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W When bombs exploded near the fnish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, the windows shook at the nearby headquarters of Life Is Good, the apparel brand best known for its upbeat T-Shirts spent most of the night there, and over the next two days he received encouraging news about the employee's prognosis for recovery. Still, a terrorist act committed steps from the company's front door that claimed three lives and injured more than 260, including one of their own, stunned Jacobs and the Life Is Good rank and fle. Over ensuing days, as the slogan "Boston Strong" became a rallying cry for the city's pride and resilience in the bombings' wake, the question arose: How should Life Is Good, a brand built on optimism, respond to the attacks? Twelve years earlier, following September 11, Life Is Good had created a simple American fag T-shirt bearing its slogan that in just two months generated more than $200,000 in proceeds to beneft victims' families. But when employees began inquiring about a similar effort for marathon bombing victims, Jacobs was hesitant. "My frst reaction was 'I don't want to make a T-shirt right now,'" he says. "A lot of people were shaken up." Within a few days, that feeling subsided. But as plans for a T-shirt emerged, the question became: What should the message be? Although Jacobs could relate to the stiff-upper-lip "Boston Strong" sentiment—he and his brother, John, with whom he founded the company, were raised with "that tough Irish, Boston, suppress all the emotion" ethos, he says—that wasn't the Life Is Good message. Instead, the company produced a T-shirt with the word Boston on the front, with a heart replacing the hole in the second o. The back read: "Nothing is stronger than love." With its "Boston Love" T-shirt, Life Is Good sought to highlight the outpouring the bombings generated from frst responders and others. "The message of the T-shirt was that In the hours before the blasts, about ffteen company employees mingled amid spectators near the Boylston Street fnish, promoting the brand. A mile away, Life Is Good cofounder Bert Jacobs was with friends in a tavern near storied Fenway Park after attending the Boston Red Sox's annual marathon morning game when news of the explosions fashed on TV. Bert Jacobs, a forty-eight-year-old Boston-area native who goes by the title chief executive optimist, immediately grabbed his phone and began trying to account for the employees who had been near the fnish. As frantic hours passed and the scope of the carnage wrought by two alleged perpetrators became apparent, Jacobs learned that one employee had been very close to the second detonation, just a block and a half from Life Is Good's offces. Having sustained shrapnel and burn injuries, the man had been rushed to a Boston hospital. Jacobs J U ST JA K E JAKE LIFE IS GOOD'S ICONIC HERO WITH THE CONTAGIOUS SMILE, TEACHES MEN, WOMEN AND KIDS THAT OPTIMISM IS FUN, HEALTHY, AND EMPOWERING. — Fall 2013 . Tempus-Magazine.com 85