![]() ![]() Inside the company, where the boot is simply known as the Boot, they can't crank out product fast enough. We know it's a legend, but we don't exactly know why."Īll you really need to know is that the waiting list on back orders-from the sorority sisters of the SEC to old-school hunters-recently ran as high as a hundred thousand. But sometimes we find ourselves scratching our head. "Some people say it's the ugliest boot made some say it's the least comfortable boot they've ever worn," says Willie Lambert, corporate merchant for L.L. They see it less as a fluke than as a question of longevity: If you stick around long enough, you become the trend again. Even the guys over in corporate can't explain it. Take last year alone: Roughly half a million Bean Hunting Boots were manufactured and sold, marking a 300 percent increase from a decade ago. Each boot takes about forty-five minutes to make-and, given the whimsies of demand and supply, customers seem to wait with the same bated breath, react with the same delight, when they finally get their hands on a pair. Even more remarkable, the product-a century-old hunting boot known by its odd hybrid of soft leather uppers married to waterproof rubber bottoms-is the cornerstone of a $1.6 billion mail-order empire with a hearty American legend of its own. It could be any factory, anywhere, except no: It's an American factory making an American product entirely out of American materials, a rare trifecta in this era of offshore, chockablock manufacturing. The scent of solvent and leather hangs thickly light flows through a filmy window. Bean boot factory in Brunswick is a thrumming hippodrome the size of an airplane hangar, a place filled with the clatter and hum of machinery, the metallic music of cutting, fitting, skiving, stitching, and brushing. Near lunchtime on a Tuesday in January, the L.L. A sampling of comments on Twitter reflects the cornucopic reactions to the boot, from patriotism to nostalgia: ![]() It connects us to our past, and partners with us on life's strange journey ahead, enabling our adventures and the "look" we fancy for ourselves. This is the odd thing about the boot: It inspires true emotion. The reconditioning process is a fascinating mix of hard-boiled, practical frugality (the boot's creator, Leon Leonwood, or L.L., Bean thought it silly to throw away five bucks-the cost of the boot in his day-when the soles were worn) and heirloom preservation. Once, a pair of boots in the bin had a return address that specified an exact igloo in Alaska. And when the boots return to where they were made in Brunswick, Maine, to be repaired, each is tagged with its home port for resending: Lawrence, Kansas … Decatur, Alabama … Shelter Island, New York … Staunton, Virginia … Salt Lake City, Utah … Bucksport, Maine … Memphis, Tennessee…. They seem to wander college quads and main streets with equal ubiquity. They've popped up on the feet of Babe Ruth and Derek Jeter, Jake Gyllenhaal, Chloë Sevigny, and recently, as shown on Twitter, the feet of a woman dancing on stage during a Bruce Springsteen concert. Bean Maine Hunting Boot has gone on expeditions to both Poles, and been commissioned by the U.S. If only these boots could talk, one imagines there'd be a gruff clamor of excitement, a cacophony of leather-tongued voices, the drawling Daniel Boones to the Brahmin über-preps, and everything in between. Each boot carries its own landscape of dings and dust, faded in its own peculiar shade, with its own particular history. It's hard not to want to touch them, to trace their wrinkles. Weirdly, the weathered boots piled into a bin, located in a far-off corner of the factory, don't smell so bad either. ![]() They won't bite though some have been gnawed upon, chewed, and bitten themselves (mostly by labs and golden retrievers, if social media is the source). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |