Dakota Green and the hard work of taking it easy

Dakota Green’s business contains a small, satisfying absurdity: someone had to work very hard to make sunscreen come out like whipped cream. There were valves to consider. There were manufacturers to find. There was the question of what, precisely, should emerge when a customer pressed the nozzle. A joke can survive on a sketchpad for years. Putting it in a can requires a rather less leisurely afternoon.

Green helped found Vacation with Lach Hall and Marty Bell, and his responsibilities have included product development and operations. That combination is useful here. Vacation sells the idea of a permanent holiday, complete with retro graphics, tropical scents and honorary office jobs. Green works where that imaginary place acquires physical properties: a texture, a package, a production process. Someone has to arrange for paradise to ship.

The revealing moment in his story involves a video of pancakes. A friend showed Green and Hall a scientist putting pancake mix into an aerosol can. Green’s response was practical in a gloriously impractical direction: “If this guy can make pancakes in a can, then we can put sunscreen in a can.” It is a fairly complete business proposition, provided you are willing to spend the next eighteen months on the punctuation.

A holiday with a production schedule

Before Vacation, Green worked in advertising. An older professional profile identifies him as a strategist at Droga5, with a wonderfully economical autobiographical note: “I used to manage hotels.” His LinkedIn education lists Portland State University and participation in the McNair Scholars program. These are quieter entries than the eventual whipped-cream can, but they place him in a working world of research, service and persuasion.

By 2017, he and Hall were consulting remotely in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Their surroundings supplied the question that would become Vacation: why did a product used in such enjoyable places offer so little enjoyment of its own? The idea developed over several years. It was an observation about the gap between an object and the occasion in which people use it.

Bell supplied a particularly suitable connection. His internet radio project, Poolside FM, later Poolsuite, had already assembled an audience around a nostalgic summer atmosphere. Through his private founder chat, Jacuzzi Club, the future partners connected. A radio station could offer an imaginary afternoon. A bottle could bring some of that afternoon into someone’s hand.

The early campaign was assembled from a rented villa in the Dominican Republic, with whiteboards on easels around the pool. Even the planning apparatus suited the proposition. Fans were invited to claim invented company jobs; more than 10,000 did. Vacation launched in 2021 with an audience willing to participate in the fiction before it had much experience of the merchandise.

The nozzle is part of the joke

Classic Whip is a useful way to understand Green’s contribution because its promise is visible before anyone explains it. A red-and-white can dispenses a shaped mound of mousse. The resemblance to whipped cream turns an ordinary gesture into a miniature performance. The packaging has already begun the conversation by the time the user presses down.

To make it happen, Vacation worked with Clayton Corporation, the company connected to the invention of Reddi-wip and a manufacturer of aerosol valves. Kevin Martz, its vice president of business development, initially wondered why anyone would want whipped sunscreen. A reasonable question. In Green’s business, reasonable questions appear to be useful starting points for unusually specific products.

The task brought together the can, its contents and the mechanism that delivered them. Honeywell scientists also participated in development. The collaborators had to produce something that behaved like the idea in the founders’ heads, rather than something that merely resembled it in a photograph. The sound, the peaks and the feel were all part of what customers were being invited to enjoy.

Development took a year and a half and nearly 100 iterations. Those numbers give the can a second meaning. Beneath its breezy appearance sits repeated adjustment, the sort of work that usually disappears when the finished object is finally convincing. Customers see a playful dispenser. The development team has spent months making sure there is a reason to keep pressing it.

How do you manufacture a memory?

Orange Gelée presented Green with a different problem. Here the audience already had a product in mind, and some of its members had been missing it for years. Bain de Soleil’s discontinued gel carried memories of holidays and a distinctive color, scent and texture. Recreating an object is difficult enough. Recreating the object as several thousand people remember it introduces a more demanding brief.

Vacation recruited an advisory panel of 11 enthusiasts and beauty experts. They contributed to decisions about the feel, color, fragrance, packaging and marketing. This placed the prospective customer inside the development process. People who might otherwise have waited to deliver a verdict could help shape what eventually arrived.

Green described the central complication neatly: “Memory is such a subjective thing.” One person’s recollection of a fragrance is not a laboratory specification. Nor does a beloved texture necessarily mean exactly the same thing to everyone who remembers it. The project required the team to translate those recollections into choices that could be made, tested and repeated.

The work took nearly two years. Alongside it, Vacation published the project’s history and progress through blog posts, allowing interested customers to follow its development. By the March 2024 launch, the waitlist exceeded 15,000. In its first three days, the revival outsold Vacation’s next most popular product sixfold. Green put the invitation simply: “We’re offering people a chance to use a product that they miss or missed out on.”

“Memory is such a subjective thing.”

Dakota Green, on developing Orange Gelée

An office you might actually join

The products live inside a fictional organization whose employees seem exceptionally concerned with leisure. Vacation offers honorary roles, virtual business cards and staff merchandise. On its website, the business card receives the kind of loving description normally reserved for the product itself: eggshell, with Garamond type. Even make-believe administration deserves decent stationery.

Green carries that register into his own public biography. His LinkedIn introduction describes experience in waterside commerce, a delightfully roundabout way of announcing that he makes sunscreen. The humor depends on keeping a straight face. Ordinary professional language is allowed to continue until its subject becomes a little too tropical to sustain the formality.

There is a sensory counterpart to that writing. Vacation worked with the fragrance house Arquiste, including perfumers Carlos Huber and Rodrigo Flores-Roux. Its signature scent includes coconut and banana alongside swimming-pool references: water, toys and swimsuit fabric. Those details help place the product in a recognizable setting. You need not own a resort to recognize what its pool smells like.

Packaging also connects customers to Poolsuite through QR codes. The radio station, the scent and the honorary job offer different ways into the same atmosphere. Their coexistence makes Green’s product work more exacting. A bottle has to belong among the music and the jokes; it also has to justify being taken home, opened and used. The fiction keeps asking for tangible evidence.

The title changes. The product stays close.

Green has held a real corporate title behind the imaginary ones. In July 2023, he signed a Vacation securities filing as chief executive officer, using his full name, James Dakota Green. By 2025, his public speaking biography described responsibility for product development and operations. At that year’s Florida Sunscreen Symposium, he was scheduled to discuss strategy and storytelling with beauty editor and podcast host Jessica Matlin.

That pairing captures the range of the job. A development decision can become a story someone tells a friend, and a story can become a reason to attempt a difficult development project. The whipped can and the revived gel approached the problem from opposite directions. One began with an unexpected possibility; the other began with an existing attachment. Both demanded attention to how an object would feel in someone else’s hands.

In August 2026, Vacation appointed Nelson Miranda as its first outside CEO. Green remained involved and continued leading product development. Miranda brought experience at Procter & Gamble, Revlon and Not Your Mother’s. The company had grown to more than 40 employees and distribution in about 15,000 retail locations. A larger organization now had to support the founders’ ideas.

Green welcomed the appointment publicly and explained what he wanted it to make possible: more time for the brand and its products. He also stated the longer ambition directly: “It’s always been our ambition to build a global brand.” That gives the next stage a concrete tension. An imagined resort can expand indefinitely. Each new product still has to make it through development.

For Green, the evidence so far is satisfyingly physical: a can that makes a familiar gesture surprising, a gel that asks people to compare the present with a remembered summer, a bottle whose scent includes a pool toy. The permanent holiday has acquired an operating company. Somewhere inside it, another very cheerful idea will need a manufacturer.