From there, he’d go all over, to Mardi Gras, the Final Four, then end up at the Cannes Film Festival. And that’s the way he was he never stopped. And there’s Ron up on the stage, and he won’t stop. The spout hits and knocks some people over, some people got hurt. “I’ll never forget, we got hit by a water spout. “The party was inside, the pageant was outside,” Cohen said. The initial pageant took place at the Plaza Hotel, one of a few Daytona-area hotels owned by Allan Cohen’s family. Trump’s relationship with Rice and Rice's annual event was also seen as the impetus for Trump’s later purchase of the Miss Universe franchise. The girls, they’d just walk into an event and everybody was like, ‘Oh, my, it’s the Hawaiian Tropic girls!’ ”Ī few years ago, Rice stated the obvious: “The perks that came along with it all were amazing.” Fast timesĪmong the celebrity judges Rice courted during the pageant’s run was a future United States president, Donald Trump, who met his second wife, Marla Maples, when she was a Miss Hawaiian Tropic contestant. "Somehow he always managed to find himself there. “I think Ron found the things he enjoyed and found a way to put himself in that sphere,” she said. Kramer choreographed those outings and remembers it as a mix of much work but much fun. Rice and Hawaiian Tropic became synonymous with his big roster of young women who traveled to major international events and promoted the product.
“That was when Ron could move away from the hustling - getting the product into stores - to start concentrating on promoting it, finding new things. “I came into the company when it was already well established,” said Kramer, who was Rice’s promotions director from 1985 through the 2007 sale. But not before putting together several lifetimes-worth of jet-setting fun and games, including his annual Miss Hawaiian Tropic contests (from 1983-2010), which began in Daytona Beach before going nationwide and around the globe. In 2007, roughly four decades after filling his first garbage can with tanning oil, Rice sold the Ormond Beach-based company for $83 million. It worked, as Hawaiian Tropic became a mainstay on the shelves in drug stores, grocery stores and T-shirt shops the world over - a far cry from the surfside vendors who first agreed to sell his wares on the World’s Most Famous Beach. Rice was an early participant in what would become known as guerilla marketing - getting a product’s name in the mainstream through a variety of promotional methods, some of them unconventional. “We didn’t know what to do with it.” A job with perks “We were making money hand over fist,” Rice said a few years ago. Rice originally called it Tropic Tan, but soon learned that name already belonged to someone else, so he went with Hawaiian Tropic, bottled and sold it himself, then sold some more, and some more, eventually landed a distributor, and within a decade was well on his way to building a worldwide brand.
“I just thought it’d be something fun to do in the summertime.”
“I didn’t think it’d go anywhere at first,” he once said. He hired a pair of 11-year-old kids to fill the first bottles of his lotion, one bottle at a time, from that garbage can.īefore long, his eight-year career as a local school teacher and assistant football coach was over. Instead of bubbling crude - “Texas tea” - for Ron Rice it all started with some mineral oil, coconut oil, some extracts, some this, some that - “a little ABC with XYZ,” he once explained. In many ways, I think he was the original Jed Clampett.” “Here’s this kid in the Carolina mountains, running around barefoot, selling Christmas wreaths, working hard like his father taught him. “It’s almost right out of the Mark Twain stories,” said long-ago marketing partner Allan Cohen. Or a struggling local high school science teacher who used his basic chemistry knowledge to strike gold. Or a summertime lifeguard in his adopted Daytona Beach, straight out of the University of Tennessee, who saw countless bottles of Coppertone suntan lotion and thought, “I can do that!”
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