Kennett launched Kerusso in 1987. While working in construction full-time in order to pay the bills, Kennett was inspired to evangelize the message of Christianity to the world as his own walk with the Lord was deepening.

With $1,000 borrowed from his brother and the idea of “t-shirt evangelism,” Kennett was able to get Kerusso off the ground as a small mail-order company with just three different t-shirt designs advertised directly to the public in Campus Life Magazine. After the initial interest in the shirts died down, Kennett made the crucial decision to sell the shirts wholesale to Christian bookstores in order to garner larger orders.

His faithfulness and determination paid off with his first wholesale order to the Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs. Soon after, business began to pick up and Kennett was able to pursue his passion full-time. “I put the hammer down and picked up the squeegee,” he shares. From their humble beginnings, Kerusso has grown to become a worldwide supplier of Christian-themed apparel, jewelry and accessories.

“I look back at how we started and it really is amazing that we’re here today. It really is by the grace of God,” admits Kennett. A college dropout without a business plan, 25 years later he leads one of the top employers in Berryville, providing jobs to over 100 people. Since the beginning, Kennett’s passion of changing the world through apparel and other products was clear and it is what continues to inspire him today. “[It is] my strong belief in the mission of what our products are designed to do—help someone share their faith in Jesus Christ. A strong conviction that that was my mission kept me going,” he explains.

With a steady demand for their products over the years, Kerusso has sold more than 14 million shirts to date. Kennett views the 14 million shirts in terms of what it means for his original vision of the company. “Even if [each shirt is viewed] just 100 times, we’ve potentially preached a message of love, forgiveness and hope more than a billion times,” he explains.

Today, this message is shared through a variety of products including apparel, jewelry, accessories, novelty items and gift items. Kerusso products are available to a wide selection of customers through different channels and brands the company has created in order to tap into a variety of markets. The Kerusso brand can be found at Christian bookstores and retail outlets in more than 100 countries, while another brand, Tru Witness, is sold exclusively at convenience stores, travel centers, pharmacies and grocery stores across the nation. There is also the potential of another brand designed for big box retailers to hit shelves in the future.

Much like other retail and fashion companies, Kerusso continues to deliver quality products that are on trend and appeal to a wide variety of customers. Kennett and his staff understand the importance of providing a product that customers are going to want to wear in order to more effectively spread their message. “You can put truth out there, but if you do it in an unattractive way, you’re not going to get it out there as much,” he explains.

In recent years, Kerusso has begun partnering with Christian media to provide apparel items for successful books and movies. “We’ve been blessed to be the go-to apparel partner for big Christian media licenses,” shares Kennett. “When the mission of [the project] aligns with our mission and it can be a great design, then that’s when it’s something to consider.” Kerusso has produced exclusive apparel items for projects such as the bestselling book “Heaven is For Real,” the highly successful feature length films Courageous and Soul Surfer, several titles with author Max Lucado, the Left Behind movies series and many others.

Part of the benefit of these thriving business ventures for Kennett is the ability to give back across the world. “If you don’t do business well, if you don’t make a profit, or if you aren’t being sharp in your business, then you don’t have anything left over to give,” explains Kennett. By his standards, Kerusso’s ability to give back proves the overwhelming success of the company.

To date, Kerusso has donated more than 150,000 pieces of apparel and other items with a retail value of almost $2 million to churches, shelters and disaster-stricken areas. Most recently, after the devastating tornados in Joplin and other areas of the south, Kerusso responded by sending truckloads of t-shirts to hard hit areas and victims of the disasters. In addition, Kerusso has implemented various campaigns over the years, such as the Live for Him Campaign, which raised funds for Compassion International, one of the largest children’s relief organizations around the world. With an array of products sold as a part of the Campaign, such as a special silicone wristband, Kerusso donated a portion of each sale to the organization. Since 2005, the company has contributed over $360,000 to Compassion International.

In the 25 years since Kennett was working construction and pursuing his newfound passion on the side, his company has truly flourished. Throughout new product lines, new ventures and ample opportunities to give back, Kerusso has consistently remained true to its mission of proclaiming the good news to the world through products about Jesus. Perhaps Kerusso’s steadfast loyalty of sharing its message with over a billion people for the past 25 years is due to Kennett, but this self-made entrepreneur is quick to point out that it’s been a team effort from the start. “I know I didn’t get here on my own,” Kennett agrees. “All the glory belongs to God, and I owe my employees, family, pastor, the retailers, and people who have supported me over the years a lot.

Ranging from mild to “four peppers hot” the 21 entry feast included everything from “Bowl of Heaven” to “Montezuma’s Revenge.” The Associates voted for recipes of the anonymous entries. Ward “Bubba” Goodrich took first place with his “Smoked Brisket Chili” and Kim Chapin came in second with her “White Chili” recipe.

“It was such a delight to bring everyone together for the tasty event, and the competition was so fun, the Associates unanimously agreed to carry on the tradition every year,” stated Kerusso Founder and CEO, Vic Kennett. “Enjoyable breaks like this event shouldn’t have to wait until the next leap year.”

Bob Ahart, Human Resources Director and emcee of the event kept the pace lively with stories about chili legends like the outlaw and desperado Jesse James, who is said to have refused to rob a bank in McKinney, Texas because it’s where his favorite chili parlor was located.

“What an honor for Kerusso and our amazing Associates,” stated Vic Kennett, Founder & CEO. “Our Associates put their passion into what we do every day, so it’s a great way to have a little fun and thank everyone who contributes to the success of Kerusso.”

BERRYVILLE, AR — SELF PORTRAIT

Date and place of birth:

Oct. 12, 1963, in La Grange, Ill.

Family:

wife Melody, sons Nik and Kyle, daughter Cassidy

Occupation:

Founder and CEO of Kerusso

My best time of day is

every moment I’m conscious of God’s presence.

A person I look up to is

Jesus.

The best advice I ever received is

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

My favorite thing

about my job is knowing that I’m serving God and making a difference in the world.

The last great book I read was

besides the Bible, The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership by Steven B. Sample.

My favorite movie of all time:

Only one? That’s tough! I’d say Lord of the Rings.

One thing I’d like to improve is

my patience.

The place I’d most like to visit is

Israel.

A phrase to sum me up:

“Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.” (from the New Testament)

Vic Kennett was ready to throw in the towel.

Actually, it was T-shirts he was giving up on, but it’s not important what form the cotton took. What mattered was that after a year of trying to make a go of selling Christiantheme T-shirts, Kennett decided there was no future in it.

He figured he would stick with construction, and bide his time until another business idea came to mind. His sister pleaded with him to hang on a little longer, though, insisting there was a great purpose in what he was trying to do.

“[My sales] were just paying for the ads,” Kennett recalls. “I was barely breaking even, and I was getting ready to quit. My sister, who is a believer, encouraged me, ‘Oh hold on, God will show up and he’ll work it out.’”

With that encouragement in mind, Kennett decided to make one final push. He took a day off from his construction job and drove around to every Christian bookstore he knew in about a 50-mile radius of Eureka Springs.

He showed the stores the handful of T-shirts he’d come up with, and they liked what he was selling. By day’s end, Kennett was back in business, and his Christian apparel company, Kerusso, was on the road to something big.

Today, Kerusso is celebrating its 25th year in business. It employs more than 100 people in Berryville and will distribute its 14 millionth T-shirt later this year, Kennett says. His company’s merchandise is available in more than 100 countries, and it has donated more than $1.5 million to charities around the world.

After cities such as Joplin, Mo., and New Orleans were devastated by natural disasters, Kerusso gave away thousands of T-shirts to clothe the newly homeless – T-shirts that never would have existed had Kennett called it quits back in the late ’80s.

“I didn’t know anything about business at the time, other than bigger-picture type lessons my dad taught me,” Kennett says. “I hadn’t really gotten into a lot of strong courses at the UA that told me you needed a business plan.”

Kennett was a college dropout in his mid-20s when he started Kerusso in 1987 in a spare room at his Eureka Springs home. He had already started one business that had gone under, a health club, and needed to borrow $1,000 from his brother just to get Kerusso going.

Had Kerusso not made it, Kennett would have likely started another company – and another, and another, until one finally succeeded. But it’s doubtful he would have been able to derive the same pleasure he gets from Kerusso, where he combines a lifelong passion for entrepreneurship with his strong Christian beliefs.

“Vic’s mindset for the company is very evangelistic,” says Rusty Dycus of Berryville, Kerusso’s vice president of sales. “He gives back to so many.

“Vic has a heart that [affects] people. We’re a for profit company, but very mission-focused, and that comes from Vic.”

SOUND IN BODY

Kennett turns 50 in a year and a half.

He sure doesn’t look it, though. Sore knees prevent him from running much anymore, but he remains in excellent shape.

He has always loved to lift weights, and he logs intense sessions on stationary bikes.

“Even when I met Vic, he was very fit,” says Melody, Kennett’s wife of 26 years. “He was always on some new diet, always lifting weights. He opened his health club because he wanted people to be very fit.”

About a decade ago, Kennett opened up a gym next to Kerusso’s headquarters. He has never charged employees to use the gym, and he is always encouraging them to get in a workout or to find some way to improve their health.

This past year, Kerusso took first place in its division in the 2011 Blue and You Fitness Challenge, an exercise competition for members of various organizations across the state.

In this competition, the company would have been penalized had employees skipped workouts or dropped out of the program, but Kennett made sure they stayed on track, according to Kerusso’s Human Resources director, Bob Ahart of Holiday Island.

“He certainly lives [a healthful] lifestyle, and he encourages that in his business a great deal,” says Gary Hayhurst of Eureka Springs, who has been Kennett’s pastor at Faith Christian Family Church in Eureka Springs for more than a quarter-century. “He believes true wellness is both soul and body. Vic wants to be well in all parts.”

Every year, Kerusso enters a team in the 5K running portion of the annual Berryville Ice Cream Social, a race it frequently wins; Kennett finished second in his age group last year. Employees get involved with the event and many other events that take place in the Carroll County city.

“We’re really proud to have such a national company in a small town,” says Ginger Oaks, the director of the Berryville Chamber of Commerce. “Any time we ever need any help and holler for them, they’re wonderful for us. They make a big impact here.”

While physical wellness is something that has always been important to Kennett, a concern for his spiritual health took longer to emerge.

Kennett attended Catholic services with his mother when his family was living in suburban Chicago, but it was limited to Sunday Mass and little more. It simply “wasn’t a big part of our house,” he recalls, and he believes his late father might have been an agnostic.

When he was in fifth grade, the family moved to Eureka Springs and stopped going to church altogether. That same year, Kennett decided he was an atheist.

One day at a yard sale he spotted a book titled The Late, Great Planet Earth. Kennett bought the book for a quarter, and reading it changed his life- but only somewhat.

“I went from being an atheist to being able to take a step of faith,” he says. “I prayed a prayer, invited God into my life, Jesus into my heart, and became a Christian.

“My heart and my mind changed, but my lifestyle didn’t. I didn’t put actions to my new faith. I went through a lifestyle that a lot of teenagers go through, drinking and carousing and looking for girls.”

A deeper commitment didn’t come until Kennett was 21. To him, that meant trying to live a wholesome lifestyle, trying to be a good father, husband and Christian.

It also meant helping the less fortunate. In 2005, Kerusso launched the Live for Him project, selling silicone wristbands with “LIVE FOR HIM” imprinted on them for $1.50 each (today the price is $1.99).

For each one that is sold, a quarter goes to Compassion International, a Christian child sponsorship ministry. Kennett says more than $360,000 has been raised for the organization.

“He’s told me, ‘You could be the next Steve Jobs, making millions trying to do something in the secular market on a huge scale, but what I get to do is the most fulfilling feeling in the world,’” says Kennett’s son Nik, a student at the University of Arkansas. “I truly think my father is one of the least selfish people I have ever met.”

HARDWORKING MEN

Don and Margaret Kennett didn’t believe in idling away the days.

Kennett’s parents were 54 and 42 respectively, when he was born, Great Depression survivors who believed that a good life involved working hard and contributing to the community. After Don Kennett retired from his job as a salesman, he moved his family to Eureka Springs, drawn by the region’s natural beauty and low cost of living.

Vic Kennett had an uncle in Eureka Springs who owned the Swiss Village Inn, and shortly after the family moved, Vic and his older brother Al took jobs there. During the summers, they made beds and swept the parking lot, and then went off to their evening jobs, performing in the Great Passion Play.

“From age 12 on, I pretty much had two jobs every summer,” Vic Kennett says. “I think it was something my dad instilled in us, to just be a productive person.”

Don Kennett had succeeded as a salesman because he believed in persistence, that a person could find success by focusing and working long hours, Vic says.

He also believed in integrity. Before Vic was born, his father owned a furniture store that failed, and he was stuck with the bills when his partner split.

He notes with pride that his father paid back every cent that was owed.

“He was a salesman, but not a salesman type,” says Al Kennett, who lives in Berryville. “He was really kind of serene in the pursuit of his own goals.

“As soon as we moved down here, we both started working right away. That was our dad’s kind of thing.”

Don Kennett’s industriousness inspired his youngest son, and it is why Vic has never been entirely comfortable with the idea of sitting around and doing nothing.

As a teenager, he had a lawn-mowing business and sold shoes door to door.

“I have no idea what he would do [if he ever retired],” Melody Kennett says. “I know he would not be happy unless he was very busy. He has to have something to focus on.”

After graduating from Eureka Springs High School in 1981, Kennett enrolled at the University of Arkansas. He studied to be a business major, but about halfway through, he began wondering what the point was of going to college. He dropped out during his junior year.

He spent a few months clearing his head in Key West, Fla., and then moved back to Eureka Springs, where he opened a gym, Fit for Life. He was 20.

Kennett logged long hours and hustled to sign up new members. He figures that he got 10 percent of the population of Eureka Springs to enroll, but it still wasn’t enough.

“I’m sure there were things I could have done better, but really, the market was just not big enough,” he says. “I was working 12-hour days and averaging about $5 an hour. It was something I loved doing.”

Kennett closed the gym after a year and a half and waited for his next big idea. When he found it, it was staring him in the face.

MAN OF IDEAS

Shop was Kennett’s favorite class in high school.

His senior year, he took three hours of it. He loved working with his hands, and when the gym closed, it gave him something to fall back on.

After closing the gym, he quickly soured on being a Realtor and selling corrugated boxes. So he went into carpentry, working for various carpenters in Eureka Springs.

One day, he was on his hands and knees in a public restroom in downtown Eureka Springs, scraping up old tiles and installing new ones. A tourist walked by, wearing a T-shirt that had a Christian message.

Kennett doesn’t recall what the shirt said, but he remembers that he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“I thought, ‘Wow that’s cool!’” Kennett says. “I had been trying my best to really follow God and live out my life that way. I wasn’t real happy with the work I was doing and I was searching. ‘God, what’s my path? Whatcan I do that pleases you, that feeds my family and is a fulfilling life for me?’”

Kennett actually had some experience in the world of Tshirts, having spent several summers working at T-shirt shops in Eureka Springs, the kind of places where someone picked out a shirt and some art, and an employee pressed it on the shirt.

Flat-broke, he borrowed $1,000 from his brother. More than half of it, $600, went to pay for a small black-andwhite advertisement in a magazine called Campus Life, which was geared toward college-age Christians.

Choosing the name Kerusso because it meant “to herald divine truth” in Greek, Kennett’s fledgling company offered three designs, all playing off the pop culture of 1987: Christian-theme versions of the Vuarnet sunglasses and Guess Jeans logos, and the slogan “Life’s a beach.”

In those pre-Internet days, Kennett received completed forms and checks in the mail, and mailed out customers’ orders a few weeks later.

That has all changed over time, but Kerusso still has a heavy focus on puns and playing off pop culture, using well-known images and words to spread the Word. “Live for Him,” for example, was a play off the popular Livestrong fundraising campaign (which raised millions of dollars for the Lance Armstrong Foundation), while patriotic-theme Christian shirts led to a $20,000 donation to the American Red Cross and Salvation Army after Sept. 11, 2001.

As the company has grown, Kennett has turned many of the administrative operations over to others but is still a major part of the creative team.

“‘Visionary’ is how I would describe his role in the company,” Dycus says. “Having an eye for great products is his strength. ‘Live for Him’ was basically a project that came from Vic himself.”

Kennett has sought to partner his company with like-minded people, which is how it ended up working with Sherwood Pictures. Kerusso has handled the official licensing for its movies – most recently Courageous, for which it created four T-shirt designs and a cap.

After Courageous came out, Kennett was on a business trip to New York. As is usually the case, he was wearing one of his company’s shirts out in public, this one made for the movie and a stranger stopped him and enthusiastically commented on his shirt.

This sort of event is increasingly common for Kennett. The more Kerusso grows, the more he spots people wearing his shirts – or they recognize Kerusso’s shirts on him – and he knows he is fulfilling his life’s mission.

“I’m thrilled with what we’re doing and the people we have here,” Kennett says. “We’re having a good time, and have a lot of work to do.

“We know what we’re doing is having an impact – we get letters and Facebook posts – but it’s really cool to see it in public.”

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