A SUNMUD order starts on a shop floor. One of the brand's sales reps walks into a surf shop or a natural food store, as most of them do about once a week, and goes through the shelf with the buyer to see what needs restocking.
Until this fall, that order usually ended up on paper.
Sunscreen that started at home
SUNMUD makes reef-safe mineral sunscreen in tins and sticks, tinted and untinted, made to hold up in the water. Founders Charlie, Dr. Maricruz and Miles started making it for themselves in 2017, to keep harsh chemicals off sensitive skin and out of the ocean. The name comes from elephants, which cover themselves in mud to protect their skin from the sun.
Today SUNMUD sells to more than 100 independent shops, mostly surf shops and natural food stores. Four independent sales reps in California, Florida and Puerto Rico visit those shops in person.
Every rep had a different system
Those shops are old school. Their buyers like to write orders on paper, so the reps worked the way each shop wanted. One rep would send handwritten notes. Another would fill in SUNMUD's spreadsheet order form and email it.
Either way, every order ended up in an inbox at the office. Miles turned each one into an invoice by hand and then logged it on a spreadsheet so the team could work out rep commissions. No one could see all of SUNMUD's orders in one place.
SUNMUD wanted one simple thing: a place where every rep could place orders for their shops, and the whole team could see them.
"Each rep had their own way of doing things. Some manually write it, some use our form… Right now we're trying to get them all on line sheets. It's super helpful."
A storefront link that opens in the shop
When SUNMUD asked us in August, Overjoy did not yet have a way for reps to order on a shop's behalf. So we built a simple version just for SUNMUD. It was a storefront link a rep could open in the shop, with checkout turned off so SUNMUD could keep sending its own invoices. Reps started placing orders with it in late September.
What an order looks like now
Now the rep picks the products with the buyer and submits the order before leaving the shop. The order lands in Overjoy under that shop, with the rep's name on it, instead of in someone's inbox. If the shop is new to SUNMUD, the rep opens the account right there. Nobody at SUNMUD retypes any of these orders.
In their first month on the Storefronts beta, 16 surf shops ordered through SUNMUD's reps on the storefront, adding up to ~$4,500 in wholesale orders. Seven of those shops had never ordered from SUNMUD before. Counting the orders SUNMUD's team also placed in Overjoy, close to 70% of SUNMUD's wholesale sales that month ran through Overjoy.
What started as a simple link built for one brand is now a full sales rep login, shaped by SUNMUD's feedback. Reps sign in as themselves, pick the shop they're standing in, and place the order under their own name. Any brand on Overjoy Storefronts can now give its reps the same setup.