the hotel’s wellness programs. “The hotels kept calling us, asking, ‘Do you have bottles?’” she says. “This is actually a huge want for consumers—a spray-able sunscreen that won’t ruin their clothes.”
The booths don’t cost anything to install or maintain. McClellan says the yearly price on sunscreen cartridges vary according to how many booths a customer has and how much they are used.
SnappyScreen is getting set to release a new, “smarter” version of its booth, which McClellan says can capture information on peak usage times and days. That will help her company further automate inventory management and ordering. The new model of booth will also display ads, she says.
McClellan says the problem of poor coverage was highlighted to her during a family trip. She says she observed that her sister Katelyn, who is now SnappyScreen’s chief operating officer, was “a horrible sunscreen applier.”
As a freshman at Cornell University, Kristen McClellan says she went to a pitch competition on a lark, and a professor told her she could be onto something. “I ended up dedicating undergrad to figuring out the tech and my customer,” she says. “We built three prototypes and had trials; we had 400 people use it in four days. That validated the problem of people not liking to put on sunscreen.”
She founded SnappyScreen in New York in 2011, deploying this latest version of the booth in 2016, and has so far raised $3 million in seed funding from investors such as Scott Belsky, an entrepreneur and investor, who is Adobe Creative Cloud’s chief product officer; and investors Bob Hisaoka and Court Westcott, and the Monarq Incubator, among others.
McClellan says she expects to expand beyond hotels and sell SnappyScreen booths to cruise ships and waterparks, as well as local municipal parks and kids’ day camps.
“We see this similar to the progression of the hot tub,” she says. “It starts out in luxury hotels and, as hospitality seeks to meet benchmarks each other, moved into lower tiers and other constituencies. Weekly, we get at least one inquiry if we have a backyard version.”
