The Long Stitch of Freeport

Leon Leonwood Bean came home from a deer hunt in the late fall of 1911 with wet feet, a short temper, and an idea. The leather pacs the Maine woodsmen of his day liked were warm enough but soaked through on any serious creek crossing. The rubber boots the harbor men wore in Bath and Portland shed water fine but turned your foot into a cold soft thing by mid-afternoon. What you wanted, Bean had been chewing on during the long wagon ride back to Freeport, was a hybrid: a rubber bottom that sheds water, a leather upper that breathes.

He took the idea to a local cobbler — Bean wasn't a leather man himself, raised in the dry-goods trade by an uncle after his parents died young — and the cobbler sewed a leather upper onto the bottom of a rubber pac. Bean called it the Maine Hunting Shoe. Had a hundred pairs made on credit with the cobbler. Printed a circular and mailed it, using a list of out-of-state hunting license holders he'd quietly gotten from the state of Maine, to every man on it. Ninety of the first hundred pairs failed within weeks — the stitching, which Bean had specced through the rubber, didn't hold. Bean refunded the money to every man who asked. Went back to the cobbler. They redesigned the stitch. He mailed the corrected boots out on his own dime.

That right there — the leaky boots, the refunds, the do-over at the founder's own cost — is the founding moment of what's now L.L. Bean, Inc., and it's where the firm dates its much-quoted guarantee. Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings, and they will always come back for more. Bean wrote that sentence himself, in his own hand, sometime in the 1910s. The firm's spent 114 years working out what it means to live inside it.

This is how a Freeport hunter's leaky boot became one of the most durable American family businesses north of Boston — and how the family, now fourth-generation and joined since 2007 by the firm's own employees, held the line on what L.L. would've called the simple proposition.

The Maine Hunting Shoe as artifact

Worth a beat on what the Bean Boot has become, because the boot's the thread running through everything else.

These days the Maine Hunting Shoe — the firm just calls it the Bean Boot by long custom — gets made at the company's facilities in Brunswick and Lewiston, Maine. Lewiston stitches the leather uppers. Brunswick joins the upper to the rubber bottom, laces it, does the final inspection, packs it. Both plants employ Maine residents, a lot of them on the line for decades. The bottoms are vulcanized rubber, made to L.L. Bean's spec by a domestic supplier. The leather's sourced mostly from American tanneries, including the firm's long relationship with the Horween Leather Company of Chicago for the heavier upper grades. The chain-tread pattern on the sole — that lateral ridging that makes the boot, to a New England eye, identifiable at thirty paces — has been basically unchanged since the 1930s.

The boot's been on the feet of presidents (Eisenhower wore Bean Boots at Camp David; Carter wore them in the Plains, Georgia sandhills; the elder Bush wore them in Kennebunkport), of New England fishermen, Wyoming ranch hands, and a whole lot of American college kids who figured out somewhere in the 1980s that the boot was as right for the quad in mud season as it was for the Maine woods in deer season. Some years the firm's sold more than half a million pairs. The waiting list in boot season has run into months. Brunswick adds capacity in small increments. The line will not be sped up past what the work, done right, allows.

The chain-tread sole — that lateral ridging that makes the boot identifiable to a New England eye at thirty paces — has been basically unchanged since the 1930s.

It retails, depending on height and lining, in the $130 to $300 range. It's repairable. The firm will, for a fee that's small next to a new pair, replace a worn rubber bottom and put the boot back in service. The leather uppers, cared for, will outlast a working life.

Leon to Leon to Shawn

L.L. ran it himself from 1912 until he died in 1967, by which point it had grown from one product and one storefront to a several-hundred-product catalog mailed twice a year to about 600,000 American households. He was, in his later decades, a famously approachable guy. The Freeport store started staying open 24 hours a day in the 1920s on the theory that hunters and fishermen heading north don't keep merchant hours — and round-the-clock operation has continued at the flagship, with a brief pandemic interruption, right up to now. L.L. wrote his own catalogs. Answered a lot of his own letters by hand. Hunted his own deer, on Maine land he bought with boot money, until the year before he died.

The firm passed, on L.L.'s death, to his grandson Leon Arthur Gorman, who'd grown up around the catalog operation and had been working at Bean since college. Leon Gorman ran it for forty-six years, 1967 to 2013 — about as long as his grandfather. He inherited a regional mail-order operation doing around $4.5 million a year. He left a national outdoor retailer doing roughly $1.5 billion. The growth happened, by Gorman's own account, slow and on purpose. He turned down repeated invitations to take the firm public. He turned down offshoring the manufacturing. He kept the guarantee in its original form for nearly his whole run (a 2018 change, after his death, capped the unconditional return window at one year — a controversial call the firm has since defended as necessary against organized return fraud).

By the accounts of people who worked under him, Leon Gorman was the quiet, undemonstrative kind of New England businessman the region's been producing reliably for three centuries. Believed in long planning horizons. Believed in steady reinvestment. Believed in paying Maine wages to Maine people and keeping the manufacturing as close to Freeport as the freight network and the labor supply would allow. He sat on boards of Maine charitable institutions. Gave heavily, in life and in his will, to Maine causes. Wrote a memoir of the firm — L.L. Bean: The Making of an American Icon — that's, among other things, the most candid surviving account of how a family business this size actually gets run across half a century.

He believed in paying Maine wages to Maine people and keeping the manufacturing as close to Freeport as the freight network and the labor supply would allow.

Leon Gorman handed the chairmanship, in 2013, to his nephew Shawn Gorman — L.L.'s great-grandson, current chair of the board. Shawn's part of a cousin cohort of L.L.'s great-grandchildren — about fifty of them now — who hold the family interest collectively through a trust structure engineered, over multiple generations, to keep ownership inside the family and dodge the periodic pressure to sell that's broken so many other multi-generational American firms. And in 2007, in a move that got less press than it deserved, the family handed a substantial ownership stake to the firm's employees through a profit-sharing and equity arrangement. L.L. Bean today is, at the same time, a family-controlled firm and a partially employee-owned one. The cousins will tell you that's what they think L.L. would've wanted. The employees will tell you they own the company in the ways that matter.

Maine is a stakeholder

You can't write L.L. Bean honest without writing Maine. The firm is, by some measures, the second-largest private employer in the state (Hannaford Supermarkets, bigger workforce, holds first). The Brunswick and Lewiston plants together employ several hundred Maine residents directly. The Freeport HQ, the call centers in Lewiston and Bangor, and the Freeport distribution operation employ several thousand more. The payroll, even diluted by the firm's retail and online expansion of recent decades, is still a meaningful piece of the Cumberland County and Androscoggin County economies.

Maine has lost most of the manufacturing it had over the last forty years. The paper mills of the central and northern counties closed or shrank. The textile mills of Lewiston and Biddeford closed. The boot shops of Skowhegan and the shoe shops of Auburn closed. The fishing fleet shrank, the lobstering fleet aged, the inland farms consolidated. The state reinvented itself in pieces around tourism and biotech and aquaculture and the quiet professional sector spreading out from Portland — but in the towns that lived it, the loss of the heavy industrial base was very nearly total.

Against that, the L.L. Bean line in Brunswick is not a small thing. It's one of the only remaining significant American shoe and boot manufacturing operations in the country. It's one of the very last places in Maine where the practical knowledge of how to stitch a leather upper to a vulcanized rubber bottom, at production scale, still lives. The firm has, on purpose, kept investing in the line — adding capacity, training new operators, paying wages above the regional norm — when a cooler financial analysis would've argued for offshoring years ago. The Gorman cousins, asked about it, will tell you they haven't seriously considered it. The line is part of what they were given. They intend to hand it on.

The simple proposition

For the better part of a decade the country's been having a running argument with itself about whether the old American institutions can hold. It gets conducted in the language of decline and rupture and crisis and, on the brighter side, restoration and revival and return. The terms are sweeping. The data are mixed. The institutions, depending on who's talking, are government, the universities, the churches, the marriages, the small towns, the small businesses, the family businesses.

L.L. Bean is a piece of evidence on the side of the institutions can hold, if the people running them mean to hold them. The firm's been continuously run by L.L.'s direct descendants for 114 years. With the employees now beside them, it's turned down every reasonable offer to sell. When the choice got put square to it, it kept the manufacturing in Maine. It kept the guarantee — narrower than it was, but kept in substance — across four generations and twelve U.S. presidencies. And by the patient discipline of long horizons and steady reinvestment and the small-town courtesy of treating your customers like human beings, it became the rare American firm whose hundredth birthday came and went not as an occasion for embalming but as a Tuesday.

The Maine Hunting Shoe is getting stitched, this morning, in Brunswick. The Freeport store's open, like it's been for most of a century, at four in the morning. The cousins run the firm. The employees own a piece of it. The boot still leaks, once in a while, when it shouldn't — and when it does, the firm still makes it right.

L.L., you suspect, would recognize the place.

— floridaman@america.cool