L.L. Bean: The Making of an American Icon

When Leon Leonwood Bean died in 1967, his company was a small Maine mail-order business that sold about $5 million a year and had stopped growing. His grandson, Leon Gorman, took over.

Forty years later sales were over $1.5 billion.

L.L. Bean: The Making of an American Icon is Gorman’s own account of those decades, published by Harvard Business School Press in October 2006.

What is L.L. Bean: The Making of an American Icon about?

How to grow a family business without losing what it is. Gorman inherited a company built on his grandfather’s famous guarantee and on Maine’s outdoor life, and he had to modernize it without breaking either one. The book covers the catalog years, the expansion, the tension between growth and tradition, and the hard stretches along with the good ones. The employee count went from about 100 to more than 5,000 on his watch. It’s written in the first person, by the family member who ran the company longest.

The guarantee runs through the whole book. Bean built the company on a promise to make things right for customers, and Gorman treats keeping that promise as the test of every big decision. The book includes sixteen pages of photographs.

The early chapters tell the founder’s story the way the family tells it. Bean was orphaned at 12 and left school after eighth grade. In 1912 he mailed a three-page catalog for his Maine Hunting Shoe to out-of-state hunters, and about 90 of the first 100 pairs came back because the tops tore away from the soles. He refunded every customer, borrowed $400 from his brother and started over. That refund is where the guarantee comes from.

Who was Leon Gorman?

Gorman was the founder’s grandson. He ran L.L. Bean as president for decades, stepped back as chief executive in 2001 and served as chairman until 2013, when Shawn Gorman, a fourth-generation family member, took over the chair. He died in September 2015 at 80, still the company’s chairman emeritus. The company is still privately owned by the founder’s descendants and still headquartered in Freeport, Maine, where it began in 1912.

How did Leon Gorman write L.L. Bean?

With help, and the help is a lesson. Harvard Business School Press approached Gorman about a decade before the book came out and paired him with a professional writer, Kent Lineback, who did many of the interviews and helped shape the structure. Gorman, who called himself computer illiterate, wrote in longhand.

The press printed 100,000 copies and treated it as its big fall book. L.L. Bean promoted it in its holiday catalog, held signings in its stores and slipped inserts into millions of customer packages. A company with that kind of reach to its own customers has a built-in audience for its history.

Who runs L.L. Bean now?

The family, at the top. About fifty descendants of the founder own the company. Shawn Gorman, a great-grandson, has chaired the board since 2013, and Greg Elder was named president and chief executive in January 2026.

Why does L.L. Bean belong on this shelf?

It’s a second-generation book, and those are rarer than they should be.

Founders’ memoirs get written. The people who take over from founders usually don’t write anything, even though they make the decisions that decide whether a family business lasts. Gorman’s book shows what the heir’s version looks like, and it’s the version most useful to the next generation of a family business. They’ll face the same choices.

Second-generation books also tend to be more practical than founders’ memoirs. The founder had the vision. The successor had to turn it into systems, budgets and hiring. Another family business can copy those.

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