{"id":24403,"date":"2025-10-28T11:25:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T11:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/24403\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T11:25:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T11:25:07","slug":"teacher-turned-supergoop-founder-dreams-about-spf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/24403\/","title":{"rendered":"Teacher turned Supergoop founder ‘dreams about SPF’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Holly Thaggard, the founder of Supergoop, says she still dreams about SPF and getting sunscreen into more people\u2019s daily routines, even after stepping away from the company earlier this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Next week, Thaggard will be inducted into the Texas Business Hall of Fame<\/a>. She\u2019ll be the only San Antonian and woman inducted in this year\u2019s class.<\/p>\n

On this week\u2019s episode of the bigcitysmalltown podcast<\/a>, Bob Rivard sat down with Thaggard to talk about Supergoop\u2019s origins and what comes next.<\/p>\n

Thaggard grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and spent time in Dallas before moving to San Antonio with her family. Though Supergoop has now grown into an international brand, she says that the heart and soul of the company is in San Antonio.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thaggard\u2019s passion for sunscreen started with her 29-year-old friend\u2019s skin cancer diagnosis. She thought back about the lack of sunscreen use in her youth, and how it just as easily could have been her receiving the diagnosis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a third grade teacher at the time, she also started looking out at the school children playing outside in the sweltering sun with no skin protection. The young children were learning the basics of health and taking care of themselves, like washing their hands, but education about sun protection was left out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe provide a fence around the playground to protect them from ongoing traffic. And yet the sun in the sky is the number one carcinogen in this world,\u201d Thaggard said. \u201cWhile we love it and embrace it and want to encourage everyone to enjoy their time outside, we weren\u2019t doing our job as teachers in protecting our youth from that danger.\u201d<\/p>\n

She initially set out on a mission to educate people about sun protection and helping get the products in more parents\u2019 hands. She considered going the nonprofit and advocacy route.\u00a0But as she learned more about the sunscreen market, she saw a gap in good-quality sunscreen formulas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many sunscreens were and still are made with ingredients that have question marks around their safety, like oxybenzone and parabens. Researchers are still gathering data on whether these products negatively impact our health, but many companies have started marketing their products as oxybenzone- and paraben-free.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow could I encourage everyone to wear something \u2026 that could possibly be another cancer-causing formula?\u201d Thaggard said. \u201cFormulas needed to evolve, and they needed innovation if we were really going to inspire people to wear it everyday.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Thaggard switched course. She set out to develop sunscreen products free of these ingredients but that still felt and looked good on people\u2019s skin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She founded Supergoop in 2005. After growing the company into an international brand, Thaggard stepped down earlier this year from the day-to-day operations after selling Supergoop<\/a> to investment firm Blackstone Inc.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now an investor and startup adviser herself, Thaggard is looking for her next big project, including helping support her son\u2019s vision to rid the world of microplastics in drinking water.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a founder \u2026 you naturally love to create and build,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd when a business gets to the size that Supergoop is today, some of the magic of building and creating and figuring things out and doing things differently \u2026 it\u2019s just like where your sweet spot is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Holly Thaggard, the founder of Supergoop, says she still dreams about SPF and getting sunscreen into more people\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3212,17352,6874,17353,1831,82,84,83,17354,17355,17356,3028,3219],"class_list":{"0":"post-24403","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-bigcitysmalltown","9":"tag-bob-rivard","10":"tag-entrepreneurs","11":"tag-holly-thaggard","12":"tag-podcast","13":"tag-san-antonio","14":"tag-san-antonio-headlines","15":"tag-san-antonio-news","16":"tag-startup","17":"tag-sunscreen","18":"tag-supergoop","19":"tag-typedaily","20":"tag-wc-less-than-500"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}