We recently connected with David Hathaway and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, David thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I grew up and currently live in Neptune Beach, FL. My parents took me to the beach all the time and now that I’m a father I take my two sons often. My sons also play sports, and those fields get extremely hot in the summer. The frustration with heavy tents on the soccer fields and crappy beach umbrellas/canopies on the beach got me thinking there just had to be a better way! I explored Amazon and google search for months and while some companies offered decent solutions, they all had their flaws: too expensive, didn’t function on both grass and sand, too complex to set up or didn’t work in low winds or extremely heavy winds. So, I set out to solve all these issues as best I could. Today, SunSail solves every one of these problems better than any shade product on the market currently.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

I was born and raised in Neptune Beach, FL, and graduated from Fletcher Senior High in 1997. Upon graduation, I went to the University of Virginia and majored in Finance.

I worked on Wall Street, albeit in Charlotte, NC, after college as an interest rate derivative salesman and trader for two large banks. I married my wife, Katie Hathaway, my high school sweetheart, after college and we have 2 amazing sons, Cohen (13) and Henry (11).

I currently am a futures trader at Sandpiper Asset Management, a global macro hedge fund, I founded in 2012. My current passion is creating and building SunSail into a business and brand. SunSail is the best shade ever made and will be seen all over the beaches of the world very soon.

Up until devoting more time to SunSail Shades, my lifelong work has been building and trading algorithmic futures trading models. The beautiful part is this type of work is that once you have it working, the models and computers do the day-to-day work. This has allowed me to be present for my family, most importantly my two sons. It has also allowed me to explore various entrepreneurial efforts.

The most recent, and frankly the most promising, of which is SunSail Shades. The idea for SunSail came in the fall of 2020 when I was sick and tired of hauling heavy tents and complicated contraptions to the beach and soccer fields for relief from the sun. I looked around and found a few products that looked decent, but all had major flaws in design or manufacturing, so I set out to build my own.

I partnered with a design and manufacturing logistics team in Austin, TX called Gembah which assists inventors and innovators in bringing their ideas to life. Most importantly, Gembah has vast manufacturing experience across the globe and while it took far longer, thanks to Covid, to bring SunSail to life, but we sold our first SunSails in early July 2022 and haven’t looked back.

SunSail is by far and away, the most convenient, most effective, simple, and affordable shade available on the market today. It also looks really cool, works incredibly well, and blocks the sun on both sand and grass, allowing it to be used virtually anywhere.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

As previously mentioned, I partnered with an incredible company out of Austin, TX called Gembah. Gembah’s mission is to take your idea and make it a reality. I already had a clear vision of what I wanted the product to look like and how it would function, but I had no idea how to find a company to produce it for me or even where in the world they would be located. Fortunately, after working with Gembah engineers and intellectual property attorneys to ensure I wasn’t infringing upon the IP of any company, we were able to explore options for factories in several countries around the globe. We have partnered with an amazing company in China to produce SunSails and Gembah acts as my representative/liaison with that factory on the ground in China to ensure I am protected, and my interests are being looked after. Furthermore, I rely on them at times for shipping and transport logistics as this world is incredibly complex and I, with only a finance background, had zero experience in the realm. It’s so vitally important to be able to trust and communicate with your partners in every stage of the supply chain.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

Sunsails are sold DTC via our website www.sunsailshades.com and also on Amazon. The benefits to selling directly from out site is in general our customers engage and experience the brand in a deeper way and in doing so become more loyal customers. Furthermore, they tend to understand the product and while it’s quite simple to use, it does have nuances and for those that have spent time on the site, they tend to get a better experience their first time out as they’ve received a bit more education. However, being a new brand and new site, getting traffic via social and google ad spend requires a lot of work both creatively and analytically as well as a decent bit of ad dollars. Conversely, I have an Amazon team that runs my ad spend which is fairly straight forward (for them) and the ability to reach a desired audience of customers is massive. Only downside is the inability to really communicate with the customer to ensure they have the best experience possible and thus the return rate is slightly higher and you don’t enjoy the same connection with the customer.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sunsailshades.com
• Instagram: @sunsailshades
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SunSailShades/
• Youtube: @sunsailshades