WHEN it was building its brand, the beverage maker Honest Tea stayed off
the conventional marketing grid, opting for samplings, recycling events
and word of mouth to reach its audience. Now the company’s founders are
taking an alternate route to telling a button-down corporate history
and are instead laying out their story, warts and all, in the pictorial
form of a comic book.
“People ask me if it’s a graphic novel, and I say that it’s graphic, but
not a novel,” said the Honest Tea co-founder Seth Goldman. Together
with Barry Nalebuff, who was his professor while at the Yale School of
Management, the two are sharing their company-building lessons in
illustrated panels that track the brand’s start in 1998 — and its many
missteps and near disasters — through to the flourishing company that
was bought in 2011 by Coca-Cola.
To lay out the dozen years of Honest Tea’s ups and downs before that
point, Mr. Goldman borrowed an idea from something he loved doing with
his three sons — reading comic books. He wanted to illustrate the
company’s story, and persuaded Mr. Nalebuff, who has written five other
books, to come aboard.
