The Sunscreen Site That Hacked My Senses
What a Foam Sunscreen, Yacht Rock, and ChatGPT Taught Me About Conversion
I opened Vacation.inc for “five-minute research” and lost half an hour.
I was hunting summer-sale ideas, clicked a link, and boom seagulls, neon fonts, an old-school cursor wobbling across grainy pool photos. A radio window popped out of the screen and I’m 90 % sure my living-room smelled like pool chlorine for a second.
The nostalgia alone is worth the visit, but what really hooked me is the invisible layer of AI that keeps the illusion running and the cash register ringing. Every move they make is something you and I can copy—whether we’re selling coffee pods, $12 socks, or a SaaS subscription.
First contact: the homepage loads, a polite cookie banner appears, and then the retro overload hits—pastel headlines, grainy resort shots, a foam-in-a-can sunscreen that does a tiny wiggle when my cursor drifts past it. A 10 %-off badge hangs out in the corner, never shouts, and quietly follows me if I scroll. Nice, but not mind-blowing.
The mind-blowing part sits down in the footer: Vibe Generator. One click and whoosh—soft waves, cocktail-shaker clinks, distant tropical birds. The sound keeps running even when I jump to Gmail, quietly stacking “time with brand” while I answer Slack pings. There’s a rule of thumb in marketing that people need about seven hours with a brand before they buy; Vacation just hacked it with background beach noise.
Mid-scroll the layout morphs into a torn-out magazine ad—“Vacation Clipper” coupons, 90s phone numbers, press logos from the New York Times to Vanity Fair. Hover any product card and a hidden snapshot appears: tennis courts for the candle, a hotel lobby for the body oil. Tiny dopamine hit, zero lag.
Then PoolSuite FM steals me. A little Windows-95 desktop window slides out, yacht-rock starts playing, and I’m laughing—and staying. Users who click reportedly hang around 14 minutes on average. That’s dwell time brands usually buy with retargeting; Vacation gets it for free.
One more detail I loved—Vacation doesn’t just cater to nostalgia lovers; it also looks out for every visitor’s needs. Tap the blue “Accessibility” button and a UserWay widget slides in, giving options like a built-in screen reader, high-contrast mode, bigger text, even adjustable letter-spacing. Five seconds and the site flips into a fully ADA-friendly experience—no separate URL, no hunting for tiny links. Inclusive design and better dwell-time? Win-win.
Lead capture? No boring pop-up. Instead, a pastel business-card machine offers me an “Honorary Role.” Shuffle once: Strawberry-Margarita Liaison. Again: Senior Beach-Umbrella Designer. When one sticks, the site asks for name + email to “print” the card. A GPT mini-app does the heavy lifting, and 75 k+ people have played along—three-times the opt-in rate of their old discount pop-up.
Here’s where the AI hides in plain sight:
Vizit visual scoring. They feed every photo into Vizit before spending ad dollars. One whipped-cream SPF shot scored 96.3 / 100 with Gen-Z women—top 1 % of beauty images—and sold out in 48 hours.
Generative production. Designers crank out VHS-style assets in Midjourney + Runway, drop the best into TikTok Spark Ads. 80 % of Classic Whip sales now come from TikTok Shop; #VacationSunscreen just rolled past 40 M views.
Business-card lead gen. The GPT title generator converts emails 3× better than a straight discount—and doesn’t train shoppers to wait for coupons.
Send-time prediction. New addresses flow into Klaviyo’s AI; open rates stay above 50 % versus a 37 % beauty norm.
Reinforcement-learning playlist. PoolSuite bumps songs up or down by skip rate, just like Spotify does, so the music never feels stale.
Stack those “tiny moves” together and you get big numbers: revenue on track to jump from $16 M to $40 M this year, average order value up 18 % thanks to AI-picked bundles (Classic Lotion + Chardonnay Oil), and weekly UGC worth $70–80 K in saved CPMs.
Why should founders and marketers care?
Because none of these tricks requires Nike-sized budgets or a dev team of 20.
Image scoring—free Vizit trial, upload ten photos, use the winner.
Micro-apps—one GPT call costs pennies; Typeform + Zapier glues it together.
Send-time AI—already lives inside Klaviyo, Iterable, even Mailchimp beta.
Sound loops—a $10 Webflow embed or a humble MP3 tag can keep visitors parked.
Translation: better list growth, richer zero-party data, cheaper ads, happier margins.
I pulled together a one-pager of 15 ready-to-use ChatGPT prompts that can help you implement similar strategies for your brand. Steal the Resource here.
All you need to do is copy, tweak a few {variables}, and drop int ChatGPT. I've tested these across different sectors—they work for fashion, beauty, home goods, and even SaaS.
Now the big question, If a seasonal sunscreen can whip foam into $40 million by weaving AI into nostalgia, imagine what you can do with sneakers, coffee, candles, or SaaS log-ins.
Catch you next Sunday,
— Sid