L.L.Bean
American outdoor clothing retailer
L.L.Bean is an American privately held retail company that was founded in 1912 by Leon Leonwood Bean. The company, headquartered in Freeport, Maine (where it was founded), specializes in clothing and outdoor recreation equipment. L.L.Bean sells a variety of hiking, weather, and other utility products.
History
L.L.Bean was founded in 1912 by its namesake, hunter and fisherman Leon Leonwood Bean, in Freeport, Maine. The company began as a one-room operation selling a single product, the Maine Hunting Shoe, also known as duck boots and later as Bean Boots. Bean had developed a waterproof boot, which is a combination of lightweight leather uppers and rubber bottoms, that he sold to hunters. He obtained a list of nonresident Maine hunting license holders, prepared a descriptive mail order circular, set up a shop in his brother's basement in Freeport, and started a nationwide mail-order business. The company's first hunting boot was sewn by Gertrude Goldrup, whose sewing machine is on display in the flagship store.
By 1912, Bean was selling the Bean Boot through a four-page mail-order catalog, and the boot remains a staple of the company's outdoor image. Defects in the initial design led to 90 percent of the original production run being returned: Bean honored his money-back guarantee, corrected the design, and continued selling them.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6131944. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1912.
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This entry incorporates text from “L.L.Bean” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.