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White L.L.Bean for Business lockup, the serif wordmark beside a hairline rule with for business and the Outfitting for work + life tagline.

L.L.Bean for Business

A world-class brand, extended to buyers who order by the thousand.

In 2007, L.L.Bean’s business division sold embroidered corporate apparel to companies like Subaru and Poland Spring through a catalog, a phone call, and a wait. The brand set one bar for whatever came next:

Extend L.L.Bean’s standard of brand and customer experience to buying at volume, online.

Bowman Design Direction led an aggressive four-week discovery, then designed and developed the interface and branding for one of the earliest volume-purchasing B2B commerce sites. The work had to satisfy the hardest audience in retail: a company whose customers already knew exactly what L.L.Bean was supposed to feel like.

Challenge

A company putting its logo on L.L.Bean apparel isn’t buying a shirt. It’s buying thousands, across a catalog that runs from petite to XXXXL, against a delivery deadline that decides the entire purchase. In 2007, the existing site could only hand that buyer a phone number.

The deeper uncertainty was the brand itself. L.L.Bean holds its look, feel, and customer experience to an exacting standard, and a business site that felt less than L.L.Bean would cost the brand more than it earned.

Direction

Discovery kept returning to one observation: a business buyer isn’t choosing what to order. They’re choosing whether it can arrive on time. Availability, not presentation, was the purchase decision.

So we invented the product grid. Every size and fit in a single view, checking live inventory the moment a buyer entered quantities. Today that interaction is ordinary commerce. In 2007, it was anything but ordinary. The rest of the experience followed the same logic. Certainty first, everywhere a buyer had to commit.

Outcome

Costly support inquiries fell by half. Transactions doubled. Orders that once required a phone call became purchases a buyer could complete alone, confident in what would arrive and when.

Delivered on time and on budget, the site gave L.L.Bean a business channel its own team called flawlessly branded, a shopping experience L.L.Bean said it was proud to offer its customers.

Takeaway

Most brands enter B2B by reprinting the catalog in plainer clothes. L.L.Bean’s real asset was a century of earned certainty, and certainty is precisely what a buyer on a deadline is purchasing. The work translated a brand promise into an operational answer. The grid did for the business buyer what the guarantee had always done for the customer.

What We Built

The L.L.Bean Standard

We extended L.L.Bean’s identity into an entirely new channel, holding colors, type, and tone to the style guide with the discipline the brand demands of itself. Nothing about the experience felt like a side business. It simply felt like L.L.Bean, which was the requirement.

The Product Grid

We invented a purchasing grid that put an enormous catalog of sizes and fits into one view, checking live inventory the instant quantities were entered. Instead of asking buyers to shop like consumers, the grid adapted to how purchasing departments already worked. Quantities went in, availability came back, and the deadline had its answer before a dollar was committed.

Volume Commerce

We designed the workflows that let a company order in the thousands: logo submission, embroidery specification, and volume purchasing on ATG’s Java commerce platform. The interface we designed and developed made multiple live service calls on a single page. ATG and the backend team engineered the platform beneath it.

Use Cases as a Working Method

Susan Baker at L.L.Bean wrote the use cases that defined the required flows and content. We used them as a working method, bringing L.L.Bean, ATG, and the developers together around one shared picture of the experience and revising the use cases together as decisions were made. The wireframes, annotations, and designs that followed converted that agreement directly into product.

White L.L.Bean serif wordmark in outline form, reversed for placement on the brand’s signature deep green backgrounds.

The Through-Line

What began as a phone number next to a catalog became a purchase a buyer could complete with confidence, at volume, on deadline.

Where B2B sites of the era looked like stripped-down retail, the identity held the full L.L.Bean standard, so a buyer never felt they had left the brand. Where competitors made volume buyers call for availability, the product grid answered on screen, in every size, the moment quantities were entered.

Where buying at volume usually means friction, the commerce workflows removed it. Logo submission, embroidery specification, and ordering in the thousands ran through one interface built to feel effortless.

Where complex projects usually fragment, the use cases converged. ATG, the backend developers, and the client worked from one shared picture, so every screen that shipped matched the decision that preceded it.

The grid settled it: a brand promise is not a slogan to display. It is a question to answer, and the site answered it before the buyer had to ask.

Every Deliverable Answered the Buyer’s Real Question: Can It Arrive on Time?

Laptop on a marble desk showing the Direct to Business homepage celebrating 95 years of teamwork, catalog cover at right.

Discovery + Strategy

Before a screen was designed, we mapped how a business actually buys.

  • Four-Week Discovery

    Requirements are decisions in disguise. We led an aggressive four-week discovery capturing how business customers order, approve, and reorder, and turned it into the blueprint every partner built against.

  • Brand Stewardship

    Brand fidelity was the brief, not a constraint on it. We treated L.L.Bean’s colors, logos, and voice as fixed points, and designed a new kind of commerce inside them.

  • Buyer Architecture

    A manager ordering three thousand shirts decides differently than a shopper ordering one. We mapped how corporate buyers plan, approve, and deadline purchases, then shaped the experience around their calendar.

  • Availability Strategy

    Stock is an answer, not a spreadsheet. We put live inventory at the center of the purchase decision, so a buyer could see what could ship, in every size, before committing a dollar.

  • Use-Case System

    Alignment is designed, not assumed. Use cases, wireframes, and annotations gave ATG, the developers, and the client one shared definition of the work, and restarted momentum each time the project stalled.

  • Project Direction

    Schedules slip where dependencies hide. We surfaced bottlenecks early, named new tasks as they appeared, and drove the work to completion on time and on budget.

Desktop mockup of a polo shirt product detail page with color swatch selection, styled on a white desk between plants.
Laptop on a marble desk showing the Direct to Business homepage celebrating 95 years of teamwork, catalog cover at right.

Testimonial

L.L.Bean | for Business

As you may know, branding and customer experience are extremely important to L.L.Bean. With this project, it was critical that the site’s “look and feel” exemplify the L.L.Bean brand. Bill Bowman and his team executed flawlessly.

We are very pleased with the end product. The site is well branded, easy to use, and delivers a shopping experience we are proud to offer our customers.

The project required significant customization, and Bill was a leader in suggesting solutions, providing options, and working tirelessly to complete the work on time and within budget. He was instrumental in pulling the team together to review and revise use cases at times when flow and content were not well defined. He was insightful, collaborative, and intuitive in his partnership with us.

Bill also played a strong role in overall project management, identifying dependencies and raising concerns when they risked blocking progress. His ability to present effective solutions and his dedication to driving work to completion were critical in moving the project forward.

I cannot speak highly enough about Bill’s many talents. He is creative, strategic, and collaborative. A business partner I recommend without reservation.

Cheryl Rogers
Marketing Manager
Laptop showing the step-two size and quantity ordering grid across regular, tall, misses, and womens columns, coffee mug alongside.
Creations

L.L.Bean for Business

Crafts

The Crafts Behind This Creation