The Life Is Good Company: Bert and John Jacobs

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  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 Coniff, 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.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Well, there was a lot of absurd exchanges. We had this guy who had run Champion, the brand.

• 0:36Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  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 got a mountain bike. And we were dead serious. We didn't even know how to answer the question. We're like, we got the VCR. We got a picture of mom. Yeah. And he was just like dumbfounded, looking at us like, God, these guys are so clueless.

• 1:06Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:17Guy Raz?

  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 turned that phrase into a brand and a $100 million business.

• 1:35Guy Raz?

  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 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.

• 2:18Guy Raz?

  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.

• 3:01Guy Raz?

  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 keychains, 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

• 3:45Guy Raz?

  the way John and Bert tell it, the early years of the family, before they were born, were actually pretty good.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  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, you know, families with a lot of kids. By the time it came to us, the grass was knee-high, and the shutters were half-fallen 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.

• 4:33Guy Raz?

  So lots of--so a busy--I mean, as kids, it must have been a pretty, kind of, chaotic home.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Chaotic's a good word, Guy. Day to day, yeah, it was kind of madness. There was, there was no heat in the upper floor, ever. Um, so our oldest four 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 tighty-whities with no blanket and just lie there and snore.

• 5:04Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  But, but there was frost on the window. I mean, I'm not, no exaggeration. It was, it was pretty strange and funny when we, when we look back, but chaotic is a good word.

• 5:14Guy Raz?

  And what were your parents like? I mean, were they like warm and fuzzy? Were they strict? Like, were they different kinds of people?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:35Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  And our mom was the absolute opposite. Gregarious, outgoing, always laughing, dancing, very creative. But then I think, um, you know, they, they went through some, some big changes when, when John and I were in elementary school. Our parents were in a near-death car accident.

• 5:53Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  And that seems to be a bit pivotal because, um, our dad lost the use of his right arm entirely and he never really regained that. He, he was a gifted craftsman. He was a, um, avid outdoorsman. And I think he was pretty frustrated that he, that he couldn't do those things any longer.

• 6:14Guy Raz?

  And did it change the way he looked at life once he lost use of, of his hand?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just think he became frustrated with his body and he was a pretty physical guy. And, um, it certainly did seem, when, when we look at kind of before and after that, that he became depressed and that depression seemed to manifest itself in.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:12Guy Raz?

  Was it scary? Do you guys remember being scared when you were kids?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  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 this whole family was just crumbling, and that I didn't know what was gonna 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.

• 7:58Guy Raz?

  When you guys were, I mean, you had six, there's 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?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  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 we'd... 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's different when there's a three-year

• 8:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Technically, four-year gap between grades.

• 8:51Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was probably a period in high school when I was a senior and John was a freshman, and we wouldn't say hi to each other in the hallway. It was just a short period of time.

• 8:59Guy Raz?

  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?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was pretty focused on that. I had actually had a couple of businesses. When I was really young, I had a seed-selling business, which was really a commission thing, cut 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.

• 9:38Guy Raz?

  And John?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  I had done a little bit with landscaping in high school and right at the beginning of college, but my focus was mostly art and writing.

• 9:49Guy Raz?

  When you say art, like drawing and painting and things like that as well?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. Drawing, painting, animation, any form like that.

• 9:57Guy Raz?

  Okay, so I guess after you guys finished college, both of you head out west. I guess, Bert, you go to Colorado.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:08Guy Raz?

  And then, John, you go out to California, right?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:11Guy Raz?

  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 sort of... Figure out what you're gonna do next with your lives? Like, was that the plan?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  And we really took advantage of 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.

• 11:11Guy Raz?

  So, you're doing this road trip.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:13Guy Raz?

  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?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 11:25Guy Raz?

  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 is like, hey, maybe we should, like, do a business. Is that really true?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  That is true, yeah. It was the first time we talked about it was on that trip.

• 11:39Guy Raz?

  What do you remember about the conversation?

• 11:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:54Guy Raz?

  What were your T-shirt designs in college, just out of curiosity?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Well, they were caricatures of, you know, intramural teams, and really simple stuff.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Like funky dancing figures, or one, at that time, I guess we were talking late 80s. It was like, oh, you can do with one, with the price of one color, you can get a rainbow across the letter M. Like, it was, 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 or, and it didn't happen a lot, but occasionally you'd see it in the dorm and like, wow, that, that felt good.

• 12:38Guy Raz?

  And were you guys like, like, silk screening your own shirts?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  No, no, uh, we, 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 going to a local screen printer and, you know, we ju, we just bought major mill, Hanes, B V T, or Fruit of the Loom, or something like that from a distributor. And, and that was, I, I remember talking with John that it was a charge to, to feel that a stranger was gonna reach in their pocket and pay money for something that he created.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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?

• 13:30Guy Raz?

  So you guys, you guys get back to Boston. And by the way, when, when you got back to Boston, did you guys like move back in to your parents' house?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Uh, we did.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  We did, briefly, yeah.

• 13:40Guy Raz?

  So you're back at your parents' house and you have, you have decided, we are gonna, let's, let's make some T-shirts and sell them. And I understand you could take your design to a silk screener and they, they could just make a bunch of T-shirts that you hand, hand over to them. What were the designs that you decided on making at first? What, what did the T-shirts look like?

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Well, we had a lot of concepts and ideas and designs and some of the stuff we had from college. We did a, 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 and 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, that kind of kept things going a little bit, but nothing was, um, nothing was really ringing the register too much.

• 14:35Guy Raz?

  And what, you're just like going around Boston and, and like setting up tables and selling them? How, yeah, how were you selling them?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  We had two duffel bags and, uh, 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. They, the cops would move you out. We tried to sell near Faneuil 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-

• 15:23Guy Raz?

  You had to hustle.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, 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 they would, we would hear them on the radio say, Jacob's Brothers are out on the corner of Carm 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, um, we finally got enough sales that we decided that, that the one place we were selling better than the street was when we went to college dormitories.

• 15:58Guy Raz?

  Hmm. Well, how, how did that, how did that work? You would just drive to colleges and like open up the door? I guess this is back in the day when they weren't locked and you would just walk in and like-

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, 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, in Boston. There's more colleges and universities per capita in Boston than anywhere in the world.

• 16:21Guy Raz?

  But what would you do? You would walk down the corridors of dorm, like- The dorm room.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Knock on the doors, door to door, yeah.

• 16:28Guy Raz?

  T-shirts for sales, you would knock on the door.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  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 six o'clock to 10 o'clock. That was your wheelhouse. So you'd try to cover a whole campus. That means you've got to be moving at Olympic speed to try to get through it.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:13Guy Raz?

  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?

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Any interest in a T-shirt like this? And you just take it out and hawk it. 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.

• 17:59Guy Raz?

  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?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  It's, some of it has no words. It's just these like funky dancing figures and it's, it's.

• 18:16Guy Raz?

  Like stick figures or?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, but more fluid.

• 18:20Guy Raz?

  Like Keith Haring style?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit, a little bit primitive. But a lot of things were sort of, 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.

• 18:49Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  And. Yeah, we also started talking about, we had all this time in the band. And we started talking about brands. We talked about Nike a lot. You know, how the swoosh came to mean 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 swoosh, what's our little pony, kind of thing. And we needed, we knew that we needed something to connect with people on, and we knew that we didn't have that.

• 19:27Guy Raz?

  Do you remember what your, like, revenue, average year of revenue might have been at that time?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  It was extremely low, right? It was probably, you know, under eighty thousand dollars in top line revenue.

• 19:41Guy Raz?

  But you had to pay for the T-shirts, and so your profit was probably...

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Well, the profit was, profit was probably twenty thousand dollars, and you got to pay for, you know, gasoline, and you got to pay for...

• 19:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  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, there must have been the reality that real jobs were something we had to consider.

• 20:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  And our friends actually were having real lives evolved. They were having relationships, they were getting homes, apartments, they had real suits and going to real jobs. And that was sometimes embarrassing if we'd be out on the street with runny noses at, like, ten degrees in December, trying to sell a T-shirt and you bump into somebody. But most, 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.

• 21:19Guy Raz?

  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 and...

• 21:32Speaker 01

  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

• 22:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:25Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:37Guy Raz?

  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?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  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 group.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:47Guy Raz?

  And I guess we should just explain here for a sec that this drawing that you do, this guy that you call Jake, this was a super simple drawing. It was almost like a kid's drawing of a face with this like, big, giant, toothless grin.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, he had a beret on, and he was cool. And he had sunglasses. 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 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, it is." And we started riffing on it.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:02Guy Raz?

  And what was "life is good"? I mean, what was "life is good" supposed to mean? Was it supposed to mean like, easy life, you know, life is easy, you know? Was it aspirational? What was it supposed to convey?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  So I think we liked the openness of it. We liked the fact that it was up to the receiver.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  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 loved 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 with what those three words mean. Once we got a chance to put it in front of Total Strangers, it was so immediate, the reaction, like-

• 25:57Guy Raz?

  How did you unveil it to people?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  We got out on a, 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. And 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

• 26:40Speaker 01

  seem to matter what their background or passion was. It was speaking to people.

• 26:45Guy Raz?

  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. Like, 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."

• 27:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  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 that. 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,

• 28:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  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...

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, go ahead.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  She was just like, you know, we were 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.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  And that's really what the whole brand and the whole idea and philosophy is based on, that 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...

• 30:00Speaker 02

  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, this thing's got like the magic dust. We just didn't have any idea what to do with it.

• 30:16Guy Raz?

  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, like a couple of hundred bucks between you. I mean, is that, is it true or is that, or is that an exaggeration?

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Not even, actually, 78 bucks, yeah. The day that, the day that we, after printing the 48 "Life is Good" t-shirts, we had 78 bucks left.

• 30:48Guy Raz?

  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.

• 31:24Guy Raz?

  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.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  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, um, life's pretty good when you're having an ice cream. It's a simple pleasure. You know, 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, and the ones with the ice cream cone sold even better than the, just the Jake. And the next thing happened with her sister-in-law.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  And she had a, a place with her boyfriend up in Vermont on the bike path. And, um, 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, we pretty quickly realized that all we had to do was walk around and ask people, what do you love?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  You know what? The first thing Nancy, that retailer said to us was, guys, I got to reorder. And Bert and I were like, what's a reorder? And that indicates where we're at as a business after five years. But excited to learn.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  And we forgot to bill her. We didn't bill her for the shirts. We just sent them down.

• 33:11Guy Raz?

  So I, I guess that year, 94, after you, you kind of become life is good. You did like almost $90,000 worth of revenue, which is, which is great. You know, you're, you could start to see maybe a path towards, you know, towards real profitability.

• 33:31Guy Raz?

  And I guess the next year, um, you really, I mean, you, you're still running this business, by the way, out of your apartment in Boston that you guys share, right?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Uh huh. 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.

• 33:55Guy Raz?

  And that was when you guys made your first hire as well, I guess, right?

• 33:58Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah. Uh, Carrie 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, uh, pack orders and help us try to organize the orders. And, um, she was a big help. So we, we begged her to quit her job eventually and she did it.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we, 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 Carrie. Seventeen thousand dollars, 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 seventeen thousand dollars. So he did the math for us and he said that we would have to do a quarter of a million dollars in business.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Which sounded like a billion dollars to us.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  And we did two hundred and sixty-two, I think it was, two hundred and sixty-two thousand.

• 35:01Guy Raz?

  That year. And that two hundred and sixty-two thousand was like, that's to pay for all of your supplies?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Everything.

• 35:07Guy Raz?

  And everything, right?

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:09Guy Raz?

  It was not profit. That is, that is the

• 35:11Speaker 02

  No, in those, in those

• 35:12Guy Raz?

  Gross revenue.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Days, we, we would get prepared for dye t-shirts, PFDs they call it. And we'd store 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 Marlboro, Mass, to a screen printer called Midland Graphics,

• 35:56Speaker 02

  screen print the 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.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  And, and then we, then we set up a trailer like the back of a eighteen wheeler.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  A container.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Container, like permanently stationed next to our screen printer with their permission?

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had a dirt parking lot and for zero rent, they let, because we were afraid to get the overhead of a warehouse. And so, they let us, it was thirty dollars a month to rent the, lease the, the container. And for zero dollars, they let us park it on their lot.

• 36:35Guy Raz?

  Because you didn't want to take the risk on, on like a long-term lease.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:39Guy Raz?

  So you were just like, let's just use a shipping container as our warehouse. It makes sense.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, we want, we wanted to make sure the revenue ran way out ahead of the

• 36:46Speaker 01

  We just needed a couple of Extension cords, 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.

• 36:57Guy Raz?

  How did you, 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?

• 37:07Speaker 02

  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 asked the guy what he did. I said, "What do you do for a living?" And he said, "I'm a trademark attorney."

• 37:42Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  And the guy's name was Bob Pierce, and I went and saw him 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. The 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 there's, 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, the source of the goods in some way,"

• 38:28Speaker 02

  then it's a brand. So he did all those things correctly. And I gotta tell you, it's 25 years later, and, and Bob Pierce still gets all our intellectual property business.

• 38:39Guy Raz?

  That's amazing. So you got the trademark on this phrase, "life is good," as a brand, and that's it? I mean, you're, you're, you sort of, you own this phrase and you can use it as your business?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Even the fact that you've said it a few times during this podcast, you owe us money, guys.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a, it was a big day when we got it. We, we still didn't really know how to run the business or what to do, but it was, we knew it was a valuable thing.

• 39:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah. How did you guys divide up labor between the two of you? Like, who did what? Who did finances? Who, who did the art? Who did the deliveries? How did you guys, who was in charge? Who was the boss? Was the older brother the boss?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Anything that involved brain power pretty much fell on my side. No, seriously, Bert, uh, he had more of a background coming out of school, uh, on the business side and he's a great communicator, great motivator. So he worked the phones a lot. I, I was spending more time on the drawing table or like at the screen print 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.

• 39:56Guy Raz?

  I guess there was a turning point, a pretty significant turning point in 1996. You guys get a call from a, a pretty big sporting goods chain based out of Indianapolis named, named Gallions or Galen?

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Gallions.

• 40:11Guy Raz?

  Something like that?

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:12Guy Raz?

  Gallions, yeah. What, what was that?

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were, they were actually, in our opinion, the best sporting goods in the country. Um, their stores were incredible. And yeah, they, 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 is Good and that when they came to visit us, they'd be coming to our apartment. So they, um, anyway, we made them print spaghetti

• 40:54Speaker 02

  and ragu sauce and we hung out and they, they were on board and, um, 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 Gallions, right?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  That's right. And I, 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, but we did have a lot of laughs and they, 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.

• 41:30Guy Raz?

  So, so, once you get into Gallions, was that just like a game changer? I mean, did you see your business just like skyrocket?

• 41:36Speaker 02

  It was a game changer because once, what happened was, uh, most of our business then and now is 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 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?

• 42:18Speaker 02

  It went from that 250,000 to 620, then we broke a million at 1.2.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  1.2, yep.

• 42:26Guy Raz?

  Was that just mind blowing to you? Were you just thinking, how did we go from having like $78 between us three years ago to a million dollars in sales?

• 42:35Speaker 02

  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, had a beer and kind of said, wow, you know, what just happened?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  But... On the other hand, we're still in our apartment, and you don't really look around and see any differences, just a mad scramble still, but...

• 43:02Speaker 02

  But I think, yeah, I think Gallions 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, I mean, we didn't even have a computer. Until Carrie, who still works with us to this day, by the way, she actually owns 5% of the business.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  She's a partner.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, but she, you know, she said to us, you really need to get a computer. And both John and I were like, no, we're artists. We don't, we don't want a computer. And they said, she said, well, you need it to run the business. Why do we need a computer? But she was right.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot of absurd exchanges. We had this guy who had run Champion, the brand.

• 43:44Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  And Wilson Sporting Goods. And he was helping us out through his, a sales rep. You know, we connected personally.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Joe Phillips, God bless him.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  He was flying up from Philly.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  He was like an angel.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, to get angel slash devil.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  The best kind. And he, uh, 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 were like, uh, we just, we've been doubling for like the last few years. We just figured we were going to double again. He's like, that's a very scary way to run a business.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  He asked us what our assets were. He was trying to get us off our personal, off our loans, because our, our personal names were on the loan notes. And, uh, he said, we gotta, we gotta change this. You know, what, 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. Like, I got, um, we got a picture of mom. We got the VCR. And he was just like dumbfounded, looking at us like, God, these guys are so clueless.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:54Guy Raz?

  Who was buying the shirts? Like, I, cause I, I mean, when I think of life as good, I think of like, uh, going to Ocracoke Island, you know, someplace like Cape Cod, like, you know, you, 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 in places like that in the summertime?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Gift shops for people like, you know, around themes like home themes, like, you know, love, family, gardening.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Drilling, the backyard.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Handyman.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  All that kind of stuff, yeah. So it really was, uh, the distribution was really spread out, which, which, you know, we didn't really, I, 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, um.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Not too many eggs in one basket.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were, there were so many different places for us to go and, and, and when the economy went down, it would, not all the channels would get impacted the same way.

• 46:19Guy Raz?

  I mean, did you, I mean, when you think about, um, a very simple phrase, some very basic, and I, I mean, you're, you guys are great artists, no, no, no judgment, but like very simple artwork.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 46:35Guy Raz?

  And it became this thing, T-shirts and, and dinner plates and, and posters and things like, like what, what, what other things, I'm, I'm probably forgetting a bunch

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Frisbees, backpacks.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  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?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  And in, you know, more recent years, more things like video content and publishing books, et cetera, which is extremely exciting to us, but we're still most known for the T-shirts.

• 47:09Guy Raz?

  Did you guys, I mean, you've been doing this now, since, really, I guess, since the late eighties, right, you've been selling T-shirts. Have you ever, uh, is there any part of, of, of you guys want to just sell it, you know, sell it to a bigger company and just kind of cash in? Cause you, cause you've, both of you have become pretty well off from this tiny little T-shirt business and, uh, you can, I don't know, kind of do whatever you want.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  And they'd say, "We all wore Life is 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 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.

• 48:33Guy Raz?

  And Bert, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, did you ever consider wanting to sell the business?

• 48:40Speaker 02

  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

• 49:21Speaker 02

  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 we have no intention of going public or selling the business. We just want to see 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, that will enable the best work of Life is Good to be done after Johnny and I are dead and gone.

• 49:58Guy Raz?

  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 the windows and like you presumably today, both of you are doing pretty well. I mean, you can, you can live pretty comfortably.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no question about it.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, just to have our own home, seriously, not, not to be too corny, but that, 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.

• 50:30Guy Raz?

  Do your, what did your, I mean, what did your parents make of your business? Your mom, I know, passed away a couple of years ago and then like a year later, your dad, your dad passed. What did they make of this? I mean, this t-shirt business that turned into something huge.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they loved it. 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, right up until the, the time that our mom passed away, if she saw somebody in a life is good t-shirt, she'd run up to them and say, "My son's made that." You know, it was embarrassing when you were with her, but.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Our dad, 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're still doing the van trips, he always just, you know, we'd roll in at 3am some night, "How'd you do? How'd you do?" It was never, "What the hell are you guys doing?" Like you're, you know, you're 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.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and maybe the, maybe the interesting thing, going full circle with our dad is that in the, the autumn of his life, he, 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. And our, and 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.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  And, um, 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 landed on our feet, all of us, and, and he didn't screw everything up. So I think he was a little easier on himself and in some ways the success, success of the business, um, might have helped my dad, you know, get over that hump and realize that if we're not failures, he wasn't a failure.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And it was really cool to see him relaxed and enjoying his grandkids and.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like, it was like he and our mom were, 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, thirty years. I mean, they just, they were married for fifty-six years. And then the, the last ones, believe it or not, while it was tough with my mom's illness and everything, they, they had some great years.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  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, that she did a, a good job with, with all her kids and that we're all okay, you know?

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 53:53Guy Raz?

  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?

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's about right.

• 54:20Guy Raz?

  You got about, what, almost 200 employees today?

• 54:23Speaker 02

  Right. Yep.

• 54:25Guy Raz?

  That's pretty good. I mean, do you, for Seabird, 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, or in your intelligence? Or do you think that some of it came from just luck?

• 54:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 55:05Guy Raz?

  And John, how much of it, because of luck, how much because of your hard work and your skill and intelligence?

• 55:11Speaker 01

  I would say skill and intelligence, maybe 20%. Hard work, another 20. And then brute strength, maybe for me, 20.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  So neither, I mean, really, you got your answer there in that neither of us know how to add up to 100%.

• 55:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  And, yeah, we just, you know, so definitely not skill.

• 55:36Guy Raz?

  We had a lot of luck, and just can't do math, so clearly there was a lot of luck.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, no question about it, yeah.

• 55:42Guy Raz?

  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 grinning girl who looks a lot like the original Jake, sitting back to back with her dog. And underneath, it says, "Lean on Me."

• 56:22Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And our 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...

• 56:34Speaker 03

  No. I think I was probably average as a kid, and I'm probably horrendous as an adult.

• 56:39Guy Raz?

  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.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  And he brought it down. It was-- it didn't look like much. It just looked kind of like a piece of dusty, old, really thick wood.

• 57:05Guy Raz?

  The wood was actually part of an old bowling lane, made from the hardest and strongest part of a pine tree.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:24Guy Raz?

  So Jim hauled this nine-foot slab of bowling lane onto his truck, drove it home, and got to work.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:41Guy Raz?

  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 them at the flea market in Brooklyn. So Jim thought about it, and he said, sure. And he set up a booth.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  I had 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.

• 58:13Guy Raz?

  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.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  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.

• 58:40Guy Raz?

  But just when he finally started to get some traction.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  I didn't hear from her for, for like four months.

• 58:47Guy Raz?

  Four months.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  It was excruciating.

• 58:50Guy Raz?

  And to make matters even more stressful, Jim had just gotten married.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  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 gonna be thrown in the towel.

• 59:05Guy Raz?

  But finally, after those four nail biting months, the woman from Starbucks did get back to Jim and she ordered a big communal table for the store in Brooklyn. And soon after that, another designer from Sweetgreen ordered tables and chairs for two restaurants in the DC area.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  I was happy to get the order, but most things were a request for something that I hadn't yet done.

• 59:28Guy Raz?

  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.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:00:02Guy Raz?

  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, Shake Shack, is using Jim's furniture in over 100 locations. And you never know who's gonna walk into one of those places.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:00:31Guy Raz?

  Jim's company is called CounterEv Furniture, short for CounterEvolution. 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 CounterEv or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.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 [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis or at Guy Raz. Our show was produced this week by Rachel

• 1:01:16Guy Raz?

  Faulkner with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is David Ja. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.