For an outdoor clothing and gear company, L.L. Bean’s offices were surprisingly cloistered. “About 90% of our employees did not have access to natural daylight. There were parts of the building that were like a cave,” says Shawn Gorman, the 111-year-old company’s executive chairman. As the great-grandson of founder Leon Leonwood Bean, Gorman has worked at the privately owned company for more than 30 years. For that entire time and decades longer, L.L. Bean has been running essentially in the dark. “It was just so inconsistent with who we were as a brand,” Gorman says.
So the company decided to bring in some light with a new headquarters campus design. The $110 million project, which officially opens this week, covers 390,000 square feet and centralizes the company’s Maine offices into a modern and light-filled office complex. Windows surround its entire perimeter, as well as the edges of a large courtyard cut into the center of the building.
Designed by the Portland, Maine-based architecture and engineering firm SMRT, the building is a dramatic adaptation of an existing steel warehouse that the company used as a distribution center. Reusing its intact structural materials, the designers reformed the warehouse into a modern office, with floor-to-ceiling windows, large open plan desk areas, a 900-seat conference center, and a range of employee-focused amenities, inside and out.
The building is an effort to wrangle a corporate footprint that had accidentally spread across its property in Freeport. “Over the years it’s become this Yankee farm house where we’ve added on spaces without any overarching theme,” Gorman says. “We need space, we add on. It was just not very cohesive.”
The growing needs of the company eventually created a multi-city spread of buildings and offices. “There were departments within the company that were miles away, and anytime you had meetings people had to drive back and forth,” Gorman says.
The new building got everybody under one roof. It’s also enabled the company to embrace one of its unique practices: all of its products are tested in house. In the old space, the testing space was tucked away in a dark corner, and seen only by the technicians putting the company’s boots and tents through an all-weather wringer. “It was completely hidden from any vendor who walked in, any employee who walked in. People would forget that we did it,” Gorman says.
The new design put the company’s testing labs, including a rain room for waterproof gear, right along a major corridor, with large windows looking in. “We wanted to make sure this was a bit of a showcase,” Gorman says.
The new building also features a place where new and forthcoming products can be put on display for employees and visitors to see long before they’re available for sale. Gorman says it’s all a part of increasing the visibility of the company’s work, and gauging its potential.
“The marketing department is seeing it, the supply chain team is seeing it, the merchants are seeing it, the finance team is seeing it,” he says. “When you get all these people giving energy to certain products, you get a better idea of what the consumer is going to want.”
And for a company that had worked so long in a dark warehouse, having an office with natural doesn’t hurt.
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