The Salon Owner Who Became Michigan's Tanning Bed Expert

Every company has a founding story. Ours starts with a dead tanning bed, a full appointment book, and a phone that nobody was answering.

It started behind the counter

Before Sun Systems and Service existed, Stan Pope ran his own tanning salon. He knew the business from the owner's side of the desk: the memberships, the morning rush, the clients who notice a weak tan before you do. He also knew the part nobody talks about. When a bed went down, the people who could fix it were few, far away, and in no hurry. The parts companies would sell you a box and wish you luck. A bed could sit for a week while the appointment book bled.

So he learned the machines himself. The ballasts and starters, the timers and relays, the acrylics and the lamps and the way output fades long before a tube goes dark. He fixed his own beds. Then other owners started calling. In 1990 the calls became a company.

Thirty-five years of showing up

Sun Systems and Service was built around one idea: the person who answers the phone should be the person who can fix the bed. No dispatcher, no call center, no technician flown in from three states away. Stan drove to the salons himself, carried the common parts on the truck, and told owners what it would cost before he touched anything. He learned every make and model that came through Michigan, including the ones the manufacturers stopped supporting, because a salon cannot afford to retire a bed just because a company moved on.

Hundreds of Michigan salons have been kept running that way. Some of them have been calling the same number for three decades. Many of them opened with equipment Stan sourced, installed and tested, and trained their first staff on lamp changes in his presence.

Then he went deeper than any technician needed to

Most people who fix tanning beds stop at the parts catalog. Stan kept asking why. Why does a lamp lose output on a curve? What does the body actually receive from a given light, and how do you measure it? Those questions put him in the company of scientists, and between 2008 and 2012 Stanley J. Pope, writing under the Sun Systems and Service name, became an author on five peer-reviewed papers on ultraviolet light. His co-authors were Dianne Godar of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, Michael Holick of Boston University School of Medicine, one of the most cited vitamin D researchers in the world, and William Grant of the Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center. Two of the papers carry his name first.

The research is about measurement, not about tanning beds. It works out how to turn a UV reading from a meter lying flat into the dose a standing human body actually gets, and how to convert a sunburn-weighted dose into a vitamin D-weighted one, so that scientists studying either the risks or the benefits of sunlight work from realistic numbers. The later papers applied that math to tens of thousands of American children and adults. A Metro Detroit tanning bed technician helped write them.

• Pope SJ, Holick MF, Mackin S, Godar DE. Action spectrum conversion factors that change erythemally weighted to previtamin D3-weighted UV doses. Photochemistry and Photobiology, 2008. PubMed
• Pope SJ, Godar DE. Solar UV geometric conversion factors: horizontal plane to cylinder model. Photochemistry and Photobiology, 2010. PubMed
• Grant WB, Pope SJ, Moan JE. Indoor tanning and risk of melanoma: a case-control study in a highly exposed population, letter. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, 2010. PubMed
• Godar DE, Pope SJ, Grant WB, Holick MF. Solar UV doses of adult Americans and vitamin D3 production. Dermato-Endocrinology, 2011. Full text
• Godar DE, Pope SJ, Grant WB, Holick MF. Solar UV doses of young Americans and vitamin D3 production. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2012. Full text

What that means for you

When Stan tells you a set of lamps is done at 700 hours, or that a yellowed acrylic is costing you output, or that a bed tripping its breaker after it warms up is telling you about the ballast, that is not a sales sheet talking. It is a man who has spent 35 years inside these machines and several more measuring the light they make. The same is true for the red light beds and hybrids that are changing the business now. They run on the lighting, power and cooling fundamentals he has worked on since before most of their manufacturers existed.

Where we are today

Still small on purpose. Still one number. Still open seven days, because beds do not break on a schedule. What has grown is the reach.

• Salons across Metro Detroit and Michigan get on-site repair, parts by request, inspected used equipment and help opening new locations, with special jobs in Ohio, Indiana and northern Michigan.
• Homeowners in Birmingham, West Bloomfield, Bloomfield Hills and across Oakland County get the same technician for tanning bed and red light bed installation in finished spaces, with one number for the life of the equipment.
• Anyone in the United States can put Stan on their phone. Virtual sessions bring a technician since 1990 to salons in states that have none left.
• Everyone can use the free tools built from his service calls: a troubleshooter, a relamp scheduler, an electrician spec sheet and a salon estimator.

A note from Stan

Thank you for stopping by. I started Sun Systems and Service in 1990 because I had been the salon owner with the dead bed and nobody to call, and I did not think anyone else should have to be. Thirty-five years later this is still a small company on purpose. When you call, you get me. I know most of the beds in Metro Detroit by the sound they make, I carry the common parts on the truck, and I tell you what it will cost before I touch anything. The same goes for the homeowners we now install tanning beds and red light beds for. Your house gets treated like a finished space, and you get one number to call for the life of the equipment. We are open seven days, because beds do not break on a schedule. I appreciate the chance to earn your business.

Stan Pope
Founder, Sun Systems & Service