TUX Creative House makes Sunski’s SPF a daily invitation to get outside — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Since 2012, Sunski has made lightweight, sustainable sunglasses for people who live their lives outdoors. To carry that outlook into a second category, the brand turned to Los Angeles-based creative agency TUX Creative House, asking it to grow Sunski from a sunglasses company into a broader sun-protection brand and to launch its first SPF line. The work covered the full journey, from brand strategy and positioning through product strategy and visual identity to packaging and the go-to-market platform for the launch.

Sunski’s community is outside in the sun more than most, yet the sunscreen made for them has barely moved on in years. Co-founder Tom Stewart is blunt about the options. On one side, “thick ghost paste that only makes sense for a tropical surf trip,” on the other, “mass-market, greasy lotions that smell like artificial flavours from a cocktail mix.” So rather than working back from what Sunski could manufacture, the founders started from a moment in their customers’ day. “We started with the point we wanted to own,” Stewart explains. “For us, that is the moment we step out of the indoors and into the light.” SPF, sitting across the line between eye and skin protection, was the product that could own it.

From there, TUX made daily sun protection a reason to spend more time outside. The launch turns on a contradiction the founders felt keenly. We are wired for nature but now live in front of screens, on track to spend 14 years of our lives looking at a phone. Set against that, sunscreen becomes a small daily reason to step out, and sunglasses and SPF are positioned together as a ‘Daily Nature Kit’ – two things designed to be reached for on the way out of the door. “The sunscreen category is crowded with familiar visual cues and messages, so our challenge was to find a perspective that felt true to Sunski,” explains Stacy Gagnidze, Strategy Director at TUX Creative House. “We uncovered a brand built around adventure and a genuine love of being outdoors. We wanted Sunski SPF to feel less like a product people have to use and more like an invitation to get outside.”

The founders had clearly marked the ground to avoid before TUX began its work. Stewart named two “danger zones” spotted across the competitive landscape: the ‘outdoor brand trap’ of carabiners, mountain silhouettes and the rugged-signalling type every gear company reaches for, and the beauty industry’s clinical treatment of SPF, all white space and dermatological gloss, which to Sunski “lacked soul and connection to why we go outside in the first place.”

TUX answered by taking the brand away from the beach. Where suncare often defaults to imagery of sand, surf and palm trees, the identity is instead built from California’s deserts, forests, lakes, coastlines and snow-covered mountains. “Sunski’s community isn’t lying on a towel; they’re adventuring, and California gave us a much richer map of what that looks like,” notes Chelsea Matthews, Partner & VP of Creative at TUX Creative House. Anchoring the brand there did two jobs at the same time. It opened up a far wider visual world than “ocean and palm tree,” and it made SPF relevant all year, since there is always a landscape in season. That geography became a set of hand-drawn totems – icons that are rendered in a screen-printed poster style, each tied to a product and a place. The recurring one is a tree, standing in for sun protection itself.

This was never intended to be a new product bolted onto the old brand. “This was less about SPF fitting into Sunski’s existing world and more about the whole brand evolving into something that could represent both categories credibly,” Matthews explains, describing the wider refresh of Sunski’s identity around its new mission. Part of the answer came from how suncare is really used. Research shows it to be a quietly gendered category, bought daily as a skincare ritual by women and more occasionally by men, with each side usually sold its own look – polished ‘beauty’ codes for one, rugged ‘gear’ for the other. TUX built a single system that aims to answer to neither, led by landscape and lifestyle so that nobody is mis-targeted. Continuity with the eyewear comes from shared DNA – the wordmark, optimism and ‘go outside’ point of view – while the totems and the landscape system give SPF its own energy.

Sunski’s existing wordmark, a warm, handwritten script, stays on as the signature that has represented the eyewear for years. Contrasting against it, a bold, condensed display typeface gives campaign lines like ‘Nature Wants You’ the weight to hold their own over big landscape imagery, while a plainer, restrained sans takes the functional layer of ingredients, usage and the regulatory Drug Facts panel. “The friendly type says ‘come outside’; the systematic type quietly does its job,” Matthews adds.

The colour palette is led by the product itself. “A warm, optimistic yellow drawn straight from the tube, set against sky blue,” Matthews continues. The pairing reads instantly as outdoors-inspired, and doesn’t borrow from suncare’s cliché of clinical white and coral. Around it, a secondary palette is pulled from the landscapes themselves, so that snow and desert stories each have their own tones.

Suncare has to carry a lot of mandatory information, and this brief piled even more on top. The SPF value, an ophthalmologist-tested ‘sting-free’ formula for eye comfort, ingredient exclusions, a stream-friendly claim for the lakes and rivers the Sunski community swims in, and the practical promises of sand-proof, spill-proof and leak-resistant – a lot of proof points for a small piece of plastic. TUX kept the front of each pack brand-forward, and gave every credential and regulatory line its own clearly ordered panel behind it. The clean formula, free of oxybenzone, octinoxate and benzene, is handled as quiet reassurance, since the research found this audience cares more about how a sunscreen feels and performs than about what has been left out of it.

The founders knew the shift was a gamble for a brand its community already thought of as reliably sunny. “We definitely got the wow moment from the early direction,” Stewart recalls, crediting a sandbox loop that tried each phase across Sunski’s existing touchpoints as it went, and singling out Senior Art Director Mariana Serrano, whose illustrations and iconography became the foundation of the SPF packaging. The proof came at the launch: the founders’ first on-camera video, talking through the nature-first philosophy the work had helped them own, became the most liked and most engaged post in the company’s history.