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

Fuller: The recentralization of marketing was particularly difficult. I had to downsize some staff. Anyone who says they can do that easily … well, I’m not one of those people.

In the process, unfortunately, we lost some people who had core competencies. For example, we had some very smart people working on smaller pieces of our business, and it has been difficult work without them.