Optimism has been good for Bert Jacobs, who along with his brother John, co-founded Life is good in 1989.

The lifestyle and clothing brand, built around Jake – a smiling, somewhat crudely drawn elongated smiley face with a huge grin and a jaunty beret – started with the pair peddling T-shirts on the streets of Boston. It has grown from the two brothers sleeping in a van while they sold T-shirts door-to-door on college campuses to a $100 million business built around the idea of spreading optimism.

(READ the story from the Boston Globe)