Did Tom Rinks create the Taco Bell Chihuahua?

Rinks says he and Joe Shields created a Psycho Chihuahua T-shirt line, met Taco Bell at a licensing show, and then worked with the company for about 18 months on a possible mascot campaign. He says they wrote and storyboarded commercials before Taco Bell stopped responding and later aired the famous Chihuahua ads. A jury sided with Rinks and Shields on an implied contract claim.

How much did Rinks say he would have taken to settle?

Rinks told Guy Raz that if Taco Bell had offered $200,000 during the fight, he and Shields would have taken it. By the time trial began, Taco Bell offered a few million dollars, according to Rinks, but he rejected it. The jury later awarded $30.1 million plus another $12 million in interest, though Taco Bell appealed and later settled.

What does the Taco Bell story have to do with Sun Bum?

The Chihuahua fight is the origin story for Rinks's obsession with mascots that can carry a brand without a celebrity founder. Sun Bum's yellow ape works in the same register, simple, sticky, a little ridiculous, and instantly legible from a distance. Rinks's career is basically a long argument that a character can be worth more than the product category it sits on.

Tom Rinks says he would have settled the Taco Bell Chihuahua lawsuit for $200,000 before a $30.1 million jury award

The Taco Bell Chihuahua, that tiny late-90s tyrant of “Yo quiero Taco Bell” fame, apparently could have been bought off for the price of a loaded suburban kitchen renovation. On How I Built This, Tom Rinks says he and Joe Shields would have settled their fight with Taco Bell for $200,000 before a jury awarded them $30.1 million plus interest.

if they would have offered us 200,000, we’d have taken it.

Tom Rinks, on the episode

That is the whole episode in one number. Not because the rest of Rinks’s story is small. The man later built Sun Bum, a sunscreen brand that made woodgrain plastic and a yellow ape feel like beach culture rather than pharmacy aisle obligation. But $200,000 is the part that makes you sit up. It turns one of advertising’s great little-guy-beats-corporate-giant stories into something more painful and more human: five years of legal hell that, by Rinks’s telling, could have ended for less than Taco Bell probably spent focus-grouping the dog’s attitude.

The $200,000 number is the whole dog

Rinks’s version is a perfect 90s business parable, which is to say it involves Madonna, a trade show, T-shirts, licensing agents, and a corporation acting like a guy who suddenly stops texting after borrowing your car. He and Shields had a Psycho Chihuahua apparel line, inspired after Rinks saw a photo of Madonna holding her Chihuahua, Chiquita. The shirts hit. Taco Bell reps came by their booth at a licensing show, Rinks says, because the chain was already hunting for a mascot.

From there, according to Rinks, the relationship got serious. He says they worked with Taco Bell for 18 months, designing tray liners, uniforms, hats, posters, toys, and commercials. Then, in 1997, the calls stopped. Three months later, the Chihuahua campaign appeared.

it was the commercial that I’d written, you know, the first three commercials were our commercials

Tom Rinks, on the episode

The caveat is obvious: this is Rinks telling Rinks’s story, years after the fact, on a show built to make founders sound like patient geniuses with unusually cinematic setbacks. The $200,000 line is unverifiable from the transcript alone, and memory has a way of sanding a five-year panic into one perfect anecdote. Still, the larger claim has more ballast than most founder lore. There was a lawsuit. There was a federal trial. There was a jury award. Guy Raz states the number on mic: $30.1 million plus another $12 million in interest. Taco Bell appealed, then settled a few months later.

So the eyebrow goes up, but not all the way to the hairline. If Rinks was exhausted, if the shirts had stopped selling because everyone now wanted the Taco Bell version, if he was known around Grand Rapids as “the guy suing Taco Bell,” then yes, $200,000 starts to sound less like a bargain and more like a trapdoor out of a burning room.

The Cocoa Beach tan was applied in Grand Rapids

The reason the Taco Bell claim lands beyond 90s ad trivia is that Rinks’s whole career is about making symbols feel inevitable. Sun Bum did not win because the world was begging for another sunscreen. Rinks saw the category as a shelf full of mom bottles, built a woodgrain package around a deadpan ape in sunglasses, and then made the brand feel like it had washed ashore from Cocoa Beach, even when customer calls were being routed to Grand Rapids in winter.

That sounds slippery until you remember most consumer branding is theater with a barcode. Rinks is unusually frank about it. Furniture store sales taught him how to sell different feelings to different customers. Psycho Chihuahua taught him the power of a character. Sun Bum turned that into a cleaner machine: not a founder in front of the bottle, not a surfer dude grinning on the label, but Sonny, the ape, staring back like a sticker that escaped from a skate ramp.

I didn’t want to flex. I let other people flex. I flexed by doing the work and I felt really good about that.

Tom Rinks, on the episode

That line is revealing, and not only in the humble-founder way. Rinks knows the frontman can spoil the trick. He says he was not the tequila guy, not the surfer guy, not the Christian guy. Better to let the bottle, the dog, the ape, the cork, the color, the fake weather report do the talking. In that light, the Taco Bell lawsuit is not a detour from the Sun Bum story. It is the wound that proves his religion: the mascot is the money.

By the start of trial, Rinks says, Taco Bell finally offered a few million dollars. His lawyers wanted the fight. Rinks looked at Joe Shields.

I looked at them and said, no, let’s go.

Tom Rinks, on the episode