Casting for business - Westfair Communications

Outdoors retailer L.L. Bean Inc. is scouting retail locations to sell its famed “Bean boot” in Fairfield County, the boyhood stomping grounds of Chris McCormick, its chief executive officer.

The Maine-based retail icon is opening a store this August in South Windsor.

L.L. Bean strongly considered Fairfield County for its first Connecticut store, McCormick said, but the company”™s initial site search did not turn up a suitable location. He expects the company to identify soon a site for a store.

Despite its wealthy resident base, Fairfield County has yet to attract an all-seasons, “big-box” outfitter such as Bass Pro Shops, Cabela”™s Inc. or Gander Mountain Inc.; although Eastern Mountain Sports Inc. has three local stores in retail malls and plazas.

The void is even more striking considering Fairfield County is, in effect, a residential base camp of New York, the second-largest market in the nation for outdoors outfitters with $1.5 billion in sales in 2005, according to the Outdoor Industry Association.

Gander Mountain has a store in Middletown, N.Y., an hour west of Danbury that ranks in the top five of its 100 stores nationally for volume, according to Dave Williams, regional vice president of Gander Mountain.

L.L. Bean is considering potential sites in Danbury and Fairfield, McCormick said. He grew up in Bridgeport and Easton, and attended Fairfield University where he is an advisory council member of the Dolan School of Business.

Joining L.L. Bean”™s marketing department in 1983, McCormick led development of L.L. Bean”™s pioneering e-commerce site in the 1990s, and in 2001 was tapped to become the company”™s third CEO by current Chairman Leon Gorman, who is founder Leon L. Bean”™s grandson.

“I looked at it with a mixture of excitement and fear,” McCormick said, describing the moment when he learned he would become caretaker of the L.L. Bean brand. “You start thinking there”™s no place to go but down, but you get over that pretty quickly.”

If his grandfather was an outdoors and retail icon, Gorman carved out his own reputation as an industry legend, lofting L.L. Bean into the ranks of the world”™s most recognizable outdoors and clothing brands even as he proved the company”™s products on the slopes of Mount Everest.

By comparison, McCormick can only chuckle about his own misadventures. They include capsizing his kayak in surprise after a seal surfaced close by in Maine”™s Casco Bay (having yet to learn the Eskimo roll, he bailed out); and the time he accompanied the septuagenarian Gorman on an expert-level cross-county ski trail a few winters back, near the base of Mount Washington in New Hampshire.

“He took off, and I didn”™t see him for the rest of the day,” McCormick recalled.

If he still is still working on his outdoors credentials ”“ biking is his best sport ”“ he has already made his notch in the boardroom. In its 2006 fiscal year ending this past February, L.L. Bean revenue hit a record $1.54 billion, with Web sales replacing the company”™s mail-order catalog for the first time as the dominant sales channel.

McCormick said the company is pinning its short-term growth on executing its retail-store expansion, and its longer term prospects on bolstering its baby boomer base by appealing to younger customers.

He regards as “transgenerational” the concept pioneered by Gorman: a “destination” outdoor store with a wide range of instructional seminars and events, a formula that has been duplicated by Cabela”™s and other retailers. McCormick said patrons of the Freeport, Maine, store should adjust their expectations: While the new retail stores similarly offer seminars, they lack some of the eye-grabbing features of the flagship store, such as an indoor trout pond and a 10-foot-tall replica of Leon L. Bean”™s famous Bean boot, which is formally called the Maine Hunting Shoe.

Even as L.L. Bean expands its retail channels under McCormick, the company made a symbolic gesture this spring to its home state. For the first time, the rubber soles of its Bean boots are to be manufactured in Maine.