The Vault
MAIL-ORDER MILLIONS Long before Aritzia began bringing “everyday luxury” to the masses, Leonard Leonwood Bean was peddling tents, blankets and boots to a worldwide audience of fishermen, hunters and hikers from his hometown of Freeport, Maine. Business at L.L. Bean—founded in 1912, it’s now a $1.8 billion (2022 sales) American icon helmed by Leonard’s greatgrandson—was already booming when Forbes peeked inside the outdoorsman’s mail-order operation in 1941.
C O N T R A R I A N • S T R AT EG I E S
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Today his catalog brings in 98¾% of his sales. How? By being quaint. He keeps it that way by writing all the copy himself. He even keeps some bad grammar in. He knows it’s wrong, but it’s been there for years helping along the catalog’s quaintness, so why change it? Last year his bill for postage stamps was $54,540, his cash balance at the bank one day recently $130,000. Sales last year went to $920,642, and this year will top over a million. So many sportsmen wait to buy at “Bean’s” that he now has to give 24-hour service, holidays and Sundays, all year. His celebrity customers run from [author] Kenneth Roberts dropping in for fishing tackle to get his mind off [his character] Oliver Wiswell to Mrs. [Eleanor] Roosevelt taking away a pair of khaki shorts, waist thirty. He ships to Iraq, to Chile, to a maharaja in India. —Forbes, June 1, 1941
F O R B E S M I D D L E E A S T.C O M
Remarkable Rise CEO Jennifer Wong, then a high school student, was turned down by Hill for a sales job at the first Aritzia, so she drove to another store and got hired. “It was a parttime job while I went to school,” she says. “The rest is history.”
years on Michigan Avenue, the city’s premier shopping stretch. Five more locations are in the immediate pipeline—and the company has scouted 100 more. Overall, Aritzia plans to open eight to ten American boutiques every year for the next four years. “There’s still a lot of white space,” Wong says. The obvious danger is overexpansion. But Hill isn’t worried. “We’ve been through 2008. We’ve been through other recessions as well,” he says. “We know that usually the thing that affects our business is ourselves. If we execute really well, we’re fine.” F I N A L T H O U GH T
“PEOPLE WANT ECONOMY, AND THEY WILL PAY ANY PRICE TO GET IT.” —Lee Iacocca
JULY 2023
COURTESY OF ARITZIA
die, but we thought it would become a lot less relevant,” he says. Instead, when his boutiques reopened, he was surprised to see an influx of customers showing up in person. People who had discovered the brand online sought it out offline too. Another silver lining: Prime commercial real estate was suddenly extraordinarily cheap. “The so-called ‘retail apocalypse’ coupled with the pandemic has opened real estate opportunities I’ve never seen in my lifetime, and we’re taking advantage of those,” says Hill, whose company signed one of the largest retail leases in Manhattan last year. It plans to relocate its Midtown flagship (it also has one in SoHo) to a 33,000-square-foot space at Fifth Avenue and 49th Street, whose most recent tenant, Topshop, vacated in 2019. It also inked Chicago’s largest lease (46,000 square feet) in seven
