When brothers Bert and John Jacobs were in their early 20s, they bought a beat-up old Plymouth Voyager minivan – nicknamed “the Enterprise” – stocked it full of T-shirts they had designed, and went on road trips up and down the east coast selling their wares on college campuses.



They covered their costs selling the shirts for about $10 apiece, but it was a meagre existence. They slept in the van, lived on peanut butter and jam sandwiches and every so often would scrounge to buy a pizza or rely on one of their customers to sneak them into a school cafeteria.


“People say, ‘Oh that must have been tough.’ But it wasn’t that tough, we were young and strong,” shrugs John, the younger by three years. “There was a hope it would lead to something big, but we were doing something we liked to do. We were selling our artwork, travelling, meeting new people, and watching the girls go by. On slow days, if the weather was decent, we’d toss around a Frisbee.”


Twenty years later, the Jacobs brothers are still hawking T-shirts and still playing Frisbee. As co-founders of Life is Good, a ¬Boston-based apparel and accessories company that last year had sales of $120m, the Jacobses unapologetic¬ally peddle a message of optimism and an appreciation for the small pleasures of life. Most of its merchandise – the company offers more than 980 items, including dog beds, travel mugs and tyre covers – features the company emblem, a stick figure named Jake, enjoying a range of outdoor pastimes: swimming, camping, fishing and golfing, to name a few. The core slogan is “Life is Good” but other taglines include: “Take your sweet time”, “Spread good vibes” and “Do what you like, like what you do”.


To cynical observers, this un­abashed message of cheerfulness may come across as trite. But the brothers – both of whom are six foot five and have a New England mountain-man look, with ruddy complexions and unruly heads of ginger hair – insist that this is a misinterpretation.


“The little things in life are the big things,” says Bert. “If you think you’ll be happier when you get that promotion or that two-car garage, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”


Adds John: “It’s not: life is great, or life is perfect, or life is easy. It’s not an exclamation point. It’s acknowledging that there is bad in the world, but don’t harp on it.”


The brothers grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Their father worked in a machine shop; their mother was a homemaker who raised six children (they are the youngest siblings.) They lived in a small house with four bedrooms and describe their childhood as “happy chaos”.


“Despite having limited funds, Mom was always laughing and singing,” recalls Bert. “She is a big part of the inspiration for the brand.”


After college, the two began selling T-shirts at small-town street fairs and on college campuses, and supplemented their income by supply teaching. At first, selling the shirts, which featured abstract art or dancing figures, was just a bit of fun, a “financially accessible way to go into business”, according to John. “But we also wanted to communicate a message.”


During long days on the road, the two discussed bigger ideas. “We talked about the media inundating our culture with negative information. There’s no six o’clock news any more. There’s only the six o’clock murder report,” says Bert. “We wondered: is there something we could create that’s about what’s right with the world, rather than what was wrong? Could we create an icon that could be a symbol of optimism?”


In 1994, on a hiatus from one of their road trips, the Jacobses threw a keg party. At the time, they lived in a flat near Boston; their walls were covered with drawings and they encouraged guests to be as artistic as they wished.


The two noticed that their friends gravitated towards a simple sketch by John: a cartoon face wearing a black beret, a pair of sunglasses and a wide grin. Beneath the drawing, friends wrote things such as: “This guy has life figured out” and “My hero”.


They felt they were on to something but they needed more consumer research. Their solution: another kegger. They set up an easel in their living room and on it wrote 50 sample mottos for their cartoon figure. Once again they encouraged their friends to leave comments. “Life is good” was the clear winner.


The Jacobses printed 48 T-shirts with a picture of Jake and the winning motto. The next day they set up a booth at a street fair in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard and MIT. They sold out in 45 minutes.


“It was all different kinds of people who were buying them: skateboard punks, Harley-Davidson riders, suit-and-tie guys who worked in the financial district, schoolteachers. It was such a broad base,” says Bert.


“In five-and-a-half years of selling T-shirts, we hadn’t seen anything like it,” adds John. “Half-way through the pile, we looked at each other: it was scary. We’d finally found what we were looking for.”


After the initial success, the Jacobses took their idea direct to retailers and trade shows in New York City. They had done this before with previous T-shirt ventures but had had little success. This time, retailers were receptive.


They had found their niche, but had no idea how to run a business. They sent out shipments without invoices; they wrote orders on top of old pizza boxes in their flat; they did not even own a fax machine or a computer.


Kerrie Gross, a friend and neighbour who worked as a paralegal, helped computerise the brothers’ invoices and run their day-to-day operations. “We had a financial guy tell us we’d need to make $250,000 in sales in order to afford to hire an employee. He might as well have told us we’d need to make $50bn,” says John, because it seemed like such an impossibly large sum.


In its first year, the company made $260,000. They hired Ms Gross and a number of other friends who remain partners in the business, in which the Jacobses hold an 80 per cent stake. It earned $1.2m in 1997 and $2m in 1998. Today it has 4,500 distributors operating in 30 countries.


The brothers have no interest in selling their business, or taking it public. In the face of recession, they remain upbeat.


“Whether the economy is up or down, or whether we’re at war, people need optimism,” Bert says. “I think it was Churchill who said: ‘I am optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else’.”


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