For Life Is Good, COVID can’t kill all optimism
Life is good.
It’s more than a slogan. For more than 25 years, it’s been an ethos for the company that makes $100 million a year printing those three words on T-shirts, ball caps, coffee mugs and other merchandise.
But then 2020 arrived, and with it the coronavirus pandemic. When Bert and John Jacobs, the brothers who founded the company in 1994, met in March with the top leadership staff of Life Is Good, they spoke of things that seemed a rejection of the optimism they normally peddled. Layoffs. Bankruptcy. Even an end to the business.
It wasn’t as if Jake – the smiley-faced stick figure who adorns many of the company’s T-shirts – hadn’t had a reason to frown before. After 9/11, people told the Jacobs brothers life wasn’t good any longer. They responded with a shirt bearing a stylized American flag above their brand. Customers bought them up, and though the company donated sales from that shirt to charity, the gesture broadened their customer base.
“Our business didn’t just survive that era, it thrived,” Bert Jacobs said in a recent phone interview.
The 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon struck closer to home – the brothers grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, and the privately held company is based in Boston. They responded with a T-shirt bearing the city’s name on the front with a heart replacing the second O and the legend, “There’s nothing stronger than love” on the back.
“That became the best-selling T-shirt we ever made at the time,” Jacobs said. The profits again went to charity, and their customers multiplied.
But the coronavirus was something else. The company couldn’t just print a clever T-shirt and ride it out – not if the very act of gathering many of their 200 employees in their New Hampshire distribution center jeopardized lives. Shutting down the center – even if it meant losing the business – seemed like it might be the right thing to do.
So the brothers met with their leadership team, which asked for 48 hours to seek feedback from the staff and consider alternatives.
Hanging in the balance: the future of a company whose origin story sounds like a folk tale.
After finishing college, the brothers put their artistic inclinations to work trying to sell T-shirts in the early ’90s. They traveled the East Coast in a van dubbed “Enterprise” hawking T-shirts on college campuses and anywhere else they found a crowd.
After five years and with $78 to their names, they returned home to Boston and threw a keg party. They pinned drawings of their latest ideas to the wall for friends to critique. One showed the grinning stickfigure face they would soon make iconic. Someone circled it and wrote, “This guy’s got life figured out.”
Life Is Good was born. Their first time out with the new design, they sold 48 shirts in 45 minutes.
Jacobs, square-jawed, ginger-haired and, in his mid-50s, fit enough for all the activities celebrated on his shirts, looks like he’s the guy who’s got life figured out. But he’s humbled talking about the business’ success.
“We didn’t invent these ideas,” he said. “We didn’t even invent ‘life is good.’ We just happened to get lucky and be the first ones to trademark it.”
So when the employees said they wanted to figure out how to safely keep the business operating, the team mobilized to retrofit the distribution center.
“We brought in nurses. We set up stations 10 feet apart (and staggered shifts),” Jacobs said. “It’s been three months, and we don’t have any cases. We’ve been fortunate so far.”
New designs include drawings of animals with the message “Wash your paws“or “Stay calm, stay cool, stay home.” A design for graduates bore the inscription, “Class of 2020: ‘Virtually’ the greatest class of all time.”
“That one went crazy,” Jacobs said.
“Our customers, like ourselves, recognize that there are obstacles. … We like to say, ‘Life isn’t easy, and life isn’t perfect. But life is good.’”
Still.
“We didn’t even invent ‘life is good.’ We just happened to get lucky and be the first ones to trademark it.” Bert Jacobs, Life Is Good co-founder