Keep Calm and Chive On. There’s a good possibility you’ve seen the famous slogan on one of The Chive’s infinite t-shirts or even Bill Murray’s face on one of their products. What first started out as a celebrity blogger site has now grown into a photo entertainment site where they receive millions of hits a day. The Chive refers to themselves as, “Probably the best site in the world” and they have more than enough factors to back themselves up with that bold statement. Brothers John and Leo Resig have found the way to successfully run their renowned site all while still maintaining their great sense of humor and giving back to the community.
Leo was working for an ad firm in Venice Beach in 2006 and noticed the high revenues celebrity gossip sites were bringing in. The Resig brothers first gave the tech world a shot with a celebrity gossip site of their own entitled Derober. John adds, “It’s important to know how badly we failed. But it kind of gave us the tools that we would use to go on to founding The Chive. For example, we learned how to blog, we learned Photoshop; things like that. Personally, we learned to stay in our lane because we were not celebrity gossip bloggers. Leo and I could’ve [cared less] about celebrity culture. If you’re going to start a company, you might want to like the content in which you distribute. We didn’t care about Heidi or Spencer.” The brothers both have backgrounds in photography, so John would take the pictures and Leo used Photoshop and “made them pretty.” Leo explains, “Both of us got really good at Photoshop so our take on Derober was super satirical. We weren’t breaking news and didn’t have any leads to do anything. So we would take this same photo that everyone is using, Photoshop it, and then when you rolled your mouse over the photo, Heidi and Spencer would grow horns.”
Even though John and Leo didn’t care about celebrity gossip, they did know that if they had enough people visiting their site consistently, they could make a profit. Leo elaborates adding, “That’s when we put our heads together and figured out what we both really liked, which was basically just a viral photo gallery. You didn’t have to read to understand the content to be entertained by it. But that’s pretty much how Derober led us to The Chive quickly in terms of what you want to do on a daily basis. You have to be consistent with your content output to really build an audience. It’s a 365, 24/7, five to ten post a day. So if you’re going to do that, at least be entertained while you’re doing it.”
The name, The Chive, comes from Chicago, “Chi” (Leo was working at an ad agency in Chicago at the time) and Venice, “ve” combined. John explains, “We threw a ‘The’ in front of it because chive was already taken. If you put ‘The’ in front of it, it was $9.99 from GoDaddy.com, which was a really big deal because I knew it wasn’t a premium domain yet, which was $16.99. I was hoping that we wouldn’t be $16.99 because I knew Leo would ask me for eight dollars.” Leo jumps in, “Split the rent!” “Yeah, like split it down the middle. So that was a big deal for me because I didn’t have any money.” Leo continues, “Which is funny these days because a lot of people think [The Chive] is correlated with The Onion. It would be a dream to even be in the same sentence as The Onion now. Seven years later we have more traffic than they do and have had for about four years.”
The Chive has a fun online store of merchandise, including their famous Keep Calm and Chive On t-shirts, which many of their own employee’s model (John included). Their shirts have become so popular that they sell out within minutes, which has led to a misconception that The Chive was releasing 300-500 shirts at a time, where they actually release closer to 30,000 shirts at a time. John explains, “It’s all proportional…the demand. So if you got 2,000 people trying to buy 300 shirts, there you go. But if you got at one point 200,000 people trying to buy 30,000 t shirts, it’s like I said, it’s all about perception.” Leo adds, “[The Chive has] had some big hits with those shirts. We’ve definitely sold over a million of two different designs and didn’t have to raise any outside capital. We have boot strapped and self funded the whole business basically because of our t-shirt sales in the early days. For years we’ve had well over 40 million people come to the site every month.” The majority of the t-shirt models one can see on their online store are employees at The Chive. John points out, “I would say it’s 80% employees easily.” Leo throws in, “Yeah want to do a photo shoot today? [laughs] Basically whoever walks through the door, it’s like here throw this on you’re going to do a shoot.”
One well recognizable shirt in particular is their Bill Murray t-shirt. Leo had gone to a pop art festival in Venice Beach where the focus was on Bill Murray. He was talking with the guy who puts the show on and he told Leo, “Everyone loves Bill Murray.” Leo elaborates, “The guy can do no wrong, he’s a comedic icon in some of the best comedies ever made, yet he never fully puts himself out there. He’s this wild card where you never know what he’s going to do next.” So Leo went home and designed a Bill Murray t-shirt with his face on it. “The both of us just put it on sale and we’ve never seen anything sell so fast. So we started selling more, it sold out, and more sold out. We tried to get a hold of Bill Murray, and you can’t reach him. He doesn’t have an agent.” John adds, “You find out really quick that those rumors turned out to be true.” Leo continues, “From experience, we know what typical royalty agreements are for celebrities and using their likenesses on a licensing standpoint. So we started putting money aside knowing one day someone in his camp would say ‘hey guys you owe us a lot of money.’ Then the call came in four years ago. He took a cool approach to it. His lawyer was just like, ‘hey, we see the shirt, his face is everywhere and we know that it’s you guys doing it. Bill has this charity golf tournament we do every year and Bill wants you to sponsor it.’ So we’ve been their presenting sponsor every year. We started by using proceeds of the shirt sales to donate to their charity. That quickly evolved into a concrete licensing agreement that we have had with him for years now. He gets a percentage of sales of all the shirts.” They have also earned Murray’s trust to where they now manage his likeness. Something The Chive has been keeping quiet about is their golf line that will be called the William Murray Golf line. All the Resig brothers can say for now is that it will be launching later this year.
Working at The Chive is a naturally fun environment and has become a family affair. John points out, “A lot of people fake culture. They’re like, ‘look how much fun we’re having!’ We call it forced fun.” Leo adds, “They put like pool toys all over the office.” John continues, “’Decorate your desk anyway you want! Isn’t this cool? Don’t you love you’re job!’ But whereas we are a family run company. That’s the big thing; my brother and I started the site. Our first hire number one was our cousin Bob and our second hire was our cousin Rick. Then our sisters Emily and Megan started The Berry. Hire number six was my roommate. From there we had a choice: we either hire the people who had the glossiest resumes and graduated from the best colleges, or we could hire quirky people that I wanted to drink with and had a work ethic. That’s evolved into this environment. It’s fun, everybody hangs out with each other. These are good people and it reflects into our society too.”
In 2013, The Chive made a big choice and moved from Los Angeles to Austin. Leo explains that there were many factors that went into their decision to move. “I personally didn’t plan on staying in LA the rest of my life. I really like it out there, but I got married at the time and wanted to start a family, which is something we’ve now done since moving here. So John and I being the founders and leaders of a site where I take care of most of the business end of the site, and John is more editor in chief, chief creative officer, and gets to have a lot more fun than I do. It was a big decision to not only uproot ourselves, but 30 plus employees, not to mention anyone who had family members and other family out in California.” John comments saying, “So proposition 30 passed at the time. It raised the effective tax rate to 13.3%. We’re pass-through entity so keep in mind that we pay taxes on all those t-shirts until we sell them.” Leo concludes, “We had one year where our effective tax rate was over 70%, and I hate to say taxes brought us here, but when we’re retaining 30% of revenue that we’ve worked really hard for and getting heavily penalized for, we had to sit down with our accountant and Jeremy said it best. He’s like, ‘listen, you two are really smart people and obviously want to be as successful as you are, but it’s not a smart move to stay here.’ At the same time, Austin is just a practical place to live. Or it was when we moved here two years ago, it’s gotten nuts!”
One of the first things you’ll notice when you walk into The Chive headquarters is the gigantic slide and a commercial sized copper bar (and a large refrigeration unit which John refers to as “big boy stuff”). Leo explains, “We’ve had a lot of offices over the years and I know what works for certain employees in terms of whether you’re in an open area, bullpen space, versus a closed office. I like our space here because we keep throwing desks everywhere, there’s going to be like four people working in my office.” John adds, “Well, the intern has a mini desk now that you got for me.” Leo replies, “That he doesn’t even fit in!”
As if John and Leo aren’t already busy enough, they find time to give back to the community. The Chive has Chive Charities, which states on their site, “Rather than using the cause to raise awareness for the grantee, we help the grantee raise awareness for the cause.” John explains that Austin Pets Alive is their “number one” here in Austin. “The big thing we wanted to do when we came here was build a baseball field for kids with disabilities. It’s a monster project, but last year we teamed up with the Cal Ripken Foundation and raised $350,000 in about 24 hours to build the KCCO (Keep Calm and Chive On) Ability Field in Hutto, Texas, which we opened up about a year ago.” Leo adds, “It’s a great field and it’s all handicap accessible with Astroturf. It’s really cool.” John continues, “When you come into a city, you’ve got to leave it better than you found it. Those were our two objectives and we kind of stuck with saving as many dogs as we can. I spent this past weekend up in Killeen with all the troops from Fort Hood and we threw a big party up there with a band and a big free concert.” Leo includes that locally they’re also involved with the Andy Roddick Foundation. “We sponsor that yearly. Also, the Waller Creek Conservancy. I’m a big fan. I love the philanthropy in this town. So many people rally around so many great causes and they do it right, too.”
When the Resig brothers aren’t busy traveling, promoting their KCCO beer or running Resignation Media, they enjoy Austin as much as anyone else. “As busy as we are, if I get any free time I just sit on the couch and watch TV. I even watch commercials. I like to see what that Geico gecko is up to” explains John. Leo adds, “I think last year John was on the road for 240 days. I actually like to go shooting because we’ve always lived in Chicago. Mostly outdoor shooting since there’s a lot of land here. As hot as it gets here, people are still outside so I like to bike a ton. It’s an active city, gotta love it.”
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