The simple, sincere, and unwavering approach that turned the T-shirt company Life Is Good into an $80 million cultural phenomenon, OR, How I learned to stifle my inner pessimist and appreciate a fine small business that only wants me to be happy.
GOOD TIMES
Bert (left) and John Jacobs, founders of the most optimistic company in America, have just had a dip in the Charles River. On the opposite page is the Life Is Good mascot, Jacob.
For eight years I have been haunted by a character with a jack-o'-lantern grin and pipe-cleaner physique. His name is Jake. There was Jake, emblazoned on the sweat-soaked T-shirt of an early morning jogger in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. There he was again, on a Frisbee sailing from teen to teen to teen near the boardwalk in Redondo Beach, California. There he was again, on a water bottle being shared by children in a park in Indianapolis. And there again, on no fewer than four baseball caps spied during an hour's souvenir shopping in Savannah, Georgia.
Jake is the inspiration-cum-mascot of Life Is Good, a 206-employee wholesaler and retailer founded in 1994 by brothers Bert and John Jacobs. Based in Boston, the company markets everything from apparel to dog dishes to furniture, but its chief product is optimism. The joyful-mawed Jake appears on much of the brand's merchandise engaged in a variety of outdoor pursuits: running or skiing or golfing or simply reclining in an Adirondack chair. Beneath this apotheosis of good clean fun appear the words "Life Is Good," or some equally rosy assertion.
In Jake, however, I see only my own blindness.
I first made Jake's acquaintance in 1998, when a press kit for Life Is Good, bundled with a shirt (pale blue, size XL), appeared in my office mailbox. Business editors can't resist passing judgment on new or unknown companies; reading about the then $2 million business I detected no seeds of greatness. All I saw was a commodity product, a stick figure, and a banality. Not only did I decline to write about the company, I walked around the office deriding it to my colleagues. I recall drawing a hangman figure with the caption "Yeah, Me!" on someone's whiteboard and proclaiming myself an entrepreneur.
Now granted, no business with a name like Life Is Good would consider me its target customer. I'm more the dark-night-of-the-soul type. My glass is half empty, the water's cloudy, and there's a dead fly bobbing on the surface. Still, I'm no cynic, and I have a pretty good sense of what's happening demographically in this country. How, then, did I completely miss the appeal of what may be the broadest mass-market phenomenon since The Simpsons?
Life Is Good is now an $80 million business with 5,000 distributors operating in 14 countries. The company, which has been profitable every year since 1997, offers more than 900 items in 14 categories. Its products are used by virtually everyone: toddlers, surfer dudes, college girls, grandmothers, and the occasional brute on a Harley. "We don't miss any demographics but we miss one psychographic--people who can't see the positive side of things," John Jacobs told me during a recent interview, during which I kept my dark underbelly discreetly cloaked.
The broad embrace of this brand--achieved with virtually no advertising--may stem from the different ways people interpret it. To the naturally chipper, it is a shout-out for the simple pleasures that enrich their lives. These are the things that make me happy, it announces. They're not expensive things; they're not things I dream about someday achieving; they're the things I enjoy here and now. In a sense, "Life Is Good" is "I'd Rather Be Surfing" minus the regret. I may not be surfing now, it says. But I have surfed and will surf again, and really, isn't that enough?
But "Life Is Good" has also become something of an anthem for survivors. The founders receive thousands of letters from people whose lives are demonstrably not good, because they are sick or have lost a loved one. Where other companies supply their stores with headquarters-authored mission and values statements, Life Is Good provides loose-leaf binders labeled "Fuel" and stuffed with thank-yous from people who have taken solace or inspiration from its message. Michael J. Fox, suffering from Parkinson's disease, has been photographed wearing Life Is Good products. So was Stephen King during his long convalescence after being struck by a van.
With the company climbing toward $100 million, winning plaudits from social-venture types, and eyeing an outpost in irony-drenched Manhattan, I decided it was finally time to swallow my prejudices and wrap my mind around the Life Is Good phenomenon. So I asked around. I talked to the founders. I bought a shirt.
And while I may never completely get Jake, I have developed a healthy respect for Bert and John Jacobs, who go by the respective titles chief executive optimist and chief creative optimist. The Jacobses rose to rag-trade riches on a combination of shrewdness and sincerity, all but eliminating the distinction between doing the right thing and doing the right thing for their business. I think much of what the Jacobs brothers have done is smart, most of it is interesting, and some of it is even (hold on…this is hard for me…) inspirational to brand marketers, wholesalers, nascent philanthropists, and entrepreneurs who worry that their company's proposition seems too simple to work. What follow are some lessons I learned from Life Is Good. The most important lesson, of course, was humility.
Work that birth legend. From the roof deck of their $8 million, 10,000-square-foot design center and flagship store on Boston's superswank Newbury Street, Bert and John Jacobs can see the site of their original business. Sixteen years ago they hawked $10 T-shirts featuring their own artwork (not Jake--he came later) from a card table on the opposite corner, making themselves scarce whenever the cops swung past. "It's a one-way street so one of us could always keep watch," says Bert Jacobs, who is now 41, the older brother by three years. "We had a folding table so we could pack up quickly."
That first business, called Jacobs Gallery, had other Boston area locations as well, all of them similarly ad hoc and illegal. The brothers also sold shirts door-to-door at college dorms up and down the East Coast for five years, living in their van and sleeping on piles of merchandise. It's a great story, Hewlett-Packard-two-guys-in-a-garage great. And the Jacobses are well aware of its allure. So they print the tale everywhere--on tags attached to their products, on cards dropped into shopping bags, on their website--even on some of their T-shirts. "I think it's interesting how many customers know the story about them traveling around selling shirts," says Carol Wilkes, co-owner of Highland Hiker, an outdoor gear store in Cashiers, North Carolina, that carries Life Is Good products. "You hear people telling it to each other. Someone might be in the store looking at things on the Life Is Good table and another customer says to them, 'Do you know about these guys? They started out of a little van.…"
