L.L. Bean's First Boot

Leon Leonwood Bean was a hunter who hated wet feet. In nineteen twelve he was living in Freeport, Maine, and had a specific complaint: every boot available for hunting the wet lowlands of Maine leaked at the rubber-leather seam. He designed a boot himself, a rubber-bottomed waterproof lower half stitched to a leather upper, and he had a cobbler make one hundred pairs. He then mailed them, with a money-back guarantee, to every Maine hunting-license holder he could find.

Ninety pairs came back. The stitching at the rubber-leather seam had failed, which was exactly the problem Bean had been trying to solve. He refunded every one of the ninety customers, went back to the cobbler with a different construction method, and rebuilt the boot. The guarantee, which he had offered because he believed in the product, became the foundation of the company's identity not because he planned it that way but because he had no choice. He had promised a refund, the boot failed, he paid.

The Freeport store that exists today, open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year since nineteen fifty-one, is the direct descendant of that original mail-order operation. Bean started the round-the-clock policy in the early nineteen fifties because he personally found it aggravating to arrive at a store and find it closed. He thought other hunters felt the same way. He was right.

The boot he rebuilt after those ninety returns is still in the catalog, with refinements, more than a hundred years later. The same rubber-leather construction. The same guarantee.