How I Built This with Guy Raz - The Life Is Good Company: Bert and John Jacobs

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

In the late 80s, brothers Bert and John Jacobs were living as nomads, traveling from college to college selling t-shirts out of their van. It wasn't a sustainable living – until one day, they created a new design. It was a simple sketch of a grinning face, with three words printed underneath: Life Is Good. The optimistic message was deeply personal to the brothers, who grew up in what they describe as a dysfunctional home – and it also resonated with customers, who started buying Life Is Good designs printed on just about anything, from towels to tire covers. Today, the Life Is Good Company has a reported annual revenue of $100 million. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," Jim Malone of CounterEv Furniture describes how he turns reclaimed wood from bowling alleys into tables and chairs for fast-casual restaurants. See 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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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. 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 Conniff. 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 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? 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. We got the VCR. We got a picture of mom. And he was just like dumbfounded looking at us like, God, these guys are so clueless. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they 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. Fly 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 proof.

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 going to 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 shirts 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 key chains, 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 Needham, 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, were 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 American dream. It was the lawn was manicured and paint was perfect on the home. The shutters were all on and 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 families with a lot of kids. By the time it came to us, the grass was knee high and the shutters were half falling 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, financially not enough money there and there just there was no space. So lots of, so a busy, I mean, as kids, it must have been a pretty kind of chaotic home. Chaotic's a good word guy. Day to day, yeah, it was kind of madness. There was no heat in the upper floor ever. So our oldest four civil, siblings would just pile on blankets and some of them were chattering away, barely sleeping, and others, our brother Alan for some reason, would just sleep in his tidy witties with no blanket and just lie there and snore.

But there was frost on the window. I mean, no exaggeration. It was pretty strange and funny 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? Like, were they different kinds of people? Well, they were really different from each other.

Our dad was very structured and idealistic and definitely a math and science sort of engineering type of mind. And our mom was the absolute opposite, gregarious, outgoing, always laughing, dancing, very creative. But then I think, you know, they went through some big changes 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 our dad lost the use of his right arm entirely, and he never really regained that.

He was a gifted craftsman. He was an avid outdoorsman. And I think he was pretty frustrated that he couldn't do those things any longer. And did it change the way he looked at life once he lost? use of his hand? Yeah, I just think he became frustrated with his body and he was a pretty physical guy and it certainly did seem when we look at kind of before and after that that he became depressed and that depression seemed to manifest itself in constant yelling and screaming. And he'd go on these tirades just screaming and yelling at everything, whether it was us or our mom or, you know,

footballs lying on the ground or baseballs or 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 really weren't seeing it through the eyes of the person who was responsible for things. Was it scary? Do you guys remember being scared when you were kids? Very much so, yeah And it wasn't I never remember him

hitting us But yeah I'd say there was another kind of fear too That like I remember fearing that That just whole family was just crumbling And that I didn't know what was going to happen But like a lot of times

He would yell straight through the night But it wasn't all one way like that He would apologize You know when he kind of got his wits about him 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 kind of maintained the idea that he was a good guy. When you guys were,

I mean, you had six, six of you total, 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. So we shared bunk beds, had our own room together. And 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 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, 11, midnight, one sometimes. So I would say really tight growing up into similar stuff, into sports. into art, into music, and then high school is different when there's a three-year gap, technically four-year gap between grades. Right. Yeah, there was probably a period in high school when I was a senior and John was a freshman,

we wouldn't say how'd each other in the hallway. It was just a short period of time. So you, I guess, Bert, you went to, because you're older, you went to college first. You went to Villanova and I guess to Fitchburg State in Massachusetts. And John, you were at UMass Amherst. Did either of you at that point in your lives think about, like that you were going to create a business one day? Yeah, I was pretty focused on that. 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 was pretty focused on the idea of entrepreneurship. And John? I had done a little bit with like land. 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 form like that.

Okay, so I guess after you guys finished college, both of you head out west, I guess Bert, you go to Colorado. And then, John, you go out to California, right? Right. And then I guess it was around 88, 89, both of you meet up in California, and then you decide to drive back together back to Boston and then just sort of figure out what you're going to do next with your lives. Like, what 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 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 them 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 in a tent or just by the side of the road or in the back of the car. So you're doing this road trip, making your way across the country. And you get back to Massachusetts, right? And I guess presumably you'd be on the mass pike, right, going down through Western Mass coming in? That's right. Yeah. And I don't know if it's apocryphal, but I've heard 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 really true? That is true. Yeah. It was the first time we talked about it was on that trip. 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 them around the dorms and what a kick we got out of it. What were your t-shirt designs in college just out of curiosity? Well, they were caricatures of, you know, intramural teams and really simple stuff.

Like funky dancing figures or one. And at that time, I guess we were talking late 80s, it was like, oh, you can do with the price of one color, you can get a rainbow across the letter M. Like it was nothing groundbreaking. But like, oh, we could 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. And it didn't happen a lot, but occasionally you'd see it in the dorm and like, wow, that felt good. And were you guys like silk screening your own shirts? No, 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 to go into a local screen printer and, you know, we just bought major mill, Haynes, BFET or Fruit of the Loom or something like that from a distributor. And that was, I remember talking with John that it was a charge to feel that a stranger was going to reach in their pocket and pay money for something that you created. 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 going to 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 got back to Boston, did you guys, like, move back into your parents' house? We did. We did, briefly. Yeah. So you back to your parents' house, and you have decided, we are going to, let's make some T-shirts and sell them. And I understand you could take your design to a silk screener and they could just make a bunch of T-shirts that you hand over to them. What were the designs that you decided on making at first? What did the T-shirts look like? Well, we had a lot of concepts and ideas and designs and some of the stuff we had from college. We did an Irish t-shirt on St. Patrick's Day that said, tis no sin, not to be Irish, just a terrible, terrible shame.

And that cracked people up in 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 something for Mother's Day. And, you know, that kind of kept things going a little bit. But nothing was really ringing the register too much. And what you're just like going around Boston and like setting up tables and selling them? Yeah, how are you selling them? We had two duffel bags.

And after the first six months, we bought a Massachusetts state hawkers and peddlers license. And we also bought a 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. The cops would move you out.

We'd try to sell near Fanio Hall. By the time you went where it was legal for the hawkers and peddlers license, you'd be on some sidewalk where there's no foot traffic. It would be impossible. So you had to kind of push it every day. And every day we'd get to hustle. Yeah, we did. And 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 we would hear them on the rest. radio say, Jacob's brothers are out on the corner of Calm Ave, you know, and like, 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, we finally got enough sales that we decided that the one place where we were selling better than the street was when we went to college dormitories.

How did that work? You would just drive to colleges and, like, open up the door? I guess this was back in the day when they weren't locked and you just walk in and like... Yeah, they weren't locked. Most places were not locked. And you're right, it would probably be really hard today. So in some of the cities they were, but we started doing that 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 dorm room corridors. Knock on the door, yeah. T-shirts for sales? Oh, you would knock on the door. Yeah, we would hustle. I mean, you would actually run from door to door, run up the steps, because we quickly learned that the weekend nobody's around enough. And in the daytime, you can't find anybody.

So we quickly learned that the meat was in the middle of the week and the evening at, you know, probably about like 6 o'clock to 10 o'clock. That was your wheelhouse. So you try to cover a whole campus. That means you've got to 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'm just trying to put myself 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 be like, yes, and then you would say what? Any interest in a t-shirt like this and you just take it out and hog?

And it was actually not an uncommon thing. I don't know about these days, but banging on the dorm selling t-shirts was something people did. What was unusual for us was that we would knock on someone's door and we'd be down in Virginia, you know, and they would say, what year are you guys? And we'd say, we don't go to school. They'd say, where are you from? And we'd say, Boston. They'd say, well, what are you doing down here? And when we explained to people that we've been traveling in a van selling T-shirts from Boston, they were blown away.

I'm still trying to figure out 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? Some of it has no words. It's just these like funky dancing figures and it's, it's, uh, stick figures or?

Yeah, they're, but more fluid. Like Keith Herring style? A little bit. Yeah, 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 stylized sketch of pine trees and mountains or a mountain bike or something like that. But we just didn't have the hook. You know, none of these things were selling like crazy. And we also started talking about, we had all this time in the band. And we started talking about brands.

We talked about Nike, lot, you know, how the swish came to mean the athletic prowess and being a champion and all those different things. And we talked about how Ralph Lauren and that little pony came to mean affluence, et cetera. And while these things didn't seem to be the thing we were chasing, we kept saying, you know, what's our swish? What's our little pony kind of thing? And we knew that we needed something to connect with people on. And we knew that we didn't have that. Do you remember what your revenue average year of revenue might have been at that time? It was extremely low, right?

It was probably, you know, under $80,000 in top line revenue. But you had to pay for the T-shirts. And so your profit was probably... Well, the profit was probably $20,000 and you got to pay for, you know, gasoline and you got to pay for everything, you know. But 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, right. Maybe we would splurge on a pizza at that time, probably five bucks or something that night. But otherwise, we were getting by on nothing. And we knew if we couldn't keep going enough, If we couldn't propel ourselves enough to get gas and get to the next town, in the back of our heads, it must have been the reality that real jobs were something we had to consider. And our friends actually were having real lives evolved.

They were having relationships. They were getting homes or apartments. They had real suits and going to real jobs. And that was sometimes embarrassing if we'd be out on the street with, with, runny nose is at like 10 degrees in December trying to sell a t-shirt and you bump into somebody. But 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 try to find something that finally clicked with people. So 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, you know, four or five years. No, I think I just, when I think of like people trying to start a business to imply that there was never doubts 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. 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 we wouldn't have lasted, we were able, just like we were in the bunk bed when things were tense in the house,

we were able to play off some character we had just met, imitate them, make up a funny song about them or something. 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 1994? How did you, what happened to your T-shirt business that made you think?

You know, 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 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'd get on the road for about six weeks at a time and then we'd teach for a little while and then we'd take off. And we got to have this ritual where when we came back to Boston,

we'd throw a keg party and we'd invite all of our friends and we'd put all of our artwork up on the walls and we'd kind of have a focus focus group. 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 Jake 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 explain here for, sec that this drawing that you did, this guy that you called Jake, but 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 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 was at that party circled 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'd say, wow, what if that guy's not just an artist? What if he's a superhero whose power is his optimism? And because he believes anything's possible that it is. And 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 comments down to these three simple words, life is good. And those words changed our lives forever. And what was life as, I mean, I mean, what was life as good supposed to mean? Was it supposed to mean like easy life, you know, life is easy, you know. Like was it aspirational?

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. And I don't know if we used that word back then, but it was like, yes, our business was floundering and barely getting by. But we did feel lucky to be traveling, 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 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. How did you unveil it to people? We got out about a week after we came up with the idea.

We got out to a street fair in Cambridge Mass, and we were used to selling about 10 shirts in a whole day. And we'd have friends help out. It was kind of 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 11 a.m. at the fair, and by noon, all 48 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 1994. Because I remember 1994. I was just starting out of college. And it was like grunge and cynicism, especially among young people, 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 was definitely, 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 back up a minute, like 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 we maybe touched a little on our mother's role, but there was a huge influence she had on us in teaching us that you have control over your energy. 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. In fact, later, we went back to her and said, you know, you were the original inspiration for life is good. And she said, well, you know, how is that? And we said, 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 it's interesting because

she probably was doing it for her own sake, but we benefited tremendously. And we kind of got taught this lesson that, you know, rather than be the victims of this dysfunctional home, we can look around and focus on what's right with our lives and focus on what's right with the family and 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 are like, yeah, no, no, go ahead. She was 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 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, or I shouldn't say switch. She made an intentional choice. And that's really what the whole brand and the whole idea and philosophy is based on it. 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 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 thing's got like the magic dust. We just didn't have any idea what to do with it. Wow. But I mean, this was like kind of like a make or break moment for you, right?

Because I read that like at this point, you only had like a couple hundred bucks between you. I mean, is that true or is that an exaggeration? Not even, actually. 78 bucks, yeah, the day that we, after printing the 48 Life is Good T-shirts, we had 78 bucks left. When we come back in just a moment, how Bert and John grew their 78 bucks into $250,000, which grew into $1 million and then $100 million. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So, it's 1994, 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 store is an ice cream shop. And she and her husband were thinking,

life's pretty good when you're having an ice cream. It's a simple pleasure. So she asked us, does this guy Jake eat ice cream? And we said, no, but he will. And so Jake started eating ice cream. That was the second T-shirt. And the ones with the ice cream cold sold even better than the just the Jake. And the next thing happened with her sister-in-law,

and she had a place with her boyfriend up in Vermont on the bike path. And 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 pretty quickly realized that all we had, 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, guys, I got a reorder. And Bert and I were like, what's a reorder? And that indicates where we were at as a business after five years. But I'm excited to learn.

We didn't biller for the shirts. We just sent them down. So I guess that year, 94, after you kind of become life is good. You did like almost $90,000 worth of revenue, which is great. You know, you could start to see maybe a path towards, you know, towards real profitability. And then I guess the next year, you really, I mean, you're still running this business, by the way, out of your apartment in Boston that you guys share, right? 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 95, the momentum starts rolling. And that was when you guys made your first hire as well, I guess, right?

That's right. Yeah, Kerry Sherman moved in upstairs from us and became a friend, and we just used to beg her when she got home from work to help us pack orders and help us try to organize the orders. and she was a big help, so 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 help pretty badly, and she needed to take a leap. Yeah, and we had a friend over for dinner one night because 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 carry $17,000, which is what she said was the minimum. Our question to her was, what is the lowest amount that you could possibly get paid to work with us? And she said, $17,000. 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 did 262, I think it was, 262,000. That year. And that $262,000 was like, that's to pay for all of your supplies. and everything, right? It was not profit. That is, that is... No.

No. In those... Gross revenue. Days, we would get prepared for dye t-shirts, P-FDs, they call it, and we'd stored 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 them in trash bags that were tightly wound up because it was moist down there. and so 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 get them dyed in the shirt colors we wanted 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 by four o'clock drop them off at uPS whatever the orders were which was, you know, two or three retailers, a couple of orders. And then we set up a trailer, like the back of an 18-wheeler. A container. Container. Like permanently stationed next to our screen printer with their permission? Yeah, they had a dirt parking lot, and for zero rent, because we were afraid to get the overhead of a warehouse.

And so they let us, it was $30 a month to rent the lease, the container. and for $0,000, they let us park it on their lot. Because you didn't want to take the risk on like a long-term lease. Right. So you were just like, let's just use a shipping container as our warehouse. It makes sense. Yeah, we wanted to make sure the revenue ran way out ahead of those. We just needed a couple extension cords, some lighting, and not a lot of ventilation in those containers.

But we cranked summer of 95, 96, and it was kind of nonstop 24-7. 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 were going to the Boston Public Library at night because 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 ask 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 in Psalm two days later and convinced him 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. label in our shirt said Jacob's Gallery. So we switched the label to life is good. And then we had to get affidavits from five different retailers who said that it represented a brand. And by definition, legally a trademark denotes the source of the goods. So 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 source of the goods in some way, then it's a brand.

So he did all those things correctly. And I got to tell you, it's 25 years later, 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 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 big day when we got it. We still didn't really know how to run the business or what to do, but we knew it was a valuable thing. Yeah. How did you guys divide up labor between the two of you? Like, who did what? Who did finances? 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, Bert, he had more of a background coming out of school on the business side, and he's a great communicator, great motivator.

So he worked the phones a lot. I was spending more time on the drawing table or, like, at the screenprint 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 1996. You guys get a call from a pretty big sporting goods chain based out of Indianapolis

named Gallions or Galions. Something like that. Gallions? Yeah. What was that? Yeah, they were actually, in our opinion, the best sporting goods in the country. Their stores were incredible. And, yeah, 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 realize was that there was no life as good, and that when they came to visit us, they'd be coming to our apartment. So anyway, we made them Prince Spaghetti and Raghu's sauce. and we hung out and they were on board and they placed the biggest orders by far that we'd ever seen. And they kind of put us on the map outside of New England. I think Dick's sporting goods eventually bought galleons, right?

That's right. And I don't know if it was apparent to them that the entire company in Bert, myself and Kerry, were sitting with them in our kitchen at dinner. But we did have a lot of laughs and we got an order and that was a huge step for us to suddenly be shipping. 288 pieces instead of 24 pieces to a retailer. So once you get into Gallions, was it just like a game changer? I mean, did you see your business just like skyrocket? It was a game changer because once, what happened was most of our business then and now

is a specialty mom and pop business. So the mom and pops will take a look at the big guys and try to find brands sometimes that different retailers are carrying. And gallions was kind of a mom and pops. model citizen that a lot of small retailers looked up to. And so once we were in Gallions, 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 Gallions was probably responsible for hundreds of new accounts over the next year or two. And business

really started booming. You know, it went from that $250,000 to $620. Then we broke a million at 1.2. Yep. Was that just mind-blowing to you? We were just thinking, how did we go from having like $78 between us three years ago to a million dollars in sales? Yeah, it was pretty mind-blowing. I mean, 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, had a beer and kind of said, wow, man, what just happened? On the other hand, we're still in our apartment and you don't really look around and see any difference. It's just a mad scramble still. But I think, yeah, I think galleons and crossing that million dollar mark kind of gave us the confidence to invest in a lease and get a warehouse. And we hired a few people. We mean, we didn't even have a computer. Until Kerry, who still works with us to this day, by the way, she actually owns 5% 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 don't want a computer. And she said, well, you need it to run the business. And why do we need a computer? But she was right.

Well, there was a lot of absurd exchanges. We had this guy who had run champion the brand and Wilson's sporting goods. And he was helping us out through a sales rep. You know, we connected personally. Joe Phillips, God bless him. He was flying up from him. It was like an angel. Yeah, to get angel slash devil, the best kind.

And 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, what book? What do you mean? And he'd be like, how do you plan how much product to make? And we're like, we've been doubling for like the last few years. We just figured we're going to 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 personal names were on the loan notes. And he said, we got to change this. You know, what do you got for assets? Bert and I were like, we get a mountain bike. And we were dead serious. We didn't even know how to answer the question.

Like, I got a picture of mom. We got the VCR. And he was just like dumbfounded looking at us. Like, God, these guys are so clueled. Who was buying the shirts? Because I mean, when I think of life is good, I think of like going to Ocricoke Island, you know, some place like Cape Cod. Like, you know, life is good and it's the summer and it's easy to feel that way. Is that where the shirts were being sold in like beach towns and places like that in the summertime?

One of the strengths right away was that it wasn't one distribution channel. So you're talking about destination resort, which became important to us right away. But sporting goods was really big, too. Gift shops for people like, you know, around themes, like home themes, like, you know, love family, gardening. Grilling, the backyard, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So it really was, the distribution was really spread out, 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... Not too many eggs in one basket. Yeah, there were so many different places for us to go. And when the economy went down,

not all the channels would get impacted the same way. I mean, did you, I mean, when you think about, a very simple phrase, some very basic, and not, I mean, you guys are great artists, no, no, no judgment, but like very simple artwork. Yep. And it became this thing, T-shirts and dinner plates and posters and things like, like, what, what other things? I'm probably forgetting a bunch of things. Frisbeys, backpacks, towels.

I mean, it really doesn't, you know, it really just became, you know, what is a good canvas to connect emotionally with people. And in more recent years, more things like video content and publishing books, etc., 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 80s, right? You've been selling T-shirts. Have you ever, does any part of you guys want to just sell it, you know, sell it to a bigger

company and just kind of cash in because you've both of you become pretty well off from this tiny little t-shirt business and you can I don't know kind of 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 as 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, And if we 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 want to spread that message as wide as we can because we believe in it more than anything else in the world. And Bert, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, 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 startup today.

We're like a 25-year-old startup. 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 operating the business. I was president and CEO for a long time. And we replaced me with a woman that actually came from our nonprofit side. And she's killing it. And you can tell pretty quickly that she's about 10 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 kind of 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 100% 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. 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 windows and like you presumably today, both of you are doing pretty well. I mean, you can, you can live pretty comfortably.

Yeah, no question about it. Yeah, just to have our own home, seriously, not to be too corny, but that's pretty cool. And to be able to travel, it's incredible. And 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 a couple years ago and then, I could see a year later, your dad passed. What did they make of this? I mean, this T-shirt business that turned into something huge.

Yeah, they love them. I think they were proud of it, and they really did do their part while we had our dysfunction growing up. And there were times where, you know, right up until the time that our mom passed away, if she saw somebody in a life as good T-shirt, she'd run up to them and say, my son's made down. You know, it was embarrassing when you were with her. But 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 were still doing the van trips, he'd always just, you know, we'd roll in at 3 a.m. some night. How'd you do? How'd you do? It was never what the hell are you guys doing, like your 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 interesting thing with going full circle,

with our dad is that in the autumn of his life 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 you know before we were around 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 in 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 that same house falling apart. So we decided to knock the house down and build them a nice new home. And, 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 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, we live. landed on our feet, all of us, and he didn't screw everything up. So I think he was a little easier on himself. And in some ways, the success of the business might have helped 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... Yeah, it was like he and our mom were dating again.

I mean, they would just like hang out and spend time. and, you know, they went away on some weekends and things. They hadn't done that in, you know, 30 years. I mean, they were married for 56 years. And then the last ones, believe it or not, while it was tough with my mom's illness and everything, they had some great years. Wow.

Our mom said that, too, just before, you 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 also that she knew that she did a good job with all her kids and that we're all okay, you know.

You know, when you think about this crazy story, you know, going from T-shirts up and down the eastern seaboard to selling it out of the back of a van, to knocking on the dorm rooms to $78 between you to, you know, a shipping container is your office. And, you know, the company today, what, it does reportedly almost $100 million in revenue a year? Is that about right? Yeah, that's about right.

You got about what, almost 200 employees today? Right. Yep. It's pretty good. I mean, do you, for CBER, 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 and your intelligence? Or do you think that some of it came from just luck? A lot of luck. I think we stumbled into something.

that's much bigger than we are. I think we've been resilient, you know, maybe more resilient than smart. But it's a good 50% luck. We were right place, right time, 2% skill, and then we've worked our asses off. So that's played a big factor too. So, you know, maybe there's all those parts 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 20%, hard work, another 20, and then brute strength, maybe for me, 20.

So neither, I mean, really, you got your answer there in that neither of us know how to add up to 100%. Yeah. And, yeah, we just, you know, so definitely not skill. You had a lot of luck. You can't do math. So clearly there was a lot of luck. Yeah, no question about it. Yeah.

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 of a great 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 her story today starts with Jim Malone, who, like a lot of

people, 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 Jim about 12 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 think I've got something for you. And he brought it down. 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 grain. 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.

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 him 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 kind of 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 cling to every positive indicator. You know, so I thought this is great. Finally, you know, something's happening and it would be amazing. But just when he finally started to get some traction? I didn't hear from her for like four months. Four months. It 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 kind of like, if something doesn't happen pretty soon, I'm going to be throwing 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 commute. 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 10 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, ShakeShack, is using Jim's furniture in over 100 locations. And you never know who's going to 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-Ev Furniture, 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 hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, How I Built This.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 Guy Raz. Our show is produced this week by Rachel Faulkner with music composed by Rumtin Arablewe. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Sanaz Meshkampur, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers.

Our intern is David Jha. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.