While I may have a contemporary look or shoot the catalog in Santa Fe, you always see people enjoying the outdoors. It's those little things that reinforce Traveler 's roots and our customers' expectations of L.L. Bean. Bean, in its heart, is an outdoor company. It started around a set of Maine hunting shoes. But your home business sells couches and rugs .
Direct marketing is an intensely quantitative business.
But the creativity is there. It's just a different type of creativity. When I first arrived at Bean, I had a hard time accepting some of the dynamics around the company's direct marketing efforts . The metrics regarding customer retention, customer acquisition costs, and so forth, are incredible. But at Bean, there are years of results and learning that support the data and guide our efforts.