L.L.Bean History
Earlier company descriptions, brand line-ups, store counts and photographs from the history of L.L.Bean, kept for historical reference.
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The Company Description of Its Time
L.L.Bean files itself as an American, privately held retail company founded in 1912 by Leon Leonwood Bean, headquartered where it was founded, in Freeport, Maine, specialising in clothing and outdoor recreation equipment. Its motto is given early: 'The Outside Is Inside Everything We Make.' The belief statement follows the same line - they believe the more time you spend outside the better, designing products that make it easier to take longer walks, have deeper talks and never worry about the weather, in the spirit of the founder's saying that being outside brings out the best in us. The product examples the filing chooses are tactile ones: the soft warmth of shearling slippers, rugged climbing boots, innovative outerwear and flannel pajamas to snuggle by the fire in.
Outdoor Discovery, Service and the 2018 Numbers
The retailer's second product is instruction. Since 1979, its Outdoor Discovery Programs - offered at every retail store - have helped customers enjoy outdoor activities and learn new skills, with offerings from a few hours to multiday trips including adventure trips, kayaking, stand-up paddle boarding, fly casting and fly fishing, biking, snowshoeing and kids' camps; nearly 150,000 people participated in these programs in 2018. A clothing retailer teaching fly casting for four decades is filing a philosophy: sell the activity's skills as faithfully as its equipment, and the equipment sells itself to people who now know how to use it.
Service and scale close the filing, with their reference year attached. Like the flagship store, the Customer Service department - with two contact centers based in Maine - operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and the company's reputation for outstanding customer service is frequently recognised through industry awards and customer feedback. In 2018 the company mailed catalogs to customers in every state and over 150 countries. Its expanded Freeport distribution center is a million-square-foot facility processing an average of 45,000 customer orders a day, able to store over 10 million units of merchandise; over 14.5 million packages were shipped in 2018, nearly 1 million of them in the busiest week. Those figures are kept as 2018 figures, exactly as the reference note in the historical record dates them.
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