Marty Bell on Building Poolsuite, Scaling Creative IP and Why Cayman is the Right Base.

A: The week I put our first (very badly built) website online it went viral, and I think I probably had less than 100 followers at the time. I was refreshing Twitter every 10 seconds to try to keep up with the number of people posting it. I knew at that moment I’d tapped into something people genuinely appreciated. Even while working on other, better-funded companies, I realised it was nearly impossible to recreate the kind of organic hype and excitement Poolsuite had generated. That’s when I knew we’d captured something rare, and I started shifting my focus back to it full time.

A: What excites me most is thinking through the ways in which we can use the IP we’ve built to bring people increasingly richer, more tangible versions of our world.

We started with a music website and some 90s themed apps for iPhone and Mac, which act like a magnet to pull people in, to hang around, and to lounge by the (virtual) pool with us. Next we started throwing parties in different cities like London, NYC, Barcelona and Ibiza, allowing people to experience the brand in the real world for the first time.

A few years later we launched our first physical products with the announcement of our sunscreen brand, Vacation®, which allowed us to bring people even closer, and to layer in more nostalgia through things like scent, eccentric copywriting, novel product formats, packaging design, etc. We even tracked down 10 dot-matrix printers from the 90s and stockpiled toner so customers could get receipts on that iconic retro paper with holes down each side. Our fulfilment centre had to build a box around them just to contain the noise — but those details make the difference.

Next up for Poolsuite, we’re eager to bring people even closer as we begin exploring hospitality opportunities in earnest. What if our radio station came to life as a rustic Caribbean beach bar, broadcasting from an iconic seaside shack? What if we opened a boutique hotel that’s perpetually trapped in 1986? Cayman feels like a great place to explore those ideas – it’s the only place I’ve found that takes leisure and innovation equally seriously, which very much aligns with our ethos.

That’s the true benefit of having built this world (and IP) that, thankfully, many people want to be a part of – there’s always a new way to make them feel more a part of it. Particularly a world so linked to lounging in the sun, exploring the many interpretations of the good life, not taking things too seriously, and celebrating a time before scrolling Instagram and TikTok hijacked our leisure time.

A: It’s taken me a little too long to realise the importance of keeping things simple. I get over-excited about too many ideas and the 100 different directions we could take our brands, when in reality, the majority of our fans just want us to do more of what we’re already doing. They don’t need 5 new spin-out brands or avant-garde creative concepts every quarter. So, I’m trying my best to learn how to do fewer things, while obsessing over the details of those few things.

A: For years Poolsuite carried this tongue-in-cheek lore of being a rag-tag Caribbean broadcasting corporation, despite us really being in the UK and Europe. Now I finally get to live the life we were selling – if I get a bad email, I can be in the sea with an emergency banana daiquiri within 10 minutes.

What really makes Cayman right for Poolsuite is that it treats intangible assets like IP, design, software and brand equity with the seriousness they deserve, while giving us the stability and credibility to scale them globally.

A: I think it’s important to stay in an experimental and creative phase for as long as possible until you’ve tested and validated a solid business model. I tend to talk about things as projects or experiments until they have achieved a level of sustainable revenue that justifies calling it a business. It just takes the pressure off to be able to tell people that something is an experiment – and as long as you haven’t sold your grandpa’s war medals to fund the idea – it doesn’t really matter if the idea doesn’t work out.

You can wrap your experiments in a brand name, build a community or fan base around what you’re passionate about, and engage in a succession of low-risk experiments to see what your audience loves and doesn’t love. With enough testing, feedback and perseverance, you’re very likely to strike gold – at which point you may consider calling it a business. In everything I do now and going forward I use this template (and I’m by no means saying this is the best possible model, it’s just the one that happens to work for me):

• Step 1: Find and develop a community wrapped in a brand name, centred around something I’m really passionate about.
• Step 2: Engage that community with newsletters, content, social posts and events.
• Step 3: Start releasing experimental paid products or services to the community. Test, learn and remix the ideas until something clicks.
  

A: Okay there are a lot of items on this list, maybe hundreds, but if I have to choose one… there’s an incredibly cool old school AM/FM radio designed for floating in a pool called the ‘Jandy Sound Wave’. I’d do a crossover between that and the quintessential conference phone — the spider phone you see in every boardroom, so we can have more team conference calls from the comfort of an XL hot tub.

A: I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan in the last two years, and on both trips, my partner and I have ended up shipping boxes full of vintage magazines back to our apartment. Whenever we need a little inspiration or creative boost, we’ll dive into those. Nobody considers the details like the Japanese do! I also spend a lot of time on creative curation platforms like Cosmos (for visuals) and Sublime (for words). Lastly, I really enjoyed reading the book ‘Slow Productivity’ by Cal Newport recently, as I try to break out of the grind-every-day startup founder mindset I’ve been operating on for most of my career, to help me transition into building meaningful brands at a more Caribbean pace.