Michael Jay started silk screen printing original t-shirt designs as a teenager out of his family’s Nebraska basement in 1969, making shirts for the local high school football team and his friends. His first real order was for a local sporting goods shop – 24 t-shirts.
Founder
Lazy Butt Club
While making less than $2 an hour working his “day job” for a grocery store, he found that he could make about $30 for an hour’s work in the t-shirt business. The world of t-shirt design would be his calling, and he eventually moved to Colorado where he operated two t-shirt stores.
Now more than 50 years later, his t-shirt venture has morphed into Lazy Butt Club, Inc., an e-commerce enterprise headed by his two adult sons, CEO Daniel Jay and Nick Jay.
A San Diegan since 1989, Michael Jay turns 70 this month, and he said he is surprised his old designs have found a retro-loving audience that continues to grow through online sales.
“I just wondered where they were in 1972?!” Michael Jay said. “I knew that the internet was pretty awesome, and learning to use it to figure out how to get to where we need to be has been how we’ve been able to get out in front of it.”
Original Designs
Michael Jay’s line of designs – including the original Lazy Butt Club artwork of a cartoon duck in a baseball cap with “LBC” on it, kicking back in a lounge chair with a sun umbrella, holding a bottle of suntan lotion in one hand and a snack in the other, drinking a beverage out of a straw – have found a devoted following with people from more than two dozen countries, Daniel Jay says.
CEO
Lazy Butt Club
The company’s line of products includes baseball caps, hoodies, mugs, stickers and sweatpants.
The brothers on a whim first started wearing the iron-on t-shirt designs they unearthed in 2019 in their dad’s Vista warehouse, and the shirts sparked myriad conversations with strangers around the county.
“It was at that point we knew it was special, and eventually thought it could be the launching point of a revival,” Daniel Jay said.
In March 2020, with the pandemic just starting, the brothers started making t-shirts with their dad’s designs, investing several thousand dollars of their own and using their dad’s old equipment to print t-shirts in-house. The two built a website and launched an online store through Shopify.
Viral Videos
They have grown the business from selling one t-shirt a week to hundreds of orders a day, contracting out with other local printers to fill orders, and finding an audience of Lazy Butt Club fans through a series of family-focused videos featuring their dad.
The videos have received millions of views on TikTok, a platform used by more than 150 million people in the U.S. alone, according to the company. Lazy Butt Club is part of TikTok’s recently launched local business-forward model, TikTok Shop, that allows shoppable content on the TikTok app. TikTok shops are looking to compete with Etsy, Amazon and eBay, Michael Jay said.
“TikTok shop has been amazing for us,” Daniel Jay said. “The convenience of making a purchase directly from the app has definitely created some customers that may not have made their way to the website. With so much competition for attention, any steps that shorten the distance from potential interest to checkout is absolutely a game changer.”
The company has gone from 40 orders and $1,000 in gross sales in 2019 to more than 5,750 orders and $215,000 in gross sales so far in 2023. Daniel Jay said 2,700 of those orders and more than $90,000 are from its TikTok Shop.
Daniel Jay said he initially posted 10 videos on TikTok before one of the videos went viral in March 2021.
Daniel Jay said the morning after the first video post, there were 500 orders waiting to be filled, and in one-week Lazy Butt Club had made 2,000 sales. Other videos since have generated millions of views and thousands of orders.
Lazy Butt Club, Inc.
FOUNDED: 2019
FOUNDER: Michael Jay
PRESIDENT AND CEO: Daniel Jay
HEADQUARTERS: Vista
BUSINESS: Clothing brand
REVENUE: $215,000 (2023)
EMPLOYEES: 4
WEBSITE: lazybuttclub.com
CONTACT: lazybuttclub@gmail.com
NOTABLE: The company has sold t-shirts to customers in 24 different countries
