Life is good shirts

Bert jacobs wife

What are we going to do with our lives? That's the question Bert and John Jacobs were trying to answer when they decided to take a seven-week road trip from California to Boston in The brothers — 20 and 23 at the time — say that the trip forever changed their lives. John, who has since founded the Life is Good apparel company with his brother, tells Business Insider that it was during the road trip that he and Bert decided to pursue a new — and less traditional — career path: selling T-shirts.

They initially named their company Jacob's Gallery, and tirelessly traveled up and down the East Coast selling shirts to college kids out of their used Plymouth Voyager. But everything changed when they added an optimistic message to their shirts in It was exactly what we had hoped for. Here's the story of how these brothers went from running a struggling business to a successful one:.

Life is good controversy

John and Bert Jacobs grew up as the youngest of six children in the Boston suburb of Needham, Massachusetts. They describe their childhood as "perfectly imperfect" in their new book, " Life Is Good. After playing outside all day, they would run to the dinner table, where their mother would say something that later inspired their business: " Tell me something good that happened today.

This optimism was especially important for the boys in elementary school, when their parents were in a near-death car accident from which their mother managed to escape with just a few broken bones — but their father lost the use of his right hand. The stress and frustration from his physical therapy caused him to develop a harsh temper.

But even when difficult things were happening around the house, their mother would still be singing, telling stories, and acting out children's books for them. In , the adventurous brothers decided to take a seven-week road trip from California, where John was in school on an exchange program, back to Boston. The purpose: to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.