The answer to why the signature Bean Boot has sold out every year since 2011, even as the company has been ramping up production significantly, surely is in part due to the demand generated by the fashion world. But the answer also lies in the decisions the company has made back in Maine, decisions that are different than other American manufacturers in the past few decades.

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In Photos: A Duck Boot in Demand

In Brunswick, L.L. Bean operates a 170,000-square-foot factory where the boot is assembled from start to finish. The rubber bottom of the Bean Boot is made by a machine, but after that it’s handmade by 200 people who split their time between three shifts. All in all, making the boot takes about 85 minutes’ worth of labor (not including the breaks in between stations). Royce Haines, the senior manager of manufacturing at L.L. Bean, describes it as “a mix of old and new technology”: While the boots aren’t made exactly as they used to be, the assembly process and sewing are all done by hand.

There are two main reasons, then, the Bean Boot can’t keep up with demand. The first is the company’s decision to keep making the boot in Maine, rather than exporting operations out to, say, China, where the majority of shoes sold to Americans are made. Fifty years ago, 98 percent of shoes for Americans were made in the U.S. Nowadays, one estimate suggests that China makes 12.5 billion pairs of shoes, which is about 90 percent of shoes made worldwide. To preserve its brand, L.L. Bean keeps operations local.

Another part of the reason for staying is that it lets sourcing remain local. “All the materials we use are primarily sourced in the United States, a lot of the leather comes from right here in Maine at a tannery, other parts of the Midwest, the shearling is from Texas, we produce our own boot bottoms,” says Smith. “The steel comes from local artisans who work for us.”

The second reason that the boot keeps selling out is that it’s not as easy to find shoe makers in Maine as it used to be. “Brunswick was famous for footwear. They had a lot of shops that were building hand-sewn footwear… but as shoe shops went away in the U.S. the skill went along with it,” says Haines. For that reason, scaling up has become more difficult than in the past, when L.L. Bean could simply find workers in the area.

“Freeport, which is where the boot began, that really was the shoe capital,” says Smith. “There was a dozen or more companies and brands of shoes that were made in those factories. Some of those are heritage brands, but they’re not made in Freeport anymore—like Eastland and Cole Haan are both shoe companies that started in Freeport.”

As the skills gap grew in the Brunswick area, L.L. Bean started training its own workforce through a program that takes an average of six months to complete. “The challenge for us right now is that the needle trades (stitching industry) just diminished over time in the U.S. and it’s hard to find skilled labor, and we have to establish training programs that can take somebody who has never stitched in their life and teach them how to make boots,” says Haines.