How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Bert and John Jacobs had just come off a $100 million year for their Boston-based apparel company, Life is Good. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended business as usual, forcing the brothers to invest in a new printing model while trying to encourage optimism during this time of economic and social distress. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.Order the How I Built This book at:https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThisSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Hey, it's Guy here. So have you ever thought about starting a business? And if so, what would it be? How do you come up with an idea? How do you find the money to start? How do you get the word out about your product or service? What do you do if your idea isn't working? And how do you pivot? Well, to answer those questions, I've written a book. It's called What Else? How I Built This? And it's full of inspiring stories from some of the greatest leaders and entrepreneurs in the world

who've been through the trenches, made big mistakes, and lived to tell the tale. If you're looking to start something or just want to be inspired by those who have built incredible things, pick up How I Built This Now, wherever you buy your books or by visiting guyrauss.com. And thanks. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Howe-Wilts.

I built this resilience edition. On these episodes, we're talking with entrepreneurs and other business leaders about how they're meeting today's challenges with new and exciting ideas. And today, we're going to hear from Bert and John Jacobs. They're the brothers and co-founders behind the brand Life Is Good. Life is Good is an apparel company based out of Boston that made over $100 million in revenue last year. But the brothers have spent most of this year figuring out how to sell their products because half of their business comes from selling to retail stores, which have been closed since March. I spoke with Bert and John from their offices where they're holding down the fort and looking at e-commerce to make up for some of the missing sales.

Guys, both of you, just to be clear, you're both in your office right now in the Boston area. That's right. We're in different sections of the office. We each have our own wing right now, to be safe. Have you been able to see each other? I mean, your business partners, but also, brothers. Have you been able to see each other? A little bit, but not enough. On the other hand, we spent the first 18 years of our life in the same tiny room. So maybe it's okay to have a wall. That's not fair, John. That's not. I really do want to see you. I love you and I want to see you. Likewise. We're trying to be safe. We have seen each other when some really important family things were going on, but we're trying to be safe. And, you know, I don't think any of us quite know

exactly what we're dealing with yet. So we're being pretty strict about things. Let's start with your COVID response in general. I mean, as you're in Massachusetts, Massachusetts really took this very seriously. Once this really became clear that this was a serious thing, how did you respond? I mean, presumably you told your employees don't come in, right? That's correct. We closed down the office in Boston. We have two locations, Boston and Southern New Hampshire. And Southern New Hampshire is more of kind of the muscle of the business. It's our distribution center, and we do some finishing systems there, et cetera. There are some other departments like finance that are up there. But Boston, we immediately closed down because we are operating in a building where there's other companies and brands. So we didn't think that was a safe environment. You know, you asked what did we first do? We first met on Zoom and discussed what to do, and it was pretty grim, like many companies. So our business is structured in a way where half of our business was wholesale. And that means the high majority of those retailers closed their doors, canceled their orders, and our business was pretty close to being decimated. So we were having discussions candidly about bankruptcy and about laying off at least half of our staff. Thankfully, then we had one evening where we kind of discussed the old analogy, sports analogy,

we're sports fans about how the best defense is offense. And we looked at strategies that we've been trying to develop, and a really central one is that we've been trying to move what is a 12 to 18 months supply chain window into a couple of days. And we've invested in technology, and we've been taking baby steps in that direction. So we decided as a group that we will. really try to jump into this and see if it could save our business. And we put a plan together, which essentially was to make New Hampshire our distribution center extremely safe.

So setting up stations that are 10 feet apart, et cetera. In-house nurse, thermoscan, incredible protocol set up by our team there. And I just want to give a nod to our leadership team that helped guide us to the decision Bert's talking about to stay open because initially, like a lot of businesses, If there's any risk to the team's health, we've got to shut down. They're the ones who said, actually, a lot of these people will be safer, warehouse workers, if they have a safe place that's being really strict to go to, rather than picking up jobs in a supermarket with Uber, et cetera.

Other warehouses that aren't safe. And it turned out to be spot on. So anyway, what happened was we started designing T-shirts speaking directly to what was happening. So T-shirts that said, stay calm, stay cool. stay home. We began celebrating support systems, which are really key to get through these times. So that's other people that you're quarantining with. That's your pets, your dog, your cat, whatever it is. And so we made up the name quarantine mate. And we had a whole celebration of quarantine mates and all the different dog breeds, et cetera. And, you know, a lot of silly fun, but a lot of serious

underlying messages about being good to each other and kindness. You know, the idea from the beginning, not just with COVID, but what we were trying to do is maintain the company's value system, but change the business model. The tail was wagging the dog where the wholesale business and this long supply chain window was kind of ruling our company. And we already knew that that was an archaic model. All of America retail operates on it by and large. We knew that consumers want things closer to market, want greater choice, etc. And we were trying to migrate in that direction, but we were experiencing a lot of resistance from retailers, sales reps, our own staff, et cetera. And this forced our hand. And it has shown us that the relationship between the

consumers and the brand is so strong and the appetite is there for consumers. And I think in particular in these really difficult times, we also learned how much people need. need optimism, need uplifting messages. And when you talk about, I just want to dig into the supply chain for a moment. I mean, what you're saying is traditionally you are producing a lot of material and then wholesaling it 12, 18 months in advance to these different retail locations. Well, you design it that far in advance. You don't actually ship it that far. But really the whole system operates where retail buyers and our team are trying to have a crystal ball and see what consumers want a year from now.

and then you go off to trade shows and try to sell it. This is the way retail has been forever, but it's not in keeping with today's consumer demands. So when you decided that you had to play offense, as you say, and you mentioned investing in some technology, what was the technology you invested in that enabled you to respond to consumer demand faster? Sure. It's called direct-to-garment printing. We've been researching for the better part of five years,

And we just before COVID hit, spent several million dollars on technology to dumb it down or simplify. It means that we would take blank T-shirts in and print every order, every single order. If you order one medium V-neck t-shirt with such and such graphic and message, we print that to order and ship it to you. So it essentially is more expensive to print per unit. But if we're doing it right, you end up with perfect inventory. And inventory is the thing that kills businesses. Right, because if you've got too much, then you're kind of weighed down with all this stuff. Yeah, so we're not committed right now.

Day by day, we watch exactly what consumers are buying, how they're reacting, and we make more of that product. And if something that we put together is not selling, we don't produce it. So here's a question. I mean, you're facing worries about whether you're going to go bankrupt in March. And your leadership team is saying, look, we should actually play offense and invest in new technology that will enable us to respond to consumer demand. faster make t-shirts with these messages about washing your hands and staying safe and, you know, that are connected to the zeitgeist. That must have been expensive machinery to invest in. Yeah, we were pretty confident pre-COVID that this is the direction we should go with our brand.

You know, we're not a necessarily fashion forward company. We're high-quality basics. And we're also not an athletic apparel company that's overly focused on technical performance fabrics. John happens to be wearing a technical performance fabric. It's just for elite athletes, guy, just the very tip of your shirt right now, the life is good one that you're wearing? Yes. I see you must be working out because I can see it in that shirt. Actually, you need some work there, Johnny, I think. I'm really excited about this, but Bert's right, primarily. But the point is that what drives our business is the art and the message. So we happen to be in the apparel business, primarily T-shirts, but it's really not about the T-shirt. The thing that drives our business, our

point of difference is seeing the world through an optimistic lens and sharing those ideas how an optimist views the world. That's how our community is emotionally connected. I want to talk about that in a moment, but it sounds like you really wanted to move into this direction earlier. Like you wanted to move into a direction where you could respond to consumer demand faster and not focus on a 12 to 18 month lead time with t-shirt designs and that in some ways or maybe in in in every way the COVID crisis kind of was your opportunity to do that. It fast forwarded everything. Yeah. It's it's almost, you know, it's hard. Like I think we have to recognize the difficulties that people are going through and the businesses and industries

that have been decimated and not make light of that at all. But we're one of those fortunate businesses where COVID did us a favor. It really moved us along. I think our staff, as John pointed out, had been very courageous and they've hustled their asses off and people have been working hard at life is good. So I don't want to make it seem like it's easy either. We work many of us around the clock for, you know, the first 60 days just to figure out how to switch this model. But the fact is we're in a good position as a brand. We were in a good position to do this and we were able to replace so much of that wholesale business with our e-commerce. Our e-commerce business has doubled to date over last year in such a difficult macro economic environment. And the wholesale business, you know,

went down to next to nothing, but it's starting to rise again. Yeah, I just, when I think of why we've been able to power through this, not only this time, but the recession around 0809, or even really rough times in general, like 9-11, we did a fund. fundraiser after that and it kind of rallied our community. But the point I want to make to young entrepreneurs is if your foundation is based on some deeper purpose, our mission is to spread the power of optimism, we're so lucky to have that. And these 10 values we call the life is good superpowers, things like gratitude that is so huge right now. We're hearing it from our customers. They're grateful for the extra time they have with their family, with the lack of commute,

that they're focusing more on their health, on cooking, on being together. We hear this from our employees, that they're grateful that they don't have the commute and are having a little more time to put the kids to bed, et cetera. But we're fortunate that the foundation of our company is something we believe is timeless and powerful, and that is optimism. And if you're simply selling a widget right now and you run into a storm like this, it's much harder to evolve. Our birds talking about the nuts and bolts that we had to adjust, but the foundational values are rock solid.

And when I say that word, it could sound corny to some people, but values in a lot of companies, I feel like, is a dusty couple sheets of paper that's tucked away. Our superpowers are something we talk about daily. Our employees embody these values, gratitude, love, authenticity, creativity. And we live for these things. and we live for spreading them out to the world. So we feel like we're in a unique position to help people out there that are feeling isolated. When we come back in just a moment, Bert and John talk about gratitude and how their company has been able to find some optimism during these very difficult times.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. Hey, welcome back to how I built this Resilience Edition. And I'm talking with Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good. about their ability to stay optimistic, especially during these pretty bleak times. I'll be honest. How I built this is an optimistic show by its nature. I'm an optimistic person I try to be.

But that's not the full story. The reality is that there are days where it feels like I'm pushing a boulder up a hill, especially these past six months. I'm in California now. This state is on fire, and we can't go outside because it's unhealthy to breathe the air. And it feels it's very challenging. So you add that to the pandemic and to the political crisis in this country and the racial injustice and all of the things that are happening. And it is a very, very challenging time.

Even the most optimistic people are seeing challenges in this moment. And you're right about gratitude. You know, it's something actually I try to practice daily to remind myself of the things that I have. My children and my wife, but man, it's hard sometimes. I'd be aligned to you guys or to our listeners if I said that I'm sunny and optimistic all the time because it's hard. We're not either. Life isn't perfect and life isn't easy. That's what our brand is about.

It's more that it can be helpful. And we believe that it's the most powerful tool we have as human beings to be rational optimists, to look through an optimistic lens. That doesn't mean you have this pie in the sky idea that everything's perfect and everything's easy. But in the history of our business, life is good in 26 years, the inflection points where our business has thrived the most, we've steadily grown and had a healthy business, but I'll go through them really quickly. 2001, 9-11, believe it or not, in the wake of that awful disaster, our business grew. It grew tremendously. Okay, so people were seeking optimism and seeking unity and seeking uplifting messages. When the recession hit 2008, 2009, our business thrived in the wake of that. The bombings in our hometown bombings, awful, absolutely awful.

And we were impacted personally from that. And we found ways with our business to really grow. And now with COVID in these challenges, we have found that people are really, really seeking optimistic messages and uplifting messages. And it's not actually the soft stuff. It's very difficult right now to get by emotionally and mentally to sort of get ourselves in a place where we're prepared to try to have a good day. There's a lot of mystery to what's happening. So having unity with each other, sharing and counting on our support system, family mentioned pets earlier, really, really big.

We've celebrated science, the importance of science in hopefully finding a vaccine. We've made comments about just about everything. Sports fans are struggling, right? That may sound like a frivolous, simple thing. But we've had a lot of fun when baseball season, you know, was delayed. We made a T-shirt that said, longest rain delay in history. And that shirt's selling hundreds of units every single day.

People miss it. Those things, the small things are the big things. And, Guy, your point about how you're feeling, I think everyone who's got a conscience and a heart is struggling with that. balance right now and we're not trying to plow that aside and say everything's fine. This is a really brutal year in so many ways for so many people. I wanted to share that the inspiration for us, it's been really a co-writing of the Life is Good Story by our community. And early on, we started getting letters and emails from people. They were often from people going through really difficult

things, dealing with chemotherapy, losing loved ones. And they would say, your hat helped me stay positive during chemo or, you know, we all wore life as good to the memorial service. And we've brought up 9-11 a few times because it happens to be 9-11 today. And one of our most inspirational letters we ever got was from a woman named Nancy who lost her husband, Danny, as a firefighter in New York. And this is her courage to focus on positive things. But she felt this emotional bond with our company because they always used to buy it on Christmas. And now it was a way to kind of give a piece of Danny and keep his memory alive every Christmas. But the last few years, it never stops.

In fact, it keeps growing the stories that get us. You mentioned the fires in California. We got one fairly recently from a woman who lost her whole house in a fire and a picture of her holding a half of a Life is Good mug saying. And it's not about the thing. It's about her mindset of, I'm grateful that I'm alive, like you said, about your kids. we're all feeling these mixes of emotions, and they're expressing gratitude as like this big part of their toolkit.

Like, okay, I've lost this and this, and I'm worried about everyone's health. However, I'm alive and I have people that love me, and I just had a meal and focusing on those things. It's very central to what our brand is, and it's very much a two-way street. It's not life is good putting out these platitudes. It's even more so our community sharing their stories with us. pictures, their messages, their photos, lifting us. And really, we're kind of a conduit. We have quite a community online, and they're lifting each other constantly. And we enjoy that energy, too,

from them, but it's a true sense of community. I remember when you guys were on the podcast last year, you guys really talked candidly about your upbringing, your childhood, and it was not easy. Your dad had a car accident, and it really embittered him, and he had a tough life. And you talked a lot about that and about how your mom really kind of focused on optimism, even though you guys were poor. There were eight kids, I think, in your house, and there was, you know, very little money. And, you know, you guys struggled for many years to get this business up and running. How do you, how do both of you kind of find the motivation and the resilience to get up and keep going and keep moving, even on those tough days? I mean, you know, I will tell you that for me,

I have to do certain things every day. I have to exercise in the morning. It's sometimes hard. This morning was really hard. I didn't want to do it because I'm sad. But I'm glad I did it. It was hard and makes a day just a tiny bit more manageable. You know why you did that?

You did it probably because it works. And we saw it work for our mother who didn't have an easy life at all. But somehow she found it in herself to sing, to tell stories, to draw, and to encourage us to draw. And that was huge. And I don't think we quite realized it until we were moving out of the house, like what an influence,

how she changed the energy in the house with her own will. And so exercise is a big one for myself. I know for Bert, too, and trying to stay connected to people I really love is extremely helpful. And I think people get momentum when they see that it is effective.

And that's why Bert and I and the team are so, passionate about getting the word out to more people because it actually works. And we think it's the most powerful thing in the world is that choice of optimism. And a choice that you can make. You can choose to be happy. It doesn't mean it's easy. And it's harder for some. And it's brutal on some days, as you pointed out. But it's the most powerful thing we found. Part of the key, I think, is to seek the things that are good coping mechanisms, that are healthy coping mechanisms, you know, drugs and alcohol, et cetera, in excess is not a healthy coping mechanism. People who truly love you and being

in touch with them and communicating, that's a support system that is part of a coping mechanism that's really powerful. Exercise is a healthy coping mechanism. So I think we had examples in our own household. Our mom and dad were both really good people and they both had pretty heavy challenges in their lives. Our mom, you know, who's sort of the hero of the story, she suffered with depression. her whole life. Even while we were growing up, she suffered with it. But her coping mechanisms, as John pointed out, were singing, storytelling, dancing. She taught us the idea of rational optimism. Let's focus on the good things. Let's focus on what's have, tell me something good that happened today. You know, later we credited her. You know, we said, wow, that was such great parenting,

mom. It was so powerful what you did. And she, I remember she just said, I was doing it for myself. I think that's the biggest thing is to try to seek things that are helpful to you and try to avoid things that are damaging. What is the difference between, you know, irrational optimism and rational optimism? Yeah, irrational optimism says life is great every single day. No matter what, everything's great. There's forest fires going. There's a global pandemic. But today's just a perfect day.

You're out to lunch, if you believe that. We say rational optimism because we've read. recognize that life isn't easy and life isn't perfect, that there's real challenges. These are real difficult things that are going on. But we believe that the best, most powerful tool we have for overcoming challenges is our disposition, our view. Because optimists tend to be innovative. They tend to find solutions. You know, this is a business show, right? So we're talking about how to get through this difficult time. It's about adaptation. We listen closely to our customers, it's a dialogue.

And anybody listening, you have a business. You know, the world's changing. You can't have the same business. We have to adapt. And in our own personal lives, in order to fight off a heavy sadness and depression and becoming paralyzed by all of this, we have to adapt, you know? And we have to find healthy coping mechanisms.

Creativity is one of those superpowers I mentioned. And you think maybe of our artists and our writers who've done a phenomenal job during the this period, but you can look at our operations team who's dealing with this new model that Bert just described and way more skews, way more choices for the end consumer. On the back end, that's a lot of puzzles to solve. The attitude of our ops team has been bringing on. We'll figure it out. We loved what we do. That's something you can't really, you can't really teach. And it's part of that adaptive mindset. And I just want to credit our team because Bert and I,

I get to do interviews like this, but our team, those are the people that have figured out these puzzles at the highest level, at the mid-level, and they just power through. And they've been so collaborative with each other, because I could see how the stress of that first month or two could have broken down teams so easily and had a bunch of finger-pointing. But instead, it was like compassion. Okay, you've got, you've got- And also, Johnny, our customers. Okay, so like, I mentioned that our business, our e-commerce business doubled. The gifts, the donations to our Kids Foundation, 300% since March 1st. 300% of this year.

Empathy rises at times like this, and it's a beautiful thing to witness in humanity. And I just wanted to share a very important part of our team is our Life's Good Kids Foundation, our playmakers. And they stepped up with all sorts of adaptation. 100%. Before we let you guys go, what is something that you've learned about your leadership and the way you are? operating your company that you want to continue going forward? I would say two things, listening and hiring people with that same optimistic, resilient trait. And I think we've done a good job

of those things, but the reason I bring it up is it has shined as such a bright spotlight on our leadership team and the rest of our team that they have that in them, that we didn't have to say, hey, guys, I know this is brutal and unprecedented, but we have to, think where are the opportunities and how do we survive. We didn't have to say those rah-rah speeches. They were already doing it. They were already leading and collaborating with each other in ways Bert and I don't even understand, like Slack, for example. And then the listening part. That was such a crucial turning point when we first were trying to decide, do we need to shut down like for the whole summer? And it took the brave voices of several people in our

company to make it clear to us that it would benefit the whole team, including those in our warehouse, more if we found a way to safely open. And no matter what your title is, make sure the ears are open and you've got enough space for people to raise their hand and to chime in because the team really helped us guide toward an excellent solution that's helped us survive. Yeah, I would just say that clarity is really important. So in times like this, a lack of clarity exacerbates your problems. And I think while we, as John pointed out, didn't have the solutions to a lot of things, we were really clear about what matters most. We have a very simple mission, spread the power of optimism. Let's listen closely to our customers and see if we can innovate and find ways to

adapt here. And as John pointed out, thankfully, we've got a lot of smart, hard-driving leaders in our organization that figured those things out. So clarity, I think, is huge. And just enabling your leaders. The other thing I would say is that it's the 21st century and anybody who thinks that they're a smart entrepreneur or a smart marketer and they're going to build their brand on their own, you're kidding yourself. You have to enable your consumers to co-author the story of your brand. And that's what's happening every day for our brand as we're growing right now. We're listening to them. We're collecting data on what they love, what resonates with them, exactly what words, exactly what messages, why, get them to talk about it, get them to share, send pictures of what

you're doing, et cetera, and celebrate their lives with them. So I think we need to do more. More and more of that, that's the way we're going to build our community going forward, not by being professors, but by being students. John and Bert Jacobs, thank you so much for being on. It's been great having you. Guy, thank you. Keep it up. And we'll see you another time. Thank you so much, Guy. Congrats on the book. And we really appreciate you having us on. That's an excerpt for my conversation with Bert and John Jacobs. The co-founders of Life is Good.

To see our full interview, you can go to Facebook.com slash how I built this. And if you want to see all of our past live interviews, you can find them there or at YouTube.com slash NPR. And if you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Candice Lim with help from Will Mitchell, Matt Adams, Gianna, Capadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva, and Jeff Rogers. Thanks for listening. Stay safe and I'll see you in a few days. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.