Nelson Miranda Has Been Hired to Keep Vacation Weird - and Make It Bigger

Nelson Miranda was going to take a break. This was, in the spring of 2026, a perfectly civilized idea. The hair-care business he had led since 2020 had just entered an agreement to be acquired by Henkel. Not Your Mother's had finished the previous year growing 40 percent. Six years of steering a Tampa-area company through restless retail, generational tastes and dozens of annual product launches had produced the sort of exit after which a person might reasonably become reacquainted with weekday lunch.

Then came Vacation. The Miami sunscreen company had a job available, although it did not sound much like a break. Its three founders had made an imaginary 1980s resort into a real consumer business. They had put sunscreen into a whipped-cream can, written corporate memos in the voice of a company that seemed to employ half the population, and given a fictional regional sales manager named Ray Smith a recurring role in customer emails. The products sat in about 15,000 retail doors. The joke had acquired inventory.

Miranda knew the brand. Not Your Mother's had once explored a collaboration with Vacation, and he had watched its founders make a utilitarian category feel like a destination. He abandoned the holiday before it began and became Vacation's first chief executive from outside the founding trio.

The handoff is the story

Chief executive appointments are usually reported as changes of person. This one is better understood as a change of tense. Vacation has been founder-led. Miranda wants it to become founder-inspired, then eventually culture-led. In his formulation, the company's habits, values and peculiar strengths must become independent of whoever happens to be in the room.

“You need to go from being founder-led, which is where Vacation has been, to the stage of being founder-inspired.”Nelson Miranda

That sounds orderly, almost architectural. It is also full of traps. Founder magic is easily praised and difficult to document. A spreadsheet cannot explain why pool-water fragrance notes are funny, why fake titles make people feel included, or when one more collaboration turns delight into clutter. Scale adds process precisely where instinct once sufficed.

The founders are not being sent to a ceremonial cabana. Dakota Green continues to lead product development. Lach Hall remains immersed in social and creative work. Marty Bell, whose Poolsuite radio station helped launch the brand, continues advising on creative direction. Miranda has said he would not have accepted the role if they were leaving the day-to-day business. This is not a founder exorcism. It is a division of attention.

Three corporate educations

Miranda arrives with an unusual combination of engineering training and a career spent making people care about bottles, jars and tubes. His first long education came at Procter & Gamble, where he spent roughly two decades in marketing roles across the United States and Latin America. He regards P&G as an institution that helped invent the modern practice of brand marketing. It taught him what scale can do when research, distribution and a clear proposition line up.

Revlon supplied the counter-lesson. Miranda spent more than seven years there, eventually serving as senior vice president of sales and marketing for the North American prestige division. Compared with P&G, Revlon felt scrappy. His summary of the experience is pleasantly unornamented: be more nimble and do more with less.

The third education was ownership at closer range. When he became chief executive of DeMert Brands and Not Your Mother's in 2020, he was no longer one senior leader inside a giant enterprise. He was responsible for the whole mechanism: people, product, retail, margins, marketing and the mood on Monday morning. In 2021, he publicly named a workplace ambition alongside the commercial ones. He wanted DeMert to become one of the Tampa Bay area's best places to work.

Taken together, the three stops gave Miranda a working vocabulary for Vacation's present condition: the discipline of a large consumer company, the resourcefulness of a smaller one and the intimacy of a founder-built business. An engineer might call these constraints. A marketer might call them the brief.

A hair-care run ends in a sale

Not Your Mother's was already an established independent brand when Miranda arrived. Bethany and Rocky Pagliarulo had launched it in 2010 with six products in 400 Walmart stores. Under Miranda, it grew into a range of 86 products across nine collections and reached 40,485 stores nationwide by late 2025. Its Curl Talk range alone accounted for roughly 40 percent of sales.

The result that draws the eye is the final year's acceleration. The business grew 40 percent in 2025 while the broader mass hair-care category had risen 4 percent in the first half of that year. In March 2026, Henkel announced an agreement to buy Not Your Mother's from Main Post Partners. The buyer said the brand had generated about €190 million in 2025 sales, with double-digit growth and a strong gross margin. The financial terms stayed private.

Miranda's explanation of the operating loop is less glamorous than the outcome. As the company grew, purchasing leverage and cost work improved its margins. Those savings went back into product development and marketing. Efficiency did not become the destination; it bought more chances to create demand. Vacation's founders are betting that the same loop can fund their expensive ideas without making those ideas answer to the loop.

Depth before distance

Vacation is no delicate internet curiosity. By the time Miranda arrived, it employed more than 40 people and sold through a patchwork of luxury hotel gift shops, beauty retailers and big-box stores. It had also attracted investment from VMG Partners, whose consumer portfolio supplied both capital and a certain expectation of scale.

The tempting move would be to plant flags: more countries, more shops, more categories, more announcements. Miranda's immediate plan is less theatrical. He wants to find gaps in the organization, bring discipline to an active launch and collaboration calendar, and increase sales through the doors Vacation already has. International expansion can wait.

“My short-term responsibility is looking at gaps in the organization where we need to scale.”Nelson Miranda

This is where his engineering background becomes visible, not as a credential but as a preference for sequence. A company with many clever products can still be undone by ordinary things arriving in the wrong order. The Pepsi Wild Cherry lip collaboration is charming on a screen. Behind it sit forecasting, supply, retailer conversations, launch dates and dozens of decisions that should never become visible to the customer.

Miranda has also left himself room for commercially impolite choices. Some launches, he says, may dilute margins because they serve the consumer or build the brand. This is a useful admission. A brand built entirely by return calculations soon looks as though it was built by return calculations. The trick is knowing which indulgence creates memory and which merely creates an invoice.

Keep Ray at his desk

The smallest promise Miranda has made may be the most revealing. Ray Smith, Vacation's fictional regional sales manager and part-time accountant, will keep his job. Ray appears in social spots and customer-service emails, the loyal drudge of an imaginary corporation permanently adjourned for leisure. Asked about his fate under new management, Miranda replied that Ray would still be in the office when everyone else was out partying.

It was a joke, naturally. It was also reassurance from an incoming operator who knows the audience is watching for signs of tidying. Vacation's fictions are not decoration pasted onto the business. They are how customers enter it. Remove enough silly titles, odd scents and unnecessary flourishes and what remains may be perfectly efficient sunscreen in a handsome container. The world already has some.

Miranda speaks admiringly about founder-led products because founders, in his experience, do not compromise on what they consider their baby. The phrase is familiar; the consequence is not. At scale, refusal to compromise collides daily with freight, shelf space, gross margin and calendars. His real work will be to distinguish conviction from habit, and discipline from dilution.

The culture has to carry it

There is no clean ending yet, only a useful beginning. Vacation has hired a career operator at the moment when its invented corporation has become a substantial real one. Miranda has taken the assignment at the moment when a successful exit might have justified rest. The founders have surrendered a title while keeping their hands on the work that made the title valuable.

If the arrangement succeeds, Vacation will not feel more managed. It will simply become capable of doing its peculiar work more often, in more places, without exhaustion turning whimsy into obligation. Founder inspiration will show up in decisions made when no founder is present. The company's humor will survive a planning meeting. Ray Smith will remain tragically overworked.

That is the quiet audacity in Miranda's three-stage idea. A founder-led company depends on a few people's taste. A founder-inspired one learns to share it. A culture-led company makes the taste repeatable without making it routine. Vacation sells the sensation of having escaped the office. Nelson Miranda has gone to work to preserve it.