Almost two years ago, L.L. Bean began to move investments from infrastructure and staffing to prospecting and advertising. The results are just now coming in

By Reported Donna Loyle

CS: Your holiday sales last year were up dramatically. In fact they were the highest in the company’s history. To what do you attribute that good news?

Fuller: We had a really good fall last year. We did some aggressive promotion.

You know, 18 months ago, Bean went through some changes. In the late 1990s, our sales growth had slowed down. Our owner, L.L. Bean’s grandson who had taken over the company from his father, took the company from a $10 million-a-year business to a $1 billion-a-year business. But he was close to his retirement years, and he said he’d rather not do what consultants were telling him to do — to reinvent the company.