In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, it takes
a near-renegade approach to launch or position a
brand. Sometimes this approach can be like starting
an avalanche. An idea or concept snowballs until
it reaches a mass audience. That is certainly the
case with Life Is Good, the fashionable apparel and
merchandise distributor of Newberry, Mass. Other
times, a renegade approach taps into a more narrowly
targeted audience or niche—wine aficianados,
perhaps. Case in point, WineSmarts: a trivia card
game found in independent and high-end gift shops.
Let’s look at how life began for these two very different
brands with similar renegade roots.
Life Is Good
The story behind Life Is Good is the stuff of retail
legend. The brand was birthed by two brothers,
John and Bert Jacobs, who started out selling Tshirts
at street festivals in Boston in 1989. Five years
later, the brothers were still churning out T-shirts
and selling them out of their van at festivals and
college dorms on the East Coast, barely making a
living. In their Boston apartment in 1994, desperate
to keep their dream alive, the brothers discovered
Jake, the grinning icon for Life Is Good. “When it
was drawn,” John says, “I don’t think we recognized
it as something special, or that it would have this
wide appeal.”
The irony of their discovery is that Jake was
almost overlooked as a potential brand icon. The
Jacobs brothers had him on an apartment wall with
a plethora of other design iterations, but noticed
that visitors to the apartment seemed to be drawn to
Jake. The brothers paired Jake with the slogan Life
Is Good and sold out 48 shirts in an hour at a local
street fair. “We saw a reaction to that shirt that we
had never witnessed before,” John says. “To us it was
crazy. And every customer seemed to have a totally
different background. It blew us away. It kind of
scared us because we finally felt like we had something,
and we had better learn what to do with it.”
The original Life Is Good font was hand-drawn
by John, who goes by the title chief creative optimist.
During the brand’s growing years, the entire Life Is Good alphabet was created by in-house designers and
is now dubbed the “house font.” To maintain brand
consistency, the house font graces everything that
Life Is Good creates.
Buoyed by their success, the Jacobs created
more Life Is Good shirts featuring Jake and slowly
the brand grew in popularity, spreading across the
country. First, local retailers became interested in selling
the Life Is Good brand. And now Life Is Good
is sold in numerous countries and they have 52
Genuine Neighborhood stores.
With a total of 10 in-house designers, John
says they try to debut about 20 new designs each
season and the deciding factor for each is ‘What
would Jake do?’ Apparently, Jake does it all. In fact,
if it happens outside, Jake probably does it. “I can’t
call Jake a starving artist,” John says. “Things aren’t
really terribly important to Jake. He seems to play
about 100 different sports. He does whatever he
gets a kick out of.”
Since debuting in 1994, the brand’s proliferation
has been anything but haphazard. Tapping into the
zeitgeist of the nation, Jake’s contagious grin has captured
virtually everyone from toddlers to retired mallwalkers,
and from skateboarders to soccer moms.
The popularity of the brand is even more startling
given that Life Is Good has never advertised. Instead,
they have relied on word of mouth and yearly Life Is
Good festivals to help spread their brand. For Life Is
Good, the medium is almost secondary to their message:
eternal optimism.
SmartsCo
Julie Tucker and Jennifer Elias are the proud creators
of a drinking game, but this one turns a profit
and won’t leave you with a hangover. Founders of
San Francisco-based SmartsCo, the two business
partners joined forces in 2002 when they became
fed up with boring books about wine. Over a
bottle of merlot (what else?), they came up with
WineSmarts, a trivia card game for both wine aficionados and novices.
Writing all of the questions themselves, Tucker
and Elias turned their attention to production.
Neither had much experience in design so the duo
called on local artists to help with branding and
packaging, ultimately choosing to work with Post
Tool Design in San Francisco. “What we did—and
this is pretty much what we do with every new product—
is ask a designer to go very conservative and
then go wild,” Elias says. “And usually what we find
is that there are elements we like from both. And
we end up in a direction that is quite different from
everything that is out there, but that took elements
from different kinds of directions.”
In order to maintain a consistent brand identity,
Post Tool focused on the SmartsCo logo first.
Tucker and Elias worked closely with Post Tool on
the look and feel of their company logo and later
the WineSmarts packaging. Tucker and Elias chose
a strong, but playful font for their SmartsCo logo in
VAG Rounded Bold.
As the product line developed, so has their
choice of type to reflect the nuances in each line—such as the swaying font, Fontesque Bold, for their
WineParty. Since their WinePassports (Franklin Gothic Demi Condensed) are booklets that focus on
different regions, each region has its own font and
feel. For instance, the WinePassport for California
uses Eurostile font, while the passport for France uses
Parisian Medium. And inside each WinePassport is
a boldly colored foldout map of the corresponding
location. Anyone up for a glass of bubbly in Paris?
Oh yeah.
Given their enthusiasm and attention to the
business, Tucker and Elias have learned to collaborate
with their partners in product design. Over the
years, SmartsCo has worked with approximately eight
designers or design firms in San Francisco, Portland
and New York City. Now that SmartsCo has a total
of 16 products in their line, Elias says they still must
guard against repetition. “You get insulated or you
get used to a look. I might love the color green, but
green doesn’t work for each product. We still rely on
getting other people’s opinions to make sure we aren’t
repeating something we’ve done. We’ve gotten better
at working with designers and how to give feedback.
Our second package design was hard for us because we
weren’t sure how we were expanding our line. It helps
to see each package cover as its own entity.”
Joie de Vivre
While both Life Is Good and SmartsCo have followed
the advice of fans, friends and even authority
figures, each brand reflects the personalities and
proclivities of their respective founders. Both share
strong elements of fun and fanatacism. Perhaps that
explains their relative appeal to the renegade spirit
in many of us. After all, shouldn’t learning and living
be fun?
