A Boot That Survived Its Own Launch Ninety of the first hundred pairs L.L. Bean sold to out-of-state sportsmen in 1912 came back. The rubber bottoms had pulled away from the leather uppers, and Leon Leonwood Bean, in the first year of his mail-order business, refunded every buyer, corrected the construction and mailed …

A Voice Built to Survive a Return L.L. Bean's copy has never needed to convince a reader that a product looks good. It needed to convince the reader that the product works — and every rhetorical habit the brand's catalog prose developed over more than a century follows from that one requirement. Adjectives are cheap. A …