Inside the cavernous building in New Hampshire where Life Is Good prints and ships thousands of T-shirts and other branded apparel every day, the Boston company’s ethos is spelled out in giant letters above the factory floor. “Everything is figureoutable.”
That mantra has steered the 30-year-old company through turbulent times, including the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s kept the optimism of its founders, Bert and John Jacobs, intact as they expand operations here.
Business has been steady since Life is Good opened its 500,000-square-foot production and fulfillment center three months ago in Hudson, where it has had a presence for more than 20 years. To keep up with demand, 12 industrial direct-to-garment printers run 24 hours a day.
During a recent tour, a tiny drone buzzed around the new complex, capturing footage for a marketing video that was being produced to tout the company’s new custom printing division.
Keep it Simple — which quietly launched in May but is getting a promotional push this month and its own website (keepitsimple.co) — offers custom service to companies such as restaurants and rock bands that want T-shirts and other apparel with their logos printed on them.
Because Life Is Good has thousands of blank T-shirts stored on-site, the company can offer a 48-hour turnaround.
“That promises to be a very big business for us,” said Tom Hassell, the company’s president. “There are plenty of people who do this, but they tend to have longer lead times and pretty significant minimum requirements.”
The custom work will help keep production steady throughout the year. Life Is Good employs about 150 fulltime workers at the plant, but on any given day 50 to 150 temporary workers join the ranks based on demand. Summer tends to be the slower period for the company.
“Part of it is finding the right partners, because during November and December we’re really busy,” Hassell said. “The first couple of customers that we’ve signed up for Keep it Simple, their demand is in the summer, which is perfect because then we can hopefully be really, really busy during the summer and really busy during the holiday season.”
Bert Jacobs, who like his brother has the title of “chief executive optimist,” says the custom work will help even out staffing at the new plant.
“Our business is steady for 12 months, but it does peak in the summer and peak at Christmas,” he said during an interview with his brother over Zoom. “Already we’ve got musicians and bands and lots of things jumping on board. I just came from a conference, and several friends with businesses are going to start printing with us.”
Moves the company made in 2019 to bring production to the United States to improve lead times set the stage for Keep it Simple.
“They were between 12 and 15 months from artist desk to a product showing up in a store or on our website,” Hassell said. “And we realized that in the world of T-shirts, we had the ability to make graphics about what was happening today, and the only way we could do that was to bring the printing on-shore.”
Life Is Good blank T-shirts are manufactured in Peru, but its screen-printing work is now done in the U.S.
“We bought our first printer in 2019. It took us about a year to get good at it, because there’s actually a lot of research and development associated with printing on any new color or fabric, and we need to ensure that you can wash a product 15 times and have it still look great,” Hassell said.
The moved proved fortuitous when COVID-19 hit in March 2020, and retail stores shut down around the country.
“Our wholesale business went to zero,” Hassell said. “It couldn’t have been a worse day of the year for wholesale to shut down because that is the beginning of the big shipping window to get T-shirts out for the summer.”
With its lifeline seemingly shut down, Life Is Good contemplated bankruptcy.
“Then we got together and we decided to focus on the opportunities, given the fact that we are an optimistic company,” Hassell said. “We said, ‘Well, we have these new machines. Everybody is experiencing the same thing in the country right now, so let’s make some T-shirts.’”
Soon the company was producing T-shirts with graphics that had pandemic-inspired inspirational messages like “Stay cool” and “Stay home.”
“They sold like nothing I have ever seen in my career,” said Hassell, who joined the company six years ago after stints with other apparel manufacturers and e-commerce retailers. “We made a lot more graphics about the quarantine, and it not only saved the company, we ended up having a record volume year in 2020, despite the fact that wholesale dropped 40% because it was shut down for three or four months.”
Wholesale business represented more than 50% of the company’s revenues, Bert Jacobs said.
“We really were kind of forced into an operational change, and the operational change didn’t just get us through the pandemic,” he said. “It did that — and we avoided bankruptcy because of it — but it kind of launched us into this next chapter, too.”
Life Is Good’s success during the pandemic through a line of T-shirts that projected optimism is the face of adversity also reflected back upon the company’s roots, said John Jacobs. He and his brother’s first brush with success after years of struggling came pretty much as a fluke, when a batch of shirts they printed that said “Life is Good” became an instant bestseller.
“The hope was, no matter what’s going on with the economy or if there’s a war going on, people still want to gravitate towards something positive,” he said. “One of the things that saved us in the pandemic was even if people were at home on Zoom only, they still wanted to share something positive, communicate something positive in an obviously very challenging time. The community kind of rallied and saved us.”
The company’s ability to branch out into custom work stems from how Life Is Good is constantly updating its product line.
“We create 60 works of art every single week, and that translates to about 250 products because we’ll put the graphics on sweatshirts and T-shirts and tank tops and hats and things like that,” Hassell said. “We can push the bestsellers out through our wholesale channels within weeks, as opposed to needing to wait 12 or 18 months to get those products on a retailer’s floor.”
Consumers who buy shirts and other apparel through Life Is Good’s website are actually ordering products that don’t yet exist. On the day we visited the plant in late May, the company was gearing up to fulfill another bunch of customer orders.
“We had good business over the Memorial Day weekend, so we’ve got 45,000 shirts we need to print,” Hassell said.
A sign inside Life Is Good’s new factory in Hudson alludes to the company’s sense of optimism. (Courtesy of Life Is Good)
Making shirts to order
Life Is Good can print 14,000 shirts per day on each of its 12 commercial printing machines. Workers operating the machines consult video screens as they feed shirts into the printers. Each blank shirt has a barcode that determines what design will be printed on it.
“Every single one of these shirts is going to have a different logo on it. And every one could be going to a different customer,” Hassell said as an operator fed shirts into a printer. Shirts that have graphics on each side go into the printers twice.
Once those T-shirts are produced, they are sent for shipping. Inside a warehouse with 40-foot ceilings, 102 industrial robots made for the company by Geek+ maneuver around long aisles, finding product and transporting it to waiting workers.
“This is called a goods-to-person system,” Hassell explained as robots carrying stacks of boxes buzzed around on the factory floor.
“In the past, we used to have people walking up and down aisles like you would do in the grocery store to pick goods,” he said. “And now the picker is the same person as the packer. The robots go pick up the racks and bring the products to the people.”
Workers use video screens to see which products to grab from the rack when robots arrive.
A worker prepares a package for shipping at Life is Good’s new production and fulfillment center in Hudson. The company’s 12 direct-to-garment machines make it possible to print thousands of custom T-shirts and other apparel in a single day. (Courtesy/Life is Good)
The Life Is Good production and fulfillment center in Hudson is home to more than 100 robots that are used to move products around the warehouse and prepare them for shipping. (Mike Cote/NH Business Review)
“You grab it, you turn around and there’s 80 customer orders and there’s a light blinking next to one of them. You put it there, you hit the button, and by the time you turn around, the next rack is already in place, and it’s telling you which product to grab,” Hassell said.
The robots, which the company purchased about two years ago, have earned their keep, Hassell said.
“The robots are basically taking away a very mundane task of somebody walking over there and looking at the shelf and taking something down. Our pick rate is four times higher per person than it was before we bought the robots,” Hassell said.
The Hudson plant combines operations that were formerly spread out in three buildings in Hudson and one in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Life Is Good currently occupies about 75% of the space in the plant, so it has room to grow.
“We’re far more bullish about the future than even the great past that we’ve had,” Hassell said. “We see huge opportunity here in the U.S., and abroad is virtually untapped. We have a small footprint overseas through some online marketplaces, but the world is our oyster.”
