When Stephen Smith joined Walmart International in 2011, he figured he was saying goodbye to Maine forever. The marketing and retail executive had spent nearly 15 years in the Pine Tree State, working for Resort Sports Network and Ahold Delhaize’s Hannaford Supermarkets and raising his family there before relocating to China. When he returned to attend his father’s funeral in 2014, though, a friend suggested he apply for the CEO position of outdoor apparel and equipment brand L.L.Bean—a company synonymous with Maine—and Smith took it as a sign to come home for good. The interview process took months, but Smith clinched the deal by impressing Leon Gorman, the 80-year-old grandson of founder Leon Leonwood Bean, who started the company in 1912. (The first product was a waterproof boot for hunters.)
Smith took the reins in 2016, and—despite a misunderstanding over a Bean family member’s political contributions and, of course, the pandemic—steered L.L.Bean to a record $1.8 billion turnover in 2021. This spring, he’ll debut a new $110 million headquarters, taking an unused warehouse in Freeport and transforming it into a sunlight-flooded office with firepit-dotted courtyards, a fitness center, and a public trail. The setting is fitting for a brand that champions the benefits of time spent outdoors, and, in many ways, it encapsulates Smith’s personal definition of success: “Simply, a healthy and happy family,” he says. “Pretty much anything can be done if you’ve got those two things.”
On the importance of agility:
“We had this change agenda underway from 2016 to 2019 to make the business more efficient and effective. We changed our inventory forecasting and buying process. We built a total alignment of marketing, merchandising, operations, and supply chain, all on the same calendar and all focused on the same key products. When we had to cut inventory during the pandemic, we knew exactly what we wanted to cut. That agility allowed us to protect our balance sheet and our profits and losses at the beginning of COVID, when businesses were wondering, ‘How do you make it through this?’ That agility allowed us to say, ‘The outdoors are having a moment. We’ve got to focus all of our processes on getting all of our outdoor products made and in front of our customers.’”
On understanding the customer:
“On the supermarket side of retail, I learned about focusing on the customer—that paying attention to really small things matters. I come to business as a marketer, so my natural inclination is to try to understand why a customer is buying this or not buying this. What are they being affected by in pop culture and in the news? That indicates culture, and then it indicates where there is opportunity to communicate, to be persuasive with people, and to meet their needs.”
On leadership:
“Staying curious and being reflective about yourself—your own biases, your own style, your own behaviors—is really important. You need to have empathy; you need to be sensitive. You have so many generations in the workforce right now that you need to figure out how to manage—you have someone right out of college, and you have someone at the end of their career. Assemble a team of fantastic people who have diverse experiences and diverse perspectives and bring them around to solve a problem; that collective intelligence will come up with a better answer than one individual. The best leaders assemble the best teams and then get the best out of those teams, versus thinking that they have to have all of those answers.”
On balancing the brand’s roots with its future:
“It’s not an or—it has to be an and. We’re an apparel company and an outdoor outfitter, so we have to have all of the latest technologies in our fabrics and in our designs. But we are a true brand; we’re not a manufactured brand. L.L. created this boot and had this vision for the business, so we think about that at all times and try to stay true to those roots, while being relevant for our customers.”
