What No One Else Has As Good As

As avid hunters and campers know, L. L. Bean Inc. is a profitable anachronism hidden away in the snowy pine forests of northern New England. Bean's wilderness wares are acknowledged to be among the world's best, and each day as many as 5,000 letters flow into the company's rambling yellow factory and mail order headquarters in Freeport, Me. (pop. 4,000). Not long ago, someone in Bali offered to swap two native wood carvings for a pair of Bean hunting boots, and the deal was made. But despite the countless thousands of flashlights, snowshoes and compasses it has sold since its founding half a century ago, L. L. Bean has yet to work its way out of the woods: the firm has steadfastly refused to branch beyond Freeport, and is content with its comfortable sales of $2,500,000 a year.

Wives v. Boots. Founder and autocratic boss of this Down-East Abercrombie & Fitch is L. L. (for Leon Leonwood) Bean, 90, a crusty Yankee who is more woodsman than businessman. Bean still works vigorously each day in a glassed-in office amidst the production line, is proud of the fact that he has bagged 35 deer in his lifetime. ("That's a lot of deer, son. You can get only one a year, you know.") He personally edits each entry in the Bean mail-order catalogue, and his spare, disarming style has been used in advertising textbooks as exemplary of what direct-mail selling should be. Sample: "Most hunters and fishermen smoke. For a long time we searched for an outstanding pipe. This pipe is the result."

The catalogue, which is mailed twice yearly to 400,000 customers, is Bean's most potent sales weapon. Its best known item is the "Maine Hunting Boot'' ($11.35 to $23.85), which has a rubber bottom stitched to a leather top. "We know how important those boots are to a man," says L. L. Bean. "He might like them better than his wife." Hunters last year bought 16,000 pairs.

Grandma's Attic. It was the Maine hunting boot that put Leon Leonwood Bean in business. The son of a Yankee horse trader, he drifted from job to job until 1911 when the boot idea struck him as he slogged wet-footed in leather boots through the Maine woods. Helped by a $400 loan from his brother Otho, he set up shop. The Freeport factory expanded steadily but haphazardly, and today it looks like a cross between Grandma's attic and a broken roller coaster. Dumbwaiters hesitantly carry materials from floor to floor through a mazelike production line. Mailing labels are typed and pasted by hand, and requests for catalogues are filed in shirt boxes. Pay is so modest that each change in the federal minimum-wage law has required an adjustment of the whole salary schedule.

But Bean's 115 workers also get an annual bonus, which last year amounted to 30% of wages.

Bean rules his board of directors--two sons and two grandsons--with a firm hand, and brushes aside suggestions from his heir apparent, Grandson Leon Gorman, 27, that the company "automate" by buying an Addressograph. "Why expand when you're 90 years old?" demands Bean. Besides, "I get three good meals a day, and I can't eat four." Devoted to quality and his customers, Bean has a simple business philosophy.

" Tain't the money that puts your business up. It's having something that no one else has as good as."

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