YouSaid · the spoken record

John Jacobs

lines on the record
20
first
2020-09-17
most recent
2020-09-17
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “You have to enable your consumers to co-author the story of your brand, and that's what's happening every day for our brand as we're growing right now. We're listening to them. We're collecting data on what they love, what resonates with them, exactly what words, exactly what messages, why, get them to talk about it, get them to share, send pictures of what you're doing, etc., and celebrate their lives with them. So I think we need to do more and more of that. That's the way we're going to build our community going forward, not by being professors, but by being students.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Yeah, I would just say that clarity is really important. So in times like this, a lack of clarity exacerbates your problems. And I think while we, as John pointed out, didn't have the solutions to a lot of things, we were really clear about what matters most. We have a very simple mission, spread the power of optimism. Let's listen closely to our customers and see if we can innovate and find ways to adapt here. And as John pointed out, thankfully, we've got a lot of smart, hard driving leaders in our organization that figured those things out. So clarity, I think, is huge. And just enabling your leaders. The other thing I would say is that it's the 21st century and anybody who thinks that they're a smart entrepreneur or a smart marketer and they're going to build their brand on their own, you're kidding yourself.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And also, Johnny, our customers, so like, I mentioned that our business, our e-commerce business doubled. The gifts, the donations to our kids foundation, 300% since March 1st, 300% this year.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “We have to adapt, and in our own personal lives, in order to fight off a heavy sadness and depression and becoming paralyzed by all of this, we have to adapt and we have to find healthy coping mechanisms.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, irrational optimism says life is great every single day, no matter what, everything's great. There's forest fires going, there's a global pandemic, but today's just a perfect day, that you're out to lunch if you believe that. We say rational optimism because we recognize that life isn't easy and life isn't perfect, that there's real challenges. These are real difficult things that are going on, but we believe that the best, most powerful tool we have for overcoming challenges is our disposition, our view, because optimists tend to be innovative. They tend to find solutions. You know, this is a business show, right? So we're talking about how to get through this difficult time. It's about adaptation. We listen closely to our customers. It's a dialogue. And anybody listening, you have a business. The world's changing. You can't have the same business.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Later, we credited her. We said, wow, that was such great parenting, mom. It was so powerful what you did. And I remember she just said,”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Part of the key, I think, is to seek the things that are good coping mechanisms, that are healthy coping mechanisms, drugs and alcohol, et cetera, in excess is not a healthy coping mechanism. People who truly love you and being in touch with them and communicating, that's a support system that is part of a coping mechanism that's really powerful. Exercise is a healthy coping mechanism. So I think we had examples in our own household. Our mom and dad were both really good people. and they both had pretty heavy challenges in their lives. Our mom, you know, who's sort of the hero of the story, she suffered with depression her whole life, even while we were growing up, she suffered with it, but her coping mechanisms, as John pointed out, were singing, storytelling, dancing. She taught us the idea of rational optimism. Let's focus on the good things. Let's focus on what's happened. Tell me something good that happened today.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “That may sound like a frivolous, simple thing, but we've had a lot of fun with when baseball season, you know, was delayed. We made a t-shirt that said longest rain delay in history. And that shirt selling hundreds of units every single day, people miss it. Those things, those small things are the big things.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “In our hometown, the marathon bombings, awful, absolutely awful, and we were impacted personally from that. And we found ways with our business to really grow. And now with COVID in these challenges, we have found that people are really, really seeking optimistic messages and uplifting messages. And it's not actually the soft stuff. It's very difficult right now to get by emotionally and mentally to sort of get ourselves in a place where we're prepared to try to have a good day. There's a lot of mystery to what's happening. So having unity with each other, sharing, and counting on our support system, family mentioned pets earlier, really, really big. We've celebrated science, the importance of science in hopefully finding a vaccine. We've made comments about just about everything. Sports fans are strong.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “We're not either. Life isn't perfect and life isn't easy. That's what our brand is about. It's more that it can be helpful and we believe that it's the most powerful tool we have as human beings to be rational optimists, to look through an optimistic lens. That doesn't mean you have this pie in the sky idea that everything's perfect and everything's easy. But in the history of our business, life is good in 26 years. The inflection points where our business has thrived the most, we've steadily grown and had a healthy business, but I'll go through them really quickly. 2001, 9-11, believe it or not, in the wake of that awful disaster, our business grew. It grew tremendously. Okay, so people were seeking optimism and seeking unity and seeking uplifting messages. When the recession hit 2008, 2009, our business thrived in the wake of that.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Yeah, it's almost hard. I think we have to recognize the difficulties that people are going through and the businesses and industries that have been decimated and not make light of that at all. But we're one of those fortunate businesses where COVID did us a favor. It really moved us along. I think our staff, as John pointed out, have been very courageous and they've hustled their asses off and people have been working hard at Life is Good, so I don't want to make it seem like it's easy either. We work many of us around the clock for the first 60 days just to figure out how to switch this model. But the fact is we were in a good position as a brand. We were in a good position to do this and we were able to replace so much of that wholesale business with our e-commerce. Our e-commerce business has doubled to date over last year in such a difficult macroeconomic environment.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “But the point is that what drives our business is the art and the message. So we happen to be in the apparel business, primarily t-shirts, but it's really not about the t-shirt. The thing that drives our business, our point of difference, is seeing the world through an optimistic lens and sharing those ideas how an optimist views the world. That's how our community is emotionally connected.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “We were pretty confident pre COVID that this is the direction we should go with our brand. You know, we're not necessarily fashion forward company. We're high quality basics. And we're also not an athletic apparel company that's overly focused on technical performance fabrics. John happens to be wearing a technical performance fabric.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Yeah, so we're not committed right now. Day by day we watch exactly what consumers are buying, how they're reacting, and we make more of that product. And if something that we put together is not selling, we don't produce it.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Sure. It's called director garment printing. We've been researching for the better part of five years, and we just before COVID hit spent several million dollars on technology to dumb it down or simplify. It means that we would take blank t-shirts in and print every order, every single order. If you order one medium v-neck t-shirt with such and such graphic and message, we print that to order and ship it to you. So it essentially is more expensive to print per unit, but if we're doing it right, you end up with perfect inventory. And inventory is the thing that kills businesses.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Supply chain window was kind of ruling our company. And we already knew that that was an archaic model. All of America retail operates on it by and large. We knew that consumers want things closer to market, want greater choice, et cetera, and we were trying to migrate in that direction, but we were experiencing a lot of resistance from retailers, sales reps, our own staff, et cetera. And this forced our hand, and it has shown us that the relationship between the consumers and the brand is so strong and the appetite is there for consumers. And I think in particular in these really difficult times, we also learned how much people need optimism, need uplifting messages.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So, anyway, what happened was we started designing t-shirts speaking directly to what was happening. So t-shirts that said, stay calm, stay cool, stay home. We began celebrating support systems, which are really key to get through these times so that other people that you're quarantining with, that's your pets, your dog, your cat, whatever it is. And so we made up the name quarantine mate, and we had a whole celebration of quarantine mates and all the different dog breeds, etc. And, you know, a lot of silly fun, but a lot of serious underlying messages about being good to each other and kindness. You know, the idea from the beginning, not just with COVID, but what we were trying to do is maintain the company's value system, but change the business model. The tail was wagging the dog where the wholesale business and the long”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And about laying off at least half of our staff. Thankfully, then we had one evening where we kind of discussed the old analogy, sports analogy where sports fans about how the best defense is offense. And we looked at strategies that we've been trying to develop, and a really central one is that we've been trying to move what is a 12 to 18 month supply chain window into a couple of days. And we've invested in technology and we've been taking baby steps in that direction. So we decided as a group that we would really try to jump into this and see if it could save our business. And we put a plan together, which essentially was to make New Hampshire our distribution center extremely safe. So setting up stations that are 10 feet apart, et cetera.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “That's correct. We closed down the office in Boston. We have two locations, Boston and Southern New Hampshire and southern New Hampshire is more of kind of the muscle of the business. It's our distribution center and we do some finishing systems there, et cetera. There are some other departments like finance that are up there. But Boston, we immediately closed down because we are operating in a building where there's other companies and brands so we didn't think that was a safe environment. You know, you asked what did we first do? We first met on Zoom and discussed what to do and it was pretty grim like many companies. So our business is structured in a way where half of our business was wholesale. And that means the high majority of those retailers closed their doors, canceled their orders, and our business was pretty close to being decimated. So we were having discussions candidly about bank.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “We're trying to be safe. We have seen each other won some really important family things were going on, but we're trying to be safe. And, you know, I don't think any of us quite know exactly what we're dealing with yet. So we're being pretty strict about things.”

    2020-09-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Bert and John Jacobs of Life is Good · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT