An excerpt from L.L.Bean: The Making of an American Icon
"Leon L. Bean was my grandfather. Back in the early 1900s he had a hunting camp in the Haynesville Woods in northern Maine, one of many such camps he'd had in various parts of the state during his lifetime. He and his cronies had some tongue-in-cheek rules of conduct posted in the camp. The last rule, number 7, admonished, 'If you get lost, come straight back to camp.'
I've always seen our values and the L.L. story as our camp and our place to go back to whenever we seemed to be going astray.
L.L. was born in the Oxford Hills country of western Maine in 1872. His father was a horse trader. Orphaned at the age of 12, L.L. grew up working on the farms of various family friends and relatives. He managed to complete the eighth grade in school. His main enjoyment in growing up and in his adult years was hunting, fishing and life in Maine's great outdoors. But his first 40 years, as he himself once said, were 'otherwise uneventful.'
All of a sudden the light went on. In 1912 his latent Yankee ingenuity combined with his many years' experience in tramping the Maine woods. L.L. came up with his new and improved design for a leather top/rubber bottom hunting boot. L.L. successfully tested his design in the field and immediately decided every other hunter should have a pair. He founded our company and the foundation was his new Maine Hunting Shoe. He offered it in a three-page catalog of his own creation. Which he mailed to a list of non-resident hunters he had acquired from Maine's Fish and Game Department.
According to corporate lore, 90 of the first 100 pair sold came back as defective. The uppers tore away from the bottoms. L.L. refunded his customers' money, perfected his boot design, borrowed another $400 from his brother and started all over again. This time with complete success."
From L.L.Bean: The Making of an American Icon by Leon Gorman, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.