effect when applied correctly, non-oily, non-sticky and will safely protect you from the sun. It was also completely natural, does zero harm done to coral reefs or marine life and best of all, we could produce it locally. There is or was simply nothing on the market at that time that came close to the “ease of use” and the effectiveness of Reef Repair batch 43.
The next big problem for us was that we had now taken over 6 months to develop our first products like Reef Repair sunscreen SPF 30+. We were now drastically behind the eight ball in terms of market share and certainly faced an uphill struggle to catch up to competitors around the world.
Gaining Ground
There is an a saying that …
A product without sales is just landfill
It’s a very poignant expression. We desperately needed to get sales and we also needed to “re-convince” the scuba diving industry in Thailand to give Reef Safe sunscreens another chance. Early adopters here had obviously been burned prior (pun intended), with these types of products.
We literally went to every dive shop in our area and talked to them face to face. After that we went to every dive shop in our city, then the entire island of Phuket. From there we travelled weekly to every island in Thailand, and then anywhere else that a dive shop existed. It was important for us to get Reef Repair onto shelves and into the hands of divers already on the ground in Thailand. We probably would have pitched to over 300 diving operations and resorts in those early days.
Not everyone took us on either, truthfully it wasn’t an easy sell, many operations honestly don’t care. Destructive exploitation of coral reefs is and has been a viable business model for many years. Preservation is a very new and often hard to swallow concept, so we work diligently everyday to change the narrative to that of long lasting preservation and enjoyment or our reefs and oceans.
Thankfully hard-work and persistence was a key factor in now being present in hundreds of retail locations in Thailand that touch on coral reefs in someway. From dive shops and resorts to liveaboards and snorkeling tour operators. Those early successes helped fuel our passion for conservation and allowed us to continually innovate our products and contribute to other projects that protect coral reefs in our region.
Cyclical Business Model
For every bottle of Reef Repair sold, the dive shop that sells it makes a profit on that product. They in-turn invest back into improving their own business and making diving more enjoyable and safer. For every diver in the water wearing Reef Repair and not damaging corals with toxic chemical sunscreen, we allow the reef to heal and repair, thereby becoming more beautiful and alive. Beautiful and vibrant coral reefs attract more tourists and divers, whom purchase more sunscreen and services from dive shops. This system becomes a positive cyclical phenomenon for our environment instead of an exploitative one.
The real winner is obviously the environment (it simply becomes healthier). We as divers come in second because we get healthier coral reefs to visit. Third in line are the diving operators who can now pad their bottom lines with eco-friendly product sales to help improve their services.
This cycle can continue positively and indefinitely. It simply takes you the consumer making the choice to switch to a natural reef safe sunscreen and throw away your chemically toxic sunblock, and honestly why wouldn’t you?
Revolutionary Sun Care
The truly amazing and revolutionary part of Reef Repair products is that when purchasing you are getting everything desirable in normal sunscreens, all at once, in a single bottle. Plus we give an all natural quality guarantee, that is hard to find anywhere else in the sunscreen induustry.
Here is why Reef Repair sunscreen isn’t just another “natural” sunblock, potentially it’s the last sunscreen you will ever purchase.
If we left any features out did and you’d also like to see Reef Repair sun creams do something else, like potentially removing bad tattoo’s? You can get in touch with our customer service staff via email and let them know what other features you would like to see in our sunscreens.
Thanks for reading, take care of yourselves and your skin by visiting our online shop which is packed full of reef friendly sun care products for you and your family.
Stay updated on further developments via our Reef Repair News & Events section.
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