L. L Bean

L. L BEAN CASE WRITE-UP by

L.L. Bean Inc. was a company founded at early 1800s by L.L, who had start his business with a borrowed $400 and one product sold around by mail. L.L Bean Inc. encountered various obstacles but also opportunities. It overcame the obstacles and fully utilized the opportunities, and did extremely successful in overall.

Reasons for L.L. Bean’s success?

1. Under Gorman’s grandfather’s operating philosophy, L.L Bean Inc. fully realized that the power the word-of-mouth advertising as well as customer satisfaction. L.L Bean Inc. dedicated its time and effort to improve the product’s qualities, in order to create their high quality product image. While as the same time, they care about their customer’s feedback. They hired top quality people as employee. They added more phone line for customers. They tried to response and deliver products to their customers as soon as possible. Overall, they delivered the best service they can to their clients.

2. Efficiently utilize the selling method of Mail-order sales.

In 1979, retail store sales were not as popular as current. Instead of retail sales, mail-order took huge proportion (25.8 billion) among various selling method in Americans industry and market. L.L Bean Inc. built its own catalogs, improved it but kept its traditional style, in order to facilitate their sales and revenues. In the Mid-60s, Gorman convinced L.L to increase the budget on advertising that offered free catalogs to their customers. Also, L.L Bean Inc. invented two more catalog for summer and Christmas market.

What is happening to the business, both positively and negatively?

1. L.L. Bean Inc. also has its competitors in the market, such as Eddie Bauer, Talbots, Orvis, land’s Ends and etc. positively, L.L. Bean’s product quality is well known. However, it also negatively triggers customers thought to the prices would be relatively higher. Most customers didn’t realize that L.L. Bean had never...