Looking Fit interviews Dr. Laughlin
October 31, 2002

Looking Fit magazine featured an interview with Dr. Laughlin in this month’s Hot Topics section. The interview was included in a lengthy article on the role of sunless tanning in the indoor tanning industry. The parts of the article relating to Dr. Laughlin’s interview are pasted together below.

The goal of any tanning salon should be to stand out in a crowded marketplace by offering a unique experience. Many salons offer facial services, aromatherapy, nail services and even body wraps. Another profitable--and somewhat controversial--ancillary profit-generator is sunless tanning systems. The phrase sounds as redundant as jumbo shrimp, non-alcoholic beer, scheduled spontaneity and other oxymorons. In most cases, supporting something in direct competition with your product is financial suicide. Imagine a Coke distributor advising his drinkers to slam down an ice-cold Pepsi. Although that will never happen in a capitalist society, advances in the application process have led many tanning salon operators to take a second look at sunless tanning.

By definition, sunless tanning and UV tanning should be competitors, but both methods actually may complement each other.

Mist-On Tan's Dr. Tom Laughlin says people often find that the brown they get from UV tanning is beautifully complemented by the golden brown they can get from the mist. He agrees that some salon operators think sunless machines create competition with the UV machines.

"They think UV sales will decrease, but that's not what happens," he says. "We have reports of UV bed tanning going up as much as 30 percent. I am not talking about added revenue from the Mist-On, I'm talking about just what it does to the UV bed tanning."

The ultimate pre-tan conditioner for sunless tanning systems is the UV tan, according to Laughlin. He believes UV tanning does a great job of prepping the body by dehydrating a tanner's skin and making it more susceptible to a fluid being absorbed.

"Think of the human body as a sponge; the stuff works better if your skin is slightly dehydrated," he says.

As far back as the 1970s, Mist-On's Dr. Laughlin started thinking about a way to solve the application problem. He was working with automated coating processes and learned that there was a phenomenal difference between fine coating and coarse coating. Painting a car is an example of a fine coating, while slapping something on by hand is known as a course coating.

"You would never expect anybody to paint your car by putting paint on their palm and smearing it all over your car," he says. "The finish on a person has that same quality factor in it."

His idea wasn't exactly embraced. He says everyone he talked to thought it was impossible. He conducted a full-blown patent search to find out if his idea had been realized. No one did it because no one thought you could automatically coat a person. But Laughlin, along with Mystic Tan's Cooper, made a prototype booth in 1997.

"I talked to a lot of experts in the field," Laughlin says. "The one thing they all agreed on was that it would be impossible. A few people actually said that people would die of thermal shock! I knew that was a ludicrous claim so I had to test the machine myself."

Laughlin says mist works better than lotion because it can reach various locations that are hard for lotions to reach without a partner. On the set of the television show Baywatch<$>, an expert paints sunless lotion on each actor's entire body. Amateurs have a difficult time creating the same effect. The mist dispenses the exact same amount of film over your arm as your elbow so each part of the body absorbs the same amount of DHA.

Based on his research on automatic coating processes and the latest misting technology, Dr. Laughlin founded Mist-On Tan, applying his original idea to the commercial world of indoor tanning in 1999.

He says salon operators and their customers loved it from the very beginning, but its success is up to the operator.

"Customers will try it once and if they like the results and the cost of the session you will have a customer for life," he says. "But if you can't provide adequate quality you will have a hard time getting them back."

Laughlin says the best way to think about quality is to imagine a man showing up at your door with a grandfather clock he would like you to paint. Before you get started, he mentions that he has a few restrictions: you need to paint it perfectly uniform; you are not allowed to sand it or dust it--as a matter of fact, he'll slap you if you touch it; you are not allowed to look at it while you're painting it; and worst of all, he has to be out of your salon in 10 minutes. When you are finished he is going to put the clock in the back of his Mercedes, so it better not be wet get anything on the upholstery. The clock also has a lot of cracks and crevices and he wants them perfectly coated.

"This is really important to him," Laughlin says. "And, by the way, he'll pay you $15!"

To deal with this kind of intense demand for quality, Laughlin advises that salons focus on quality service and getting it right that first time. It wasn't an easy process to develop, he adds. "Our goal was to create a system that can uniformly coat the human body and the person live to tell about it," he says. "To do something this complex at a high-uniform quality is a very expensive process, but the growth potential is phenomenal."

The purchasing price for a Mist-On system is $50,000. The price of the solution is $72 a gallon. Laughlin says operators can squeeze out roughly 30 tans for each gallon of solution at a running cost of about $2.50 to $3 per session. He advises charging customers $15 to $18 to maximize profits. Charging a lower price per session probably will generate more customers, but your profit margin will drop drastically. Several salons were grossing $10,000 per month in the first few months after purchasing a Mist-On system.