The Life Is Good Company: Bert and John Jacobs

So really quick before we start the show, I want to tell you about our How I Built This Live tour. It's happening this fall, supported by American Express. I'll be in New York talking with Christina Tosi of Milk Bar, in Boston with Luke Holden and Ben Connor, founders of Luke's Lobster, and wrapping up the tour in Denver with Kurt Richardson, founder of Otter products. You can get tickets for all these shows and get more information at nprpresents.org, and I hope to see you there. Well, there's a lot of absurd ex exchanges. We had this guy who had run champion the brand. Sure. And he was helping us out. And he would ask us very basic questions like, you know, what do you got for assets?

Burt now, like Uh we get we got a mountain bike. And we were dead serious. We didn't even know how to answer the question. Like We got The V CR. We that picture of Mom. Yeah. And he was just like dumbfounded looking at us, like God, these guys are

So clueless. From NPR, it's how I built this. show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. Built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Bert and John Jacobs rescued their floundering t-shirt business with three simple words. Life is good, and then turn that phrase into a brand and a$100 million business. Most big brands have a slogan. Just do it. By the friendly skies.

Think different. The slogan is there to help sell the shoes or the airline or the computer. It's there to boost the brand. But now Imagine if the brand was the slogan.

So instead of Nike, the product you were buying was Just do it. Or instead of a razor, you were buying the words the best a man can get. That is essentially the brand you're gonna hear about on the show today. Because unlike almost every story we've profiled, Bert and John Jacobs didn't really sell a specific product or offer a specific service. What they're selling is an idea.

An attitude. A way of seeing the world. And that idea can be summed up in the phrase Life is good. That's it. That's what they sell. Those three words.

Life Is Good. Bert and John Jacobs started experimenting with this phrase back in the mid-1990s. At the time, they were barely scraping by. They were selling t shirts on street corners and in college dorms. So at one point

They tried something new. They drew a picture of a guy with a wide grin on his face, wrote Life is good underneath And amazingly The shirt started to sell. Today, Life is Good is a$100 million brand.

Sold in stores all across the country. And the slogan is not only on t-shirts, but on socks and keychains, posters, magnets, mugs, tote bags, towels, even tire covers. Things that presumably would not be selling so well or so fast if they did not say life is good. Bert and John can actually trace the idea behind the slogan to their childhood, and as you'll hear... to their mom in particular.

The brothers grew up in Neatham, Massachusetts. They were the youngest of six kids. Their dad worked at a machine shop and he and their mom had trouble making ends meet. But the way John and Bert tell it, the early years of the family before they were born? We're actually pretty good.

Early on when we look at the photographs of our older brothers and sisters before our time, That little house was the the American dream. It was the lawn was um manicured and Paint was perfect on the home, the shutters Everything just looked my sisters were in like matching dresses. That was not the house we grew up in. So that was probably typical of you know families with a lot of kids. By the time it came to us

the grass was knee high and the shutters were half fallen off and broken windows in the winter and it was just too much action, too many people for one small little place, et cetera, et cetera. You know, n n financially not enough money there and there there just there was no space. busy I mean as a g as kids it must have been a pretty kinda chaotic home. Chaotic's a good word, guy.

Day to day, yeah, it was Kind of madness. Um there was there was no heat in the upper floor ever. Um, so Our oldest four siblings would just pile on blankets and Some of them w were chattering away, barely sleeping, and others our brother Alan for some reason would just sleep in his tidy whiteys with no blanket and just lie there and snore. But but there was frost on the window. I mean, I'm not no no exaggeration. It was it was pretty

strange and funny when we when we look back, but chaotic is a good word. And what were your parents like? I mean, were they like warm and fuzzy, were they strict? Well they were really different. From each other.

very structured and uh idealistic And definitely a math and science sort of engineering type of mind. Mm. And our mom was the absolute opposite, gregarious, outgoing, always laughing, dancing, very creative.

But then I think um You know, they they went to s some some big changes w when John and I were in elementary school. Our parents were in a near death car accident.

And that seems to be a bit pivotal because um Or dad Lost the use of His right arm. Entirely and he never really regained that.

He he was a gifted craftsman. He was a um Avid outdoorsman. And I I think he was pretty frustrated that he that he couldn't do those things any longer. And did it change? The way he looked at life once he lost two.

Use of of his hand. Yeah, I just think he became frustrated with his body and he was a pretty physical guy. And um It certainly did seem when when we look at kind of before and after that that he became depressed, and that depression seemed to manifest itself in

Uh constant yelling and screaming. Okay. And he'd go on these tirades, just screaming and yelling at Everything. Whether it was us or our mom or

you know, uh footballs lying in the on the ground or baseballs or Uh anything, the house falling apart. I think that it was already very challenging and there was tremendous economic strain and maybe that American dream was felt as though it crumbled down and it always seemed manageable to us as kids, but we We really weren't seeing it through the th the eyes of the person who was Responsible for things.

Was it scary? Do you guys ever remember being scared when you were kids? Uh Very much so. Yeah. It it wasn't uh I I never remember him. Hearing us.

But Yeah, I'd say there was another kind of fear too that like, um I remember fearing that the just whole family was just Crumbling. And then I didn't know what was gonna happen, but like a a lot of times

He would yell straight through the night. But It it wasn't all one way like that. He would apologize. You know, when he kinda got his wits about'em. He would say

You know that I don't mean to be like that. And I'm not trying to hurt anybody and those kind of things. So He did have some level of awareness and I think we all kinda maintained The idea that he was a good guy.

Mm. When you guys were uh I mean you had six the six of you total, uh you the two of you are the youngest, you're about three years apart. So Were the two of you fairly close from an early age? Really close. We w so we shared bunk beds at our own room together and uh I was just thinking as we discussed our dad, like humor was our

best weapon, not against him, but just to have laughs with each other about anything really. And we I just remember us trying to be the last guy to get the other brother to laugh before we went to bed, which would go till

You know, eleven, midnight, one sometimes. So I would say w really tight. Growing up Um into similar stuff, into sports, into art, into music. And then high school's different when there's a three year technically four year

gap between grades. Right. Yeah, there was a probably a period in high school when I was a senior and John was a freshman, we we wouldn't say hi to each other in the hallway. It was just a short period of time. So You um I guess 'Cause you're older. You went to college first. You went to Villanova and I guess to Fitchburg, uh state in Massachusetts and and John, you

You were at uh U Mass Amherst. Did either of you at that point in your lives think about Like you were gonna Create a business one day? Yeah, I was pretty focused on that. I I had actually had a couple businesses When I was really young.

I had a seed selling business. Which was really a commission thing caught out of a magazine. but by the time I was in high school I had a house painting business. So I I was pretty focused on The idea of entrepreneurship. And John?

I had Done a little bit with like landscaping in high school and right at the beginning of college, but My focus was mostly art. And writing.

When you say art, like drawing and painting and things like that as well? Exactly. Drawing, painting. animation, any any form like that. Okay, so I I guess um a after you guys finish college, both of you

Head out west. Um I guess Bert, you go to uh to Colorado and then uh John you go out to to California, right? Right. And then I guess it was around eighty eight, eighty nine, uh Both of you meet up in California. And then you decide to drive back uh together back to Boston and then sort of

Figure out what you're gonna do next. with your lives? Like w was that the plan? Well, it was more like Let's do a cross country trip. Like we really hadn't thought about what happens on the other end. We were really excited we had never done that. We had never driven anywhere outside of New England. So I don't think we were all that ambitious at the time. We w we were more

living in the moment and saying we got an opportunity here to swim in some water holes that we've never seen and let's go find'em and let's just go camp out and Something we hadn't done before. and we really took advantage that summer. I think it was a Seven or eight week drive.

Across the country. With our brother Alan occasionally hooking us up. wiring us money but we were sleeping uh in a tent or just by the side of the road or in the back of the car. So you so you're doing this road trip. Making your way across the country. And You get to back to Massachusetts, right? And I guess presumably you'd be on the on the Mass Pike, right, going down through Western Mass.

That's right. And I I don't know if it's apocryphal, but I've heard that that that's really when you sort of like the two of you are driving and One of you was like, Hey. Maybe we should like do a business. Is that is that really true? That is true, yeah. What do you remember about the conversation?

Well I remember that we started talking about that both of us in college Had designed A couple of t shirts. And Sold'em around the dorms and what a kick we got out of it.

What were the T what were your T shirt designs in college, just out of curiosity? Well, they were uh caricatures of uh Um, you know, intramural teams and really simple stuff. Like funky dancing figures or one at that time, I guess it was we were talking late eighties. It was like oh you can do with one with the price of one color you can get a rainbow across the letter M. Like it was it was nothing groundbreaking. But

Like, oh, we just do a big M on the front and then these cool, like, dancing figures on the back. But it was more as Bert started to say, like Getting total strangers to wear your art or and it didn't happen a lot, but occasionally you'd see it in the dorm and like wow that that felt good. And were you guys like like silk screening your own shirts? No, no uh we we never neither of us ever got into the screen printing. In fact we didn't even once we started the business for a long time. It was more going to a local screen printer. And you know, we j we just bought major mill

Haynes P T or Fruit of the Loom or something like that from a distributor. And and that was I I remember talking with John that It was a charge to to feel that A stranger was gonna reach in their pocket But also

We've always loved T shirts and It is a great vehicle for messages. Like You look around and people have made a choice what they're gonna share with people. That's a really big decision. It sounds very casual, but With the T shirt, generally you're kind of making a statement. What do you believe in? What are you for? So you guys you guys get back to Boston. And by the way, when you when you got back to Boston, did you guys like move back in to your parents' house?

Uh we did. We did, briefly. Yeah. She's back at your parents' house. And you have you have decided. We are gonna let's let's

Make some T shirts and sell them. Mm-hmm. I understand you could take your design to a silk screener and they they could just m make a bunch of T shirts that you hand hand over to them. What were the designs that you decided on Making it first. What what do the T shirts look like? Well We had a lot of concept and ideas.

and designs and some of the stuff we had from college We did uh An Irish T shirt on Saint Patrick's Day that said,'Tis no sin not to be Irish, just a terrible, terrible shame. And that cracked people up and Boston's heavily Irish, so You know, we thought well maybe that's something we can do is celebrate the different holidays.

And so we did something for Valentine's Day and Oh something for Mother's Day and you know that that kinda kept things going a little bit, but nothing was um nothing was really ringing the register too much. And what you're just like going around Boston and And like setting up tables and selling'em? How yeah, how are you selling'em? Mm mm we had

Two duffel bags and uh After the first six months we bought a Massachusetts state hawkers and peddlers license and we also bought a uh Boston City Hawkers and Peddlers license. That was helpful because you know, the police would when you're on the street selling, police will approach you Most of the time they would say you can't sell here. Okay, so like we would try to sell right in Harvard Square on the street. You can't sell there. They the cops would move you out. We try to sell near Fanual Hall. By the time you went where it was legal for the Hawkers and Peddler's license, you'd be on some sidewalk where there's no foot traffic would be impossible. So you had to kinda push it every day and every day we get to hustle.

Yeah, we we we did. I mean it got to the point since we did this for many years, it got to the point where all the cops in Boston knew our names and they would we would hear'em on the radio say, The Jacobs brothers are out on the corner call map, you know, and like W One guy would sometimes walk down the end of the block and watch for the cops and the other guy would you know, we went from duffel bags to setting up a little card table. And then we finally got um We finally got enough sales. That we decided that the the one place we were selling better than the street was when we went to call it dormitories.

Mm. But h how did that how did that work? You would just drive to colleges and like open up the door. I guess that this was back in the day when they weren't locked and you would just walk in and like Yeah, th yeah, they weren't locked. M most places were not locked. And uh you're right, it would probably be really hard today. So in some of the cities they were, but we started doing that in in Boston. There's more colleges and universities per capita in Boston than anywhere in the world. But what would you do? You would walk down the corridors of dorm like the the dorm room corridors. T shirt for sales you oh you knock on the door. Yeah, we would we would hustle. I mean you you would actually run from door to door, run up the steps because we quickly the weekend nobody's around enough. And in the daytime you can't find anybody. So we we quickly that the the meet was in the middle of the week.

In the evening at you know probably about like six o'clock to ten o'clock, that was your wheelhouse. So you try to cover a whole campus, that means you gotta be moving at Olympic speed to try to get through it. So especially if we had a little bit of sales going, we would just push, push, push, and then Either try to crash in a random lounge on their floor. Or more often just sleep in the back of our van. I I'm just trying to put myself in in the position of like a college student at that time. And I get a knock on the door and then there'd be these two guys or one guy like with a duffel bag

And you would say what? Like I'd I'd be like yes, and then you would say what? Any interest in a T shirt like this and you just take it out and hawk it. And it was actually not an uncommon thing. I don't know about these days, but Banging on the dorms selling T shirts was something people did. Воз аюжу

Uh for us was that We would knock on someone's door and we'd be down in Virginia, you know, and they would say uh w what year are you guys? And we'd say we don't go to school, they say where are you from? And we'd say Boston. They say well what are you doing down here? And when we explain to people that we've been traveling in a van selling T shirts from Boston They were blown away. What's on the T shirt? I'm standing in my dorm room

You're knocking on my door, you show me a shirt, what does it say? What does it look like? It's some of it has no words. It's just these like fun funky dancing figures and it's it's uh stick figures or Yeah, they're they're but more fluid Like Keith Herring style? A little bit. A little bit primitive. But a lot of things were sort of um

You could definitely see elements that ended up being part of life is good. So another thing we did was celebrating the outdoors a lot. We just didn't have words all the time. We would just do an interesting a stylized sketch of pine trees and mountains. or a mountain bike or something like that, but it j we just didn't have the hook. You know, none of these things were selling like crazy. Right. And um Yeah, we also started talking about we had all this time in the van.

And we started talking about brands, we talked about Nike a lot. You know, how the squosh came to mean uh athletic prowess and being a champion and all those different things. And we talked about how Ralph Loren And uh that little pony.

came to mean affluence, etc. And while these things didn't seem to be the thing we were chasing, we kept saying, you know, what's our swoosh? What's our little pony kind of thing and we needed we knew that we needed something to uh connect with people on and we knew that we didn't have that. Do you remember what your your like revenue average year uh revenue might have been at that time?

It was extremely low, right? It was probably You know, under eighty thousand dollars in top line revenue. Well the profit was Prophet was probably

twenty thousand dollars. And you gotta pay for you know. gasoline and you gotta pay for Yeah everything, you know. But we we didn't that entire time We didn't Get a single hotel room?

We would shower on the college campuses, we would brush our teeth on the college campuses. If we couldn't do that at the college we'd find a local restaurant and we'd go sort of take a shower in the sink. Right. Maybe we would splurge on a pizza. At that time probably f

Five bucks or something. That night, but otherwise we were getting by on Nothing. And we knew if we Couldn't

Propel ourselves enough to get gas. And get to the next town. In the back of our heads there must have been the reality that real jobs Uh were Something we had to consider. And our friends actually were having

real lives evolved. They were having relationships, they were getting homes, apartments. They had real suits and going to real jobs and Uh that was sometimes embarrassing if we'd be out on the street. With with runny noses and like

Ten degrees in December. trying to sell a t shirt and you bump into somebody. But m most for the most part, Bert and I really wanted to make a go of this to make it happen. And that meant Just finding a way to get to the next

campus and and try to find something that That finally clicked with people. So d at this point were you thinking Was any part of either of you thinking You know, maybe this T shirt thing isn't the right way to go. We've been doing it for f you know, four or five years and

No, I I think I just when I think of like people trying to start a business To to imply that there was never doubts is is just not Real. So They weren't at the forefront of our minds and I think

having another guy, someone you knew so well. was really necessary to laugh off all those nights where we either sold zero shirts or got kicked off campus or Something was wrong. That you know, the dorms were really high security and we couldn't go in this school. If one of us was solo doing that every night for five years, like it we wouldn't a lasted. We were able just like we were in the bunk bed

When things were tense. We're able to play off some character we had just met. imitate them, make up a funny song about'em or something and

And just start moving toward the next school. Right. And then we had an idea. You know, we just stayed in the game long enough to have a good idea. I mean if you really break it down we had five and a half years of bad ideas and then one good one. what happened in in nineteen ninety four. How did you What happened to your t shirt business that made you think?

You know, we we should really do this. What was a thing that happened. The actual idea for life is good. We sort of stumbled into that. We do we got to the point where the business was Performing

You know, Poorly enough that We couldn't even sustain it. So we took jobs as substitute teachers back in Boston. And we got an apartment together.

So we'd work as substitute teachers For a couple of months and then we Get on the road. for about six weeks at a time and then we'd teach for a little while and then we'd We'd take off.

And we got to have this ritual where when we came back to Boston We'd throw a keg party. All of our friends. And we'd put all of our artwork up on the walls.

And we kinda have a focus focus group. We'd we'd let our friends write on the walls. And tell us what they liked and didn't like. And that's when One of the things that went up on the wall

The the Jake. um drawing went up and it didn't say life is good under it. It said draw. So it was this idea that Jake was an artist. And I guess we should just uh explain here for for a sec that this drawing that you do, this guy uh that you call Jake. W this was a super simple drawing. It was like it was almost like a kid's drawing of a face with this like

Big giant toothless grin. Yeah. You know, he had a beret on and he was he was cool and it was he had sunglasses. No, the beret made him the artist. The sunglasses made him cool, and the big smile because he was happy. And a girl who's at that party Circle Jake. And put an arrow to him and said, This guy's got life figured out.

And we thought that was pretty cool. When we woke up in the morning we were looking we say, Wow What if what if that guy's not just an artist? What if he's a superhero? whose power is his optimism. And because he believes Uh anything's possible that it is. And we we started riffing on it. And there were all sorts of other positive comments and post-its and people writing on the wall around this one drawing. We had encouraged people to give us any feedback.

But there was so much action around this one drawing. And we just sort of distilled all the comment down to these three simple words Life is good. And those words Changed our lives forever.

And what What was life as I mean I mean w what was life is good supposed to mean? Was it supposed to mean like the easy life, you know, uh Life is easy, you know, w like was it aspirational? What was it supposed to convey? So I think we liked the openness of it. We liked the fact that it was up to the receiver. It felt based in gratitude. I don't know if we used the w that word back then, but it was like

Yes, our business was Floundering. And barely getting by, but we did feel lucky to be travelling. drawing, meeting people. We love to do all those things. And It just picked up steam that first day.

Pretty soon people are reading deeper into it and they're sharing a story with what those three words mean and Once we got a chance to put it in front of total strangers it was So immediate the reaction like How did you unveil it to people?

We got out. On a about a week after we We got out to a street fair in Cambridge, Mass. And we were

used to selling about ten shirts in a whole day and we'd have friends help out and it was kinda fun, social But there wasn't a swarm of customers around our table. And that particular day was Unlike Any other I mean we opened

Eleven AM. at the fair and by noon all forty eight shirts that said life is good on them. were gone. And it was such a wide range of people, skateboarder, school teacher, Harley Davidson guy. And that's what was astounding to us. Like

It didn't seem to matter what their background or passion was. It was speaking to people. I mean here's the thing, there's something almost counterintuitive. about what you were introducing in nineteen ninety four.'Cause I remember nineteen ninety four. I was just starting out of college and It was like grunge and

Cynicism. especially among young people, like that was the way to be. Life is good, like you must have gotten a lot of eye rolls, right? Like that it just seems so counterintuitive to try and sell that to college kids. at a time when so many of them would have been like You guys are lame, or this is silly. Yeah, there's d there was definitely uh

We got our share of that and once we started selling it to retailers Even the ones who were doing well with it would say to us I've seen a lot of T shirt brands come and go, This will be gone in two years. But If we can but back up a minute, like I I think before selling the T shirts

We felt really connected to This message. And When we were growing up

You know, we talked about our dad's depression and the yelling and screaming. But And we maybe touched a little on our mother's role, but Th there was a um huge influence she had on us in teaching us. That you have

Control over your energy. And that and so she started this ritual at the dinner table. Where she'd look around at her six kids and say, Tell me something good that happened today. Fact later we went back to her and said, You know, you were the uh original inspiration for Life is Good.

And she said, Well, you know, how is that? And we said, W you know, when you ask, tell me something good and she kind of pushed it off and said, I was doing that for me. I was doing that for my own psyche, you know. But is it interesting because Um sh she probably was doing it. For her own sake, but we benefited.

tremendously and we kinda got taught this lesson that No, rather than be the victims of this disfunctional home We we can look around and focus on what's right with our lives and focus on what's right with with the family and

Um celebrate those things. And those are the things that will grow. Our mom was the first powerful optimist in our lives. And She created an art studio out of our kitchen floor.

She Made a lunch. for three boys out of a block of brown sugar one time and It took us like a couple hours we were out at the playground and Bert and I were like Yeah. No, no, go ahead. She's just like you know, we're looking at each other like do we have sugar for lunch? But she you know, some of her quotes are so classic to us today

She she literally said to Bert and I one time in the car I like running out of money because then I don't have to worry about what I need to buy. And She just made that switch every day.

She made an intentional choice. And that's really what the whole brand and the whole idea and philosophy is based on that. We all have limited resources when we wake up in the morning we can decide to focus on what's wrong with us or we can focus on what's right. So we were hoping Uh

stronger than we ever had that this would be something that would take off because We believed in it and we felt like authentically it was us. Then when we got in the street and the shirt sold so well. it was like everything came together because we just felt like We have it here. We have this this thing's got like the magic dust. We just didn't have any idea what to do with it. Wow.

But I mean th this was like kind of like a make or break moment for you, right? Because I I read that. Like at this point you only had like a like a couple hundred bucks between you? I mean is that

Is it true or is that or is that an exaggeration? Not even actually seventy eight bucks, yeah, the day that the day that we after Printing the forty eight. Life is good T shirts. We

had seventy eight bucks left. When we come back in just a moment, how Bert and John grew their 78 bucks into$250,000, which grew into one million. And then a hundred million. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this. My PR.

Welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So It's nineteen ninety four. And John and Bert Jacobs are getting some traction with a new T shirt design. It's a smiling guy wearing a beret with sunglasses, and just underneath the words Life is good.

And they start to get the shirts into some small shops. Mainly in beach towns. The first retailer was down Cape Cod. It was a little flip flop shop. And

She bought two dozen shirts. Two weeks later. She called us up. And

Explained to us that next to her stores an ice cream shop. And she and her husband were thinking Um Life's pretty good when you're having an ice cream. Just a simple pleasure.

Uh um, you know, so she asked us, does this guy Jake eat ice cream? And we said no, but he will. And uh so Jake started eating ice cream. That was the second T shirt. And and the ones with the ice cream colum sold even better than the just the Jake. And the next thing happened with her sister in law And she had a a place with her boyfriend up in Vermont on the bike path.

And um So Jake started riding a bicycle. And rollerblading was big at the time. And then we put a guitar in his hands and it was just you know, we we pretty quickly that all we had to do

was walk around and ask people What do you love? You know what the first thing Nancy that retailer said to us was uh guys I got a reorder. And Bert and I were like What's a reorder?

And that that indicates where we're at as a business after five years. Yeah, we forgot the pillar. We didn't bill up for the shirts, we just sent them down. So I I guess that year, ninety four, after you you kinda become life is good

You did like almost ninety thousand dollars worth of revenue, which is which is great. Um you know, you're you could start to see maybe a path towards you know, towards real profitability. Um, and then I guess the next year, um you really

I mean you you're still running this business, by the way, out of your apartment in Boston that you guys share, right? Mm-hmm. This starts to turn a corner though, because we see that reaction in the street and boom We start thinking about distribution and hiring a sales rep and That summer of ninety five to

Momentum starts rolling. And that was when you guys made your first hire as well, I guess, right? That's right, yeah. The uh Carrie Sherman moved in upstairs from us and uh became a friend and we just used to beg her when she got home from work to help us uh pack orders and help us try to organize the orders and Um she was a big help, so we we begged her to quit her job eventually and she did it. She could do things five times faster than us for one thing.

And then it became clear we needed The hell pretty badly and she needed to take a leap. Yeah and we we had a friend over for 'cause he was pretty sharp and we

Asked him to tell us how much business we would have to do to be able to afford to pay Carrie Uh seventeen thousand dollars, which is what she said was the minimum our question to her was what is the lowest amount that you could possibly get paid uh to work with us And she said seventeen thousand dollars. So he did the math for us and he said that we would have to do a quarter of a million dollars in business.

Which sounded like a billion dollars to us. Yeah, and we we did two hundred and sixty two, I think it was. Two hundred sixty two thousand. Yep. And and that two hundred sixty two thousand was like that's to pay for all of your supplies and everything. And everything, right? Yeah. It was not profit. That is that is No No We would get Prepared for dye T shirts, PFDs, they call it. And we store them. We didn't have enough room for them in our

Apartment. We'd store them in a bulkhead in the building. And we had to put'em in Trash bags. Um that would

Tightly wound up because it was moist down there. And so a g in any given day We would get a certain amount of orders, we would be designing during the daytime, in the afternoon We would Take those

shirts down to New Bedford. Mm. The next afternoon we'd take those shirts out to Marlborough Mass. and to a screen printer called Midland Graphics. Screen printed T shirts and then

Uh by four o'clock. drop'em off at UP S, whatever the orders were, which was You know, two or three retailers, a couple of orders. Then we set up a trailer like the back of a eighteen wheeler. A container. Containers like permanently stationed next to our screen printer with their permission? Yeah, they had a dirt parking lot and for zero rent.

They left'cause we were afraid to And so They let us Well, it was thirty dollars a month to rent the

uh lease the the container. And for zero dollars they let us Um park it on their lot. So you were just like, let's just use a shipping container as our warehouse. Yeah, we w we wanted to make sure the revenue ran way out ahead of them. Not a lot of ventilation in those containers. But uh We cranked summer of ninety five, ninety six, and it was kind of nonstop twenty four seven. How did you how did you get the trademark on it? I mean it seems like a very common phrase, life is good, but you got it you got the trademark. How did that happen?

Well, we failed five times. We we were going to the Boston Public Library at night'cause we couldn't afford an attorney. And we sent five applications and failed. And then I went one night to play basketball and some guy asked me Did I see you and your brother selling T shirts in front of the Boston Garden?

the other night and I said, Yeah and he said, How's that going? Not so good. But we have this great idea and I went on and on about what the concept was and that we were trying to trademark it. And then I realized that I'd been rude and not asked the guy what he did.

I said, What do you do for a living? And he said, I'm a trademark attorney. Wow. And the guy's name was Bob Pierce. And I went and saw him two days later and Convince them to do the work pro bono.

and he knew just what to do. So we had to make a lot of changes. We had to create hang tags and labels. We the label in our shirt said Jacobs Gallery. So we switched the label to Life is Good. And then we had to get affidavits from five different retailers. It represented a brand.

And by definition legally Um a trademark. denotes the source of the goods. So there's when you just put a mark on a T shirt That's called ornamental.

But if people look at it and say that represents the the source of the goods in some way. Then it's a brand. So th he did all those things correctly. And I gotta tell ya, it's twenty five years later.

And and Bob Pierce still gets all our intellectual property business. That's amazing. So you got the trademark on this phrase, life is good as a brand. And That's it? I mean you're you you sort of You own this phrase and you can use it as your business.

Yeah, even the fact that you've said it a few times during this podcast, you owe us money, guys. Yeah, it was a it was a big day when we got it. We d we still didn't really know how to run the business or what to do, but it was we knew it was uh A valuable thing. Yeah. How did you guys divide up labor between the two of you? Like who did what? Who did finances? Who who did the art? Who did the deliveries? How did you guys who was in charge? Who was the boss? Is the older brother the boss? Anything that involved brain power pretty much fell on my side. No, seriously, but Bert Bert uh

He had more of a background coming out of school, uh, on the business side and he's a great communicator. Great motivator. So he worked the phones a lot. I I was spending more time on the drawing table or like At the screen print shop or maybe packing up stuff, but

There's plenty of crossover and Bert's very creative as well, so It mixed pretty seamlessly over the years. I guess it was a turning point. A pretty significant turning point in nineteen ninety six. You guys get a call from a A pretty big sporting goods chain based out of Indianapolis named

Mm. Gellions or galins? Something like that. Yeah. Gallions. Yeah. Wha wha what was that? Yeah, they were they were actually, in our opinion, the best sporting goods in the country. Um their stores were incredible and yeah, they The they were open to a sales call and interested in the brand.

So They invited us to go visit them in Indianapolis and We actually couldn't afford to fly out. So instead

We were just transparent with them and asked if we could piggyback when they came here, would they come and visit us. What they didn't realise was that There was no life is good and that when they came to visit us they'd be coming to our apartment. So they they Um Anyway, we made them

Prince Spaghetti and Ragu Sauce and we hung out and they they were on board And um They placed the biggest orders by far that we've ever seen. And they kinda put us on the map outside of New England. I think Dick Sporting Goods eventually, right?

That's right. And I I don't know if it was apparent to them that the entire company in Bert Myself and Carrie were sitting with them in our kitchen at dinner. But but we did have a lot of laughs and they we got an order and that was a huge step for us to suddenly be shipping Two hundred and eighty eight pieces instead of twenty four pieces to a retailer. So so once you get into galleons, was it just like

A game changer? I mean did you see your business just like skyrocket? It was a game changer because once yeah what happened was uh Most of our business then and now is uh specialty mom and pop business. So the mom and pop's will take a look at the big guys and s try to find brands sometimes that Different. uh retailers are carrying and galleons was

kind of a model citizen that a lot of small retailers looked up to. And so once we were in galleons, we were in all these geographic locations. And there was great visibility for us, so all of a sudden our phones were ringing like crazy from other retailers, from other territories. And so Gallians was probably responsible for hundreds of new accounts over the next year or two.

And business really started booming, you know, it it went from that two hundred and fifty thousand to six hundred and twenty. And we broke a million at one point too. Yep. Mind blowing to you?

How did we go from having like seventy eight dollars between us three years ago? To a million dollars in sales. Yeah, it was pretty mind blowing. I mean, we didn't we didn't have a concept of you know, like what it meant to do a million dollars. I think we thought maybe we should retire and you know Wow, we hit a million dollars. I mean I think we definitely stopped and sort of, you know, ha had a had a beer and kinda said, Wow, man w

what just happened, but On the other hand, we're still in our apartment. And uh you don't really look around and see any difference, it's just a mad scramble still. But But I think yeah, I I think galleons and crossing that million dollar mark. Kinda gave us the

the confidence to invest in a lease and get a warehouse and And we hired a few people. We mean We we didn't even have a computer. Who still works with us to this day, by the way. She actually owns five percent of the business. She's a partner. Yeah but she You know, she

said to us you really need to get a computer. And both John and I were like, Well no, we're artists. We do we d we don't want a computer And they say she said, Well you need it to run the business and why do we need a computer? But she was right. Well, there's a lot of absurd ex exchanges. We had this guy who had run champion the brand and Wilson Sporting Goods.

And he was helping us out through his a sales rep. Yeah, we connected personally. Joe Phillips, God bless him. He was flying up from Philly. He was like an angel. Yeah. Angel slash devil. Yeah. The best kind. And he uh He would give us advice and direction and he would ask us very basic questions like, you know, what do you got on the books for next year? And we were like w

What book? What you mean? And he'd be like, How do you plan how much product to make? And we're like Uh we just We've been doubling for like the last few years. We just figure we're gonna double again. He's like, That's a very scary way to run a business. Yeah. He asked us what our assets were. He was trying to get us off our personal off our loans because our n our personal names were on the loan notes. And uh

So we gotta we gotta change this. You know, what what do you got for assets? Bert and I were like Uh we get a mountain bike. And we were dead serious. We didn't even know how to answer the question. Like I got um the picture of mom, we got the V CR and he was just like dumbfounded looking at us like God, these guys are So clueless. Yeah.

Who was buying the shirts? Like I'cause I I mean, when I think of life as good, I think of like uh going to Okra Coke Island. You know, some place like Cape Cod, like you know, you life is good and it's a summer and it's easy to feel that way. Is that where the shirts were being sold in like beach towns? Um in in places like that in the summertime. Um one of the strengths

right away was that it wasn't one distribution channel. So you're talking about destination resort, which became uh important to us right away. But sporting goods was really big too. Gips for people like you know, around themes like home themes like You know. Love family gardening, grilling the backyard.

So it really was uh the distribution was really spread out. Wh which You know, we didn't really We can't take credit for strategically planning that. But it helped us a lot through the years the economy has gone up and down.

And when you're in a Single distribution channel. It's hard to weather economic downturns. But for us, you know, some would get hurt worse than others.

And we were always able to weather it because we were Um Not too many eggs in one basket. Yeah, there were the there were so many different places for us to go. And and it and when the economy went down it would not all the channels would get impacted the same way. I mean did you I mean when you think about

Um A very simple phrase. Some very basic And not I mean you're you guys are great artists. No no no judgment, but like very simple Artwork. Yep.

And It became this thing, T shirts and and dinner plates and and posters and things like like wha what what other things that I'm I'm probably forgetting about. I mean it really doesn't you know it it really just became And then

You know, more recent years more things like video content and publishing books, et cetera, which is extremely exciting to us. But we're still most known for the T shirts. Did you guys I mean, you've been doing this now since really, I guess, since the late eighties, right? You've been selling T shirts. Have you ever uh any part of of of of you guys want to just sell it, you know, sell it to a bigger company and just kinda cash in?'Cause you'cause you've b both of you become pretty well off from this tiny little t shirt business and uh you can I don't know kinda do whatever you want.

I think the reason that we're not interested in selling or going public is what we learned from these customers that started sending us letters. emails, sharing their personal stories, and they really taught us that Optimism is most powerful in the hardest times and these are people dealing with chemotherapy, losing loved ones. And they'd say, We all wore Life Is Good T shirts to the memorial service for my brother because That's the spirit with which he lived and We've got thousands of those letters and emails and people

kind of opening up their whole personal lives to us because the emotional connection to the brand. They're the ones who taught us this. And if we'd hadn't received those letters, that may have been appealing to us, like Yeah, we've been at this for a few decades, but We wanna spread that message as wide as we can because it we believe in it more than anything else in the world. And Bert, what what what are your thoughts on that? I mean did Did you ever consider, you know?

Wanting to sell the business? Well In a lot of ways we really feel like we're just getting warmed up. It honestly feels like a start up today. We're we're like a twenty five year old startup. where there's all these young people

walking around that remind us of ourselves but are much faster and stronger and smarter And I'm not Uh operating the business. I was president and CEO for a long time. And we replaced

me with a woman that a actually came from our nonprofit side. And she's killing it, and you can tell pretty quickly that she's about ten times The operator that I was And it's allowing Me to dive back into the creative and I haven't been there in a while.

So we're really kinda back to where we started in the beginning, hey, let's design some T shirts. But now we have a really strong balance sheet. We own a hundred percent of the business. And you know, we have no intention of going public or selling the business. We just want to see, you know, how far we can take this and at some point figure out what to do with the structure, something creative. Maybe we do an ESOP to our

staff, maybe we even sell it to our customers Something that enables the that will enable the best work of life is good. To be done after Johnny and I are dead and gone. Mm.

So I mean do you guys feel like You grew up with Very working class. Home, I mean

In that room upstairs with frost on the windows and like You presumably today, uh both of you are doing pretty well. I mean you can you can live pretty comfortably. Yeah, no no question about it. Yeah, just to have our own home. Seriously. Not not to be too uh corny, but that that's pretty cool and to be able to travel.

It's incredible. And uh I don't think We would ever take that for granted. Do your what did your I mean, what did your parents make of your business? Your mom, I know passed away um a couple of years ago and then I guess a year later your dad your dad passed. Um What did they make of of this? I mean

This t shirt business that turned into something huge. Yeah, they l they loved it. I think they were proud of it and um They really did do their part while we had our dysfunction growing up. And there were times where You know, right right up until the the time that our mom passed away. If she saw somebody in a life is good T shirt, she'd run up to them and say, My son's made that

It was embarrassing when you were with her, but um our dad got a kick out of the nuts and bolts of the business. He always wanted to know the details and He was so encouraging when Bert and I for that year and a half when we did live at home and we're still doing the van trips. He he always just you know, we'd roll in at three AM some night. How'd you do? How did you do? It was never what

the hell are you guys doing? Like you're you know, you're college graduates like you know, get your act together. There's no pressure on career. It was always how'd you do and That helped a lot.

Yeah, and maybe the maybe the interesting thing with going full circle With our dad is that in the the autumn of his life he he came out of that funk. He really came out of the depression and He really became the guy that we never knew that we see in those pictures.

And it's hard to say what that You know what caused that, but As our business grew. that house that we grew up in really fell to pieces and our and our parents while we were living just like you mentioned, guy better and better along the way.

And we'd go visit our parents living in the that same house falling apart. So we decided to knock the house down and build them. A nice new home. And um You know, I think it was the first time In my father's

life since he you know, since he had all those kids. That when people came to visit they had a place to sit down. And that the he could be proud of his home. And I think also where he felt like he was a failure. He looked at his six kids now and

You know, we we landed on our feet, all of us, and and he didn't screw everything up. So I think he was a little easier on himself and In some ways the success success of the business, um Might help my dad, you know, get over that hump and realize that If we're not failures, he wasn't a failure.

And it was really cool to see him. relaxed and enjoying his grandkids and it was like it was like he in our mom were were dating again. I mean, they would just like hang out and spend time and you know, they w went away on some weekends and things. They hadn't done that and You know. thirty years. I mean it just they were married for fifty six years.

And then the the last ones, believe it or not, while it was tough with my mom's Illness and everything, they they had some great years. Wow. Our mom said that too, just before we know, once she knew the cancer was taking her life and there was nowhere to go. She said nobody should feel sorry for me, I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life.

You know, and part of that was I'm sure Because my dad had come out of the funk. Yeah, and and also that she knew that that She did a A good job with with all our kids and that we're all okay.

Yeah. Well. You know, when you think about This crazy story, you know, going from T shirts up and down the eastern seaboard to a

Sealing out of the back of a van, to knocking on the dorm rooms, to Seventy eight dollars between you to You know. A shipping container is your office. And and you know, the company today what, it does reportedly almost a hundred million dollars in revenue a year, is that about right?

Yeah, that's about right. You got About what? Almost two hundred employees today? Right.

Yep. It's pretty good. w for but first you bird do you when you think about The success of this company, do you attribute it to your hard work and your brother's hard work or And your intelligence or do you think that a l some of it came from just luck?

A lot of luck. I I think we We stumbled into something that's much bigger than we are. Uh I think we've been resilient. You know, maybe more resilient than smart. But It's a good good fifty percent luck. We were right place, right time.

Uh Two percent skill. And then we've we've worked our asses off, so that that's That's played a big factor too, so Yeah, maybe there's all those parts are are equal.

And John? How much of it Because of luck, how much because of your hard work and your skill and intelligence. I would say skill and intelligence, maybe twenty percent, uh hard work. Another

Winnie and then Bruce strength maybe for me. twenty. So neither I mean really the you got your answer there in that neither of us know how to add up to a hundred percent. Yeah. And yeah, we just you know so it's uh definitely not skill.

That's John and Bert Jacobs, co-founders of the Life is Good Company. By the way, we know for a fact that at least one of their t-shirts has traveled all the way to space. In 2013, astronaut Karen Nyberg posted a video from the International Space Station, and she was showing how she washed her hair in zero gravity and the shirt that she's wearing in that video. It's from Life is Good.

It's a big grinning girl who looks a lot like the original Jake. sitting back to back with her dog. And underneath it says Lean on me. Hey, thanks for sticking around, because it's time now for how you built that.

And our story today starts with Jim Malone, who, like a lot of people, He used to go bowling from time to time when he was growing up. But these days No, I think I was probably average as a kid and I'm probably horrendous as an adult. But the great American pastime of bowling kind of found its way back to gym about twelve years ago. He was looking to build a new table for his apartment, and he was poking around a store full of reclaimed wood in upstate New York, and a guy there said, Hey, if you need a good deal, I And he brought it down. It was

It didn't look like much. It just looked kind of like a piece of dusty old really thick wood. The wood was actually part of an old bowling lane made from the hardest and strongest part of a pine tree. It doesn't have knots and it's like this beautiful long straight crane, and I did notice that right away. And I also thought that if it worked, it would be a great story to tell friends when they came over. So Jim hauled this nine foot slab of bowling lane onto his truck. drove it home and got to work. I had to really just go at it with a Sander and Planer and

But by the time I got it in the kitchen it was stunning. Just this golden It just looked beautiful. And the story might have ended there, except right around the same time. Jim lost his job at an animation studio. And a friend of his who loved the table he made suggested that maybe he could make more pieces of furniture and sell them at the flea market in Brooklyn. So Jim thought about it and he said sure. And he set up a booth. I had, you know, people just stop and love the furniture and say nothing but nice things and I gave out lots of cards.

But the sales were not huge. But one day, Jim got a break. A designer from Starbucks stopped by his booth and said, You know, This bowling lane furniture really kinda fits with the aesthetic of our stores, maybe you could make a few tables for us? So Jim gave her his card. When you're just starting out, you you cling to every positive indicator. You know, so I I thought this is great. Finally, you know, something's happening and uh it would be amazing. But just when he finally started to get some traction? I didn't hear from her for for like four months.

Four months was excruciating. And to make matters even more stressful? Jim had just gotten married. It was a financial strain. I mean there was no money coming in. So it really was the 11th hour and I was kinda like, if something doesn't happen pretty soon, I'm gonna be thrown in the towel. But finally, after those four nail biting months, The woman from Starbucks did get back to Jim and she ordered a big communal table for the store in Brooklyn. And soon after that. Another designer from Sweet Green ordered tables and chairs for two restaurants in the DC area. I was happy to get the order, but most things were a request for something that I hadn't yet.

Done. So now a familiar entrepreneur's dilemma. Jim had to scramble to deliver on two orders. He hired a few other people and started scaling up production of bowling alley furniture at a small facility in Brooklyn. And fortunately for him, since a lot of bowling alleys across the country have closed down, there was no shortage of wood. It went from literally being thrown in the dumps To every year we get hundreds of bowling lanes. You know, it was the free market springing to life. And today, about ten years after starting out at that first flea market.

Jim just opened his first storefront in Brooklyn. and he's placed his furniture in a number of fast casual restaurants. His biggest client, Shake Shack, is using Jim's furniture in over a hundred locations, and you never know who's gonna walk into one of those places. I actually have a picture of Obama eating at one of the Shake Shack tables. It's actually hanging in our store. I think Biden's sitting next to him too.

Jim's company is called Counter Evurniture, short for Counter Evolution. He now makes furniture full time with 16 employees. And his revenue? is in the low millions of dollars. If you want to find out more about Counter Ev or your previous episodes,

Head to our podcast page, howibuilthis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. and thanks so much for listening to our show this week. You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this or at GuyRodz. Our show is produced this week by Rachel Faulkner with music composed by Ramteen Arablui.

Thanks also to Julia Carney, San Azmehanpur, Neva Grant. and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is David Ja. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening. how I built this.

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