Life Lessons

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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.…"

Eschew irony. One reason I initially missed the charm of Life Is Good is that I misinterpreted its message. I sensed a smugness there, as though the wearer were proclaiming, "My life is good," or else a willful blinkeredness: "Life is good if you make enough money and live in a First World democracy." But the Jacobses mean neither of those things. Rather, the words are an exhortation to appreciate the here and now. "Don't determine that you're going to be happy when you get the new car or the big promotion or when you meet that special person," explains John. "You can decide that you're going to be happy today."

John points out that the assertion is, in fact, a modest one. "It's important that we're saying 'Life is good,' not 'Life is great," he says.

John also points out that the assertion is, in fact, a modest one. "It's important that we're saying 'Life is good,' not 'Life is great' or 'Life is perfect," he says. "There's a big difference. We know that there are lots of bad things in the world. But overall life is good. You have to focus on the good things and help others to focus on the good things." That message has resonated with people facing adversity, an unanticipated development that has made the business more meaningful to the Jacobses. Leafing through the brothers' scrapbooks, I come across photos of smiling children wearing Life Is Good caps to cover the ravages of chemotherapy. Recalling my early assumptions, I give myself a mental swat.

Listen to your friends. Disregard the experts. The Jacobses don't have business backgrounds. Bert majored in communications at Villanova, and John studied art and English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. What they do have is a shared gut in which they place enormous trust. In general, their instincts have guided them well, chiefly in the direction of measured expansion and rapid diversification (new product categories, new distribution models, international growth, real estate investments).

The brothers also trust the instincts of their vast circle of friends and employees. It was a bunch of chums who initially selected a drawing of Jake (done by John) and "Life Is Good" from an assortment of images and slogans the Jacobses were testing out during a between-sales-trips kegger in the early '90s. A number of friends have since joined the business, and last year the Jacobses made four of them partners, giving each 5 percent of the company. The founders hold the remaining 80 percent. "These aren't outsiders who came in all of a sudden saying they could get us from A to Z," says Bert. "They are our brothers and sisters in this thing, and their blood, sweat, and tears continue to pour into it."

By contrast, Life Is Good has no formal board of advisers, and the Jacobses aren't eager to create one. They readily seek expertise on narrow questions (the optimal square footage for company stores, for example) but generally shrug off broader, strategic counsel. Their conversation is peppered with sentences that begin "People told us…" followed by a summary of the advice: "Don't waste time distributing through mom-and-pops," "Don't locate your flagship store on Newbury Street," "Do spend money on an advertising campaign." These stories all end the same way--the Jacobses buck conventional wisdom and their own judgment proves correct.

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Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

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