Travel: The Maine Attraction
Did you know that one of Maine's three top tourist attractions, along with the Atlantic Ocean and Acadia National Park, is a retail store? Three and a half million visitors traveled to L. L. Bean’s Freeport showrooms last year. Some couples have even chosen to be married there over the years.
Thanks to catalogs packed with practical, unconditionally guaranteed products, Bean is known to an untold number of Americans. But few realize that the firm, founded in 1912 by an enterprising 40-year-old outdoorsman, was in the late 1950s and early ’60s still operated more like a local lobster pound than like the venerable mail-order establishment Life, Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, and other publications portrayed. Its aging proprietor was focusing more on how much he paid for merchandise than on the guarantee that backed it. He seemed to agree with his son Carl, who ran the company with him, on one topic only, growth—which both men spurned. Had a grandson, Leon Gorman, not been there to take over, the rickety concern would surely have collapsed after L. L. and Carl died, just months apart in 1967.
When Gorman, recently discharged from active naval service, joined Bean and began to learn about business in 1960, the outdoor outfitter’s annual sales totaled about $1 million. In 2000, the year before he left the president’s office to become chairman, the registers in its main store alone rang up a million dollars worth of sales in a single record day. Now Gorman has made the private company’s tale public in a Harvard Business School Press book, and honest cataloguer that he is, he reveals its growing pains. L.L. Bean: The Making of an American Icon (336 pages, $26.95) is at once a business treatise that doesn’t spare the jargon and a parable with an old-fashioned moral: A company can be both ethical and successful.
A refreshing absence of slick prose suggests that Gorman really did write his narrative, which is enhanced by interspersed comments from some three dozen people, mostly past and current staffers. They constitute a modern-day Greek chorus, adding apposite analysis to the corporate plot and its numerous subplots. Gorman himself provides enough homespun detail to allow anyone far from the business sector to enjoy parts of his book. As an example, he notes that in its early days the firm was upstairs from the town’s Main Street post office, and that L. L.’s brother was postmaster. “Guy Bean was reputed to be the only Democrat in Freeport during the Roosevelt years, which was why he got the appointment,” Gorman writes, adding that “outgoing mail, catalogs, and parcels were all chuted directly to the post office for immediate processing. The brothers had a good partnership.”
The tale has ample drama, some of which stems from outside forces such as the economic cataclysm that shook Japan in the 1990s. Bean had been doing a huge business there, and it resulted in the first sales drop Gorman experienced as president. An intramural schism caused a lot of tension over the years. Gorman always saw Bean as an outdoor outfitter and insisted on carrying substantial amounts of hunting, fishing, and other sporting equipment. But clothing accounts for far more revenue, and many staff members wanted to emulate Lands’ End, which built its success on more stylish items available in a wider range of colors than Gorman thought consistent with Bean’s “character.”
Gorman prefers the word character to image, which he feels has a false ring, and he also talks a lot about Bean’s “stakeholders.” While America’s publicly held corporations focus on shareholders and make decisions to maximize value in their behalf, Gorman always insisted that Bean be run for the common good of a larger group, including customers and employees along with the owners, who are still Bean family members. “Our stakeholders have invested their patronage, careers, finances, social services, and outdoor values in our enterprise,” he told his managers a few years ago. “They trust us to go the extra mile in everything we do.” Nor are these “outdoor values” an abstraction to him. He is as devout an outdoorsman as his grandfather was and puts “outdoor heritage” at the top of a list of company values. He’s one of precious few business leaders who can talk about “the enduring worth of our natural environment and the physical and spiritual value of the outdoors experience” and sound entirely sincere.
Bean’s growth curve and financial results have been very impressive over the past four decades, and as Gorman completed his book, 2006 sales were on track to approach $1.5 billion, with a return on equity exceeding 18 percent. The bottom-line reason, he’s convinced, is his grandfather’s golden rule of doing business—“Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings, and they’ll always come back for more,”—a concept so viable and one that Leon Gorman so steadfastly adhered to that Leon Leonwood Bean wound up on The Wall Street Journal’s list of the twentieth century’s top 10 entrepreneurs alongside Henry Ford, Sam Walton, and Bill Gates. Many would agree that the American retailing environment is a better place because his grandson, whenever he realized he had taken a wrong turn, followed a tongue-in-cheek rule that was posted in L. L.’s northern Maine hunting compound: “If you get lost, come straight back to camp.”
The Bean retailing base camp, these days called the flagship campus, includes two separate specialty sporting goods stores along with the 160,000-square-foot principal store, known for its indoor trout pond. You can, as people have for more than a half century, stop by 24 hours a day any day of the year. L. L. decided to keep its doors open around the clock in 1951, when hunters were pounding on the locked door at night, and the store has closed on only four occasions since. The doors to the big main store don’t even have locks.
If you go to Freeport this fall you’ll likely find something for everyone on your Christmas list. (Yes, Virginia, there is merchandise on display in the flagship campus stores that you won’t find online, in a Bean catalog, or at the six other substantially smaller company stores elsewhere in the United States.) And there’s plenty more to see and do than shop.
The company park and patio, which adjoin the stores, are decorated for the holidays with light sculptures done by an artist from nearby Portland. A campfire is lit periodically, and men and women in gingerbread costumes roam the grounds handing out cider and cookies. Storytelling events are scheduled, and an ice sculptor carves woodland creatures. Kids can have their pictures taken with a company character named L. L. Bear, and adults can watch outdoor skills demonstrations, which are held both in and outside the stores. Those who feel particularly energetic can sign up for same-day two-and-a-half-hour outdoor adventures that in winter, weather permitting, include cross-country skiing and snowshoeing at suitable nearby locations. For the token fee of $12 per person, Bean provides transportation, equipment, and personalized instruction.
The L. L. Bean flagship campus is on Route 1 in downtown Freeport just off Interstate 295 and is on the way to everywhere in Maine but a few places at its southern tip. For more information visit www.llbean.com/stores or call (800) 224-4221.