Excerpt

. . .The wool business turned into a Catch-22. We needed to differentiate our product—make it stand out from the crowd—to market and sell our first shearing so we could buy a carding machine we couldn’t afford until we sold the fleeces. We needed a gimmick. Matilda, Ruth’s 400-pound pet pig, turned out to be our great pink hope.

Matilda had napped away a chunk of her days under the summer sun. When I found Ruth on her hands and knees on the lawn, lathering sunscreen on Matilda’s exposed flank, I had to ask, “What are you doing?”

“Protecting Matilda’s skin. I don’t want her to get cancer.”

“You don’t think smearing sunscreen on a pig is odd?”

“It’s not. Matilda doesn’t have fur like other animals. She has a thin coat of wiry hair to cover her pink-and-white skin. She needs protection, just like we do, against the UV rays the hole in the ozone layer lets through.”

Ruth was right, but the practice was, to put it mildly, unconventional. It was also the catalyst for a marketing campaign.

Ruth said, “Have you ever seen the little girl’s bared butt cheek in Coppertone ads? A dog tugs at her swimsuit, exposing her tan line.”

“Sure, I recall the ad.”

“I envision a similar sunscreen ad using Matilda as a model. I can give her a tan line. Crazy, right?”

“Yup.”

“You’re probably right, but all summer I’ve been buying sunscreen by the gallon, so maybe Matilda can make us enough money to recoup the sunscreen cost and help offset the cost of a carder.”

I doubted anything would come of Ruth’s quest, but to my surprise, when she pitched the idea to a Sydney advertising agency, they expressed interest. . .