Eclipsing the sun

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, July 2, 2006

EVERETT – Shaun Hughes wear Sun Precautions’ clothes for a more important reason than loyalty to the company he founded.

He’s trying to save his skin, as well as others, from skin cancer.

It’s not a hypothetical threat for Hughes, the Everett-born and bred president of Sun Precautions. More than 20 years ago, a brush with cancer made him serious about helping others protect themselves and resulted in his now 16-year-old enterprise.

“We help some of the world’s most sun-sensitive people, who on a day like this, it would be horribly debilitating to them,” he said, gesturing toward the afternoon sunshine streaming in the windows of his headquarters building.

But his clothes, hats and accessories also are worn by people with typical skin and normal sensitivity who have become more aware of the potential dangers of too much exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

Sun Precautions’ Solumbra clothing line promises to offer at least the same protection as a thick layer of SPF 30 sunscreen. Hughes calls it “a medical solution that happens to be clothing.”

To back that up, he went to the Food and Drug Administration at the company’s start and had the patented Solumbra fabric designated as a medical device. He’s also shown the fabric and clothes to countless dermatologists and doctors, resulting in their recommendation of Solumbra products to their patients.

“We’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. Going through the FDA’s not easy, going through the medical community’s not easy,” he said.

Hughes, 49, also goes one step further. Several times a year, he slaps samples of Solumbra fabric on his back at a UV testing laboratory, which is then exposed to 31 sunburn doses of UV rays. That’s roughly equal to a day’s worth of sun in the sunniest spots on earth.

That testing is important, he said, because many of his customers actually could be injured by the sun if the fabric fails its job.

“I’m customer No. 1. I’d never want to have a product that’s defective and hurts me,” he said.

The passion for his product is understandable when Hughes tells of his own close call. Growing up and going to school in the 1960s and ’70s, he and his friends barely gave a second thought to the sun. It was a time when the sun-baked look was considered attractive.

“We thought being in the sun was healthy, that having a tan was healthy,” he said. Sunbathers at the time lathered on the baby oil and cocoa butter instead of sunscreen.

When he was in Harvard Business School, a friend of Hughes urged him to have a suspicious-looking mole checked. A visit to a dermatologist and subsequent mole removal surgery brought bad news: Hughes had a malignant melanoma at age 26.

“I’m a lucky guy; it was caught early,” said Hughes, who went on to become a Wall Street securities analyst and consultant for a time.

In a cruel twist, the friend who’d almost dragged him to the dermatologist later died of skin cancer herself.

With those personal experiences, Hughes got serious about protecting himself. But he found that he still sometimes got sunburned beneath his clothes, as the average cotton T-shirt offers a sun protection factor of 6.

So, with a background of helping other companies get off the ground, Hughes quit his job in the late 1980s, met with researchers and attended dermatology conferences. With help, he eventually developed and patented specialized woven nylon fabrics, got the FDA designation and began marketing the Solumbra clothes in 1992. Selling first through catalogs, the company set up a pioneering online store back in 1994.

Now, Sun Precautions also sells its clothes at stores in Seattle, La Jolla and Santa Monica, Calif., and at its Everett headquarters.

Most of the clothes are made at the company’s manufacturing plant in Seattle. Having it here, instead of overseas, helps the company maintain its quality control.

Designing clothes that protect adequately while remaining comfortable and fashionable is a chief challenge, Hughes said.

“It’s always hard to make things that are long-sleeved or broad-brimmed that also are comfortable and cool,” he said.

Products are designed in-house or with the help of consulting designers, Hughes said, with a great deal of influence from customers’ comments.

While publicity about general sun protection has helped bring more customers to Sun Precautions, the number of buyers who suffer from skin cancer or sun sensitivity also has grown over the years, Hughes said.

According to the American Cancer Society, more than 1 million new cases of skin cancer are diagnosed in the U.S. annually, with more than 20,000 expected to die from skin cancers or melanoma this year.

This is the busy season for Sun Precautions, as people tend to buy more from Sun Precautions when the weather’s sunny in the company’s main market of North America. But orders come in from people around the globe, as his customers include ultramarathon competitors, ambassadors and exotic travelers.

“Our motto is, ‘It’s always sunny somewhere, it’s always summer somewhere,’ ” he said.

Reporter Eric Fetters: 425-339-3453 or fetters@heraldnet.com.