The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
Best friends Rhiannon Hall and Maddy Balderson grew up in a beach town on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, with no aspirations to work in beauty.
While aged 15 and working in a surf shop, Rhi, who now co-owns skincare and false tanning brand Luna Bronze with Maddy, first dabbled with beauty in the form of a rather heavily pigmented false tan. “I actually applied it with plastic gloves- hospital gloves! The next day I woke up and I looked like a tie-dyed dim sim.” Rhi vowed to never use a false tan again. “And now, here I am.”
“I remember going to a night club,” recalls Maddy of a similarly disheartening first tanning experience, “and I had put fake tan on. They had vinyl couches in this nightclub, and I must have been sitting on one for a period of time in my little dress. I got up, walked out of the nightclub at whatever time of the morning, and I’d sweated all the tan off so I had two big circles at the backs of my legs.”
“Thank god iPhones and social media weren’t around then!” adds Rhi.
Without no vested interest in beauty, both Maddy and Rhi found themselves in administrative roles rather than chasing creative pursuits- Maddy taking a position in accounting and Rhi an executive assistant in design and architecture.
“I was working in finance and thinking to myself ‘How did I end up here?'” remembers Maddy.
“I know that I wanted to do something great with my life, and I knew there was something more out there for me,” adds Rhi, a self-confessed tomboy who, to this day, can’t quite believe she’s sitting at the helm of a beauty brand. “I never knew I’d end up owning a business. I didn’t think, as a little girl growing up, ‘I’m going to own a tanning company.’ If it wasn’t for what happened to Maddy, I think we’d still be doing what we were already doing. That was the driving force. We knew that we wanted to make a difference.”
What happened to Maddy, to which Rhi refers, hit the duo in 2014. ” Around 2014, my right eyebrow… I’d wake up in the morning and there would be blood on my pillow,” shares Maddy. “It would just randomly bleed at different times. I also had a larger patch on my jaw- it wasn’t a mole, it just looked like a different patch of skin that would randomly bleed or erupt. I didn’t think anything of it for well over a year.”
After getting engaged to her now husband, Maddy began to get her pre-wedding skincare regime in order. “I was getting monthly facials and my beautician was the one to say ‘Maddy, you absolutely must promise me that on Monday you will go and see a dermatologist because I think that’s a basal cell carcinoma.’ Sure enough, it was- they both were. The one on my eyebrow was superficial, but the one on my jaw was invasive. They had to surgically remove quite a lot of tissue from my jaw to get it [the basal cell carcinoma] out.” A period of uncertainty regarding the success of the surgery and the need for radiation followed, given how close the cancer had been to Maddy’s lymph nodes. “It was a scary time and it definitely made me wake up and go ‘Right, I’m not doing this again. I’m not having my face hacked in to.'”
“I remember that time,” adds Rhi, “We’ve been best friends for 21 years or something, and Maddy is just always positive, always happy and just gets on with the job. She doesn’t dwell. She’s not one to sit in the corner and say ‘Woe is me’- but that really did affect Maddy. I’d never seen that vulnerable side of Maddy.”
Maddy and Rhi, naturally, vowed never to sun bake again, and so began their search for a false tanning solution. “”I’d tried a dozen different products and was not happy,” Maddy tells me. “They were all synthetic, they all had this smell about them, and I wasn’t happy with the colour.”
“I still remember the day, and the house I was living in in Elwood, when Maddy messaged me and said ‘Let’s do this,'” Rhi shares of the birth of Luna Bronze. “She messaged, with all these emoji ticks, saying ‘I just want a natural, organic, gradual tanning moisturiser that I can put on after my shower and put on my shelf without it having ghastly packaging. I just want something elegant and slick that fits into my beauty routine. Let’s do it.’ I wrote back and said ‘You’re a genius.’
“The gap in the market was there. At that stage, when we launched, there was nothing natural, organic, vegan and cruelty free that ticked all our boxes.”
With such a clear vision of the gap they wanted their product to fill, the branding, packaging and messaging fell into place. “We were just driving down to the Peninsula one day,” Rhi recalls, “and thought ‘What’s the name? Well, it’s tanning minus the sun. What’s the opposite of the sun? Luna- the moon. That’s the name.'” The moon tells a story on the packaging of each product too- a cresent moon, found on the Glow Gradual Tanning Moisturiser, represents a subtle tan, while the full moon sitting on the Eclipse Tanning Mousse denotes the brand’s deepest tanning product.
More important to the duo than beautiful packaging, however, was sustainable packaging. “What Maddy has taught me is the importance of sustainability and what goes into our products,” Rhi tells me. “What’s our responsibility as Luna Bronze? That has filtered down into my entire beauty routine. Now I’m looking at ‘Is this shampoo bottle recyclable? Where was it made?’ Maddy really opened my eyes up.
“At Luna Bronze now, we won’t create or do anything unless it ticks the boxes of the sustainability project that we’re moving in to.”
“I’m trying to cut down on the amount of products I’m buying,” Maddy agrees. “As I’m getting older, I’m cutting down and realising I only need one mascara, one foundation- I’m more conscious about packaging. Working with Luna Bronze, I’ve learnt so much about the supply chain that goes in to your product. I’m a lot more conscious about our footprint.”
With an idea, a name, a brand ethos and a sustainability plan in place, what came next was product formulation. “”The first step was creating the brief, which we did ourselves,” Maddy explains. “We knew what we wanted. We had a set of non-negotiables and a few variables. We had to find a manufacturer- we weren’t just going to be cooking it up in our kitchen. That was the hard part, but we found one based in Melbourne so that was perfect. We were adamant and that was a non-negotiable- it had to be made in Australia. When we eventually found our lab, we went through a sampling process.”
The sampling process, something most brand founders cite as an exhausting process, was and still is Maddy and Rhi’s favourite part of brand ownership. The duo credit the ease of that process with having a thorough brief from day one. “When we were writing our brief, we knew what we didn’t want and I think that’s what made the process so easy,” says Rhi.
“You’d think some of the samples would be horrific, but none of them were horrific!” laughs Maddy. “The main variables were the colour range, so we were toying from 1% up to 5% to land on a colour profile. The hardest piece, though, was that fragrance profile. We wanted it light and fresh. We didn’t want cocoa, we didn’t want coconut, we didn’t want anything that smelt like any other tan, so we went with the lemon myrtle, orange blossom and mandarin.”
Rhi and Maddy also credit their friendship with the ease of new product development, as having a business partner keeps them accountable for their decisions. “Rhi: “They say ‘Don’t go into business with friends.’ We’ve heard that so many times,” Rhi tells me, “but the foundation of Luna Bronze in our friendship. Our points of view might be different, but we meet in the middle. That friendship element has saved us.”
Luna Bronze made its debut in the form of Glow- the single product Rhi and Maddy had unsuccessfully searched for back in 2014. “When I was going through the skin cancer scenario and still wanted to be tanned, it was the product that I wanted and wasn’t there,” Maddy explains of Glow, a gradual tanning moisturiser. “It really was filling a need for something that wasn’t there. We wanted something subtle- I’m not nightclubbing anymore.”
Although the Luna Bronze range is now composed of six tanning formulas and accessories, Maddy and Rhi initially thought Luna Bronze would only produce that one product. What inspired them to grow was the dialogue they facilitated with their customers- customers who wanted more.
“I love the feedback from customers who were sun tanners who have now completely stopped tanning,” shares Rhi. “That’s the core of why we started this. When people come to us and say they don’t use a tanning bed anymore, that makes me so happy. People are starting to realise… there’s great initiatives like #calltimeonmelanoma, and people are realising that it’s not cool to lay in the sun.”
When pressed about why so many people still favour a sun tan, the duo are stumped. “I completely, cannot comprehend it,” says Maddy. Although attitudes are changing and brands like Luna Bronze are aiding in spreading sun safety awareness and offering consumers a safe alternative, the Cancer Council of Australia estimates that two in three Australians will be diagnosed with skin cancer by the time they are 70.
That in mind, Rhi and Maddy agree that we have a long way to go.
“There are companies on Instagram that glorify sun tanning,” says Rhi. “It’s really sad, and it’s very disappointing, but people are influenced to buy these tanning oils. I go to the beach, and Maddy and I are sitting under an umbrella wearing 50+, and I see these young girls… it baffles me. If we can stop 10 people from tanning, we’ve not done our job, but we’ve contributed.
“I do believe we have a long way to go. What’s the responsibility of the government? We ban tanning beds, but we let people sell oil with no SPF in it. Where does the responsibility lie?”
