Freeport’s Upper
George Gershwin needed Ira, Batman needs Robin, and Freeport, Maine, wouldn’t be the brand it is today without L. L. Bean and George Denney. If Bean is its sole, Denney’s its upper.
Not many people have a grizzly bear greet them when they get home. But George Denney is not “ordinary people.” Denney’s Freeport trophy room also includes elk, caribou, a bison, and a bobcat—representing hunting trips he managed to shoehorn into a 60-plus-year work marathon, one where Denney made a lasting imprint in the global footwear industry and rerouted the economic landscape of southern Maine.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Denney transformed a dormant line of classic shoes called Cole Haan into an international status symbol. He was also one of the masterminds that helped turn his hometown of Freeport, Maine, from a depressed one-horse town (a horse called the L. L. Bean store) into the destination shopping capital of New England.
Denney, who entered the shoe business as a leather cutter, credits some of his success as CEO of Cole Haan to lessons learned as a young man working at L. L. Bean. It was back when founder Leon L. Bean was alive, a one-man quality-control whirlwind who would walk around inspecting the merchandise, monitoring customer satisfaction, and giving George Denney a vision for how he’d one day run his own businesses.
Today, Denney, a quiet man in his early 70s, is “working harder than ever,” managing his Freeport properties, putting his Midas touch on distressed Maine real estate, mentoring young entrepreneurs, and continuing to help his hometown discover new vistas on the path to prosperity.
When were you born? Where did you grow up?
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937. I moved to Maine when I was 6 years old, and lived with my grandparents. First we lived in Portland, and then moved out here to Freeport.
What kind of a youngster were you? Were you an academic? Did you play sports?
No, I didn’t play sports. I was an A+ student, but when I turned 15, I bought a car and that took me down a different road. I really wanted to leave school and just work. That’s what I loved to do.
What kind of work?
Whatever was available. I worked on a farm called Twin Cedar Farms on Bartol Island Road, right here in Freeport. I’d get up at 4 every morning and milk 30-plus head of cattle and clean them out. Then I’d come back after high school at 4 in the afternoon and we’d go out and round them up and get them ready to milk again, and on weekends I’d grade eggs. I ran tractors, did haying, everything you do on a farm.
What did you do after you graduated from Freeport High School?
I went to work for Central Maine Power when they first built it down here in Yarmouth. Then they wanted me to join a union, and I didn’t care for that, so I got a job at L. L. Bean. I worked as a sales clerk; I put up and packed orders; I worked in the catalog department; I even painted out the first ladies’ showroom. During deer hunting season, I worked from midnight to 8 a.m. writing out-of-state hunting
licenses. So I was a jack of all trades.
You moved to California for a short time, married your high school sweetheart, Joyce Wyman, and then moved back to Maine. Is that when you started working for E. E. Taylor Shoe Corporation?
Yes. I started out as a leather cutter, on a part-time basis.
How did you move up through the ranks?
They needed somebody to assist the IBM supervisor in the data processing department and asked me if I was interested—they wanted somebody who knew something about making shoes—and I said, “Sure.” It gave me a chance to wear a tie and white shirt. A year and a half later, I ended up being the supervisor, then took over the operation.
In 1975, at age 36, you got the Cole Haan brand from E. E. Taylor. How did that happen?
Standard Industries owned Taylor Shoe. We were in a pretty serious recession in ’73 and ’74, and in 1975, we still didn’t have enough orders to keep everybody working, so I had to shut the plant down. Matter of fact, I took 25 grand out of my own pocket to meet the payroll because Standard Industries didn’t send up the money, though they eventually paid me back.
Long story short, I had to lay off over 200 people. I wasn’t getting a paycheck and said to them, “I will continue to work with you to help get this company back up and running. If we do that, then I get my back pay, but if we don’t reopen, I get the Cole Haan label.” We didn’t reopen, and I got the Cole Haan label
How did you begin manufacturing Cole Haan shoes?
I joined a company in New York called Interqueros Corporation. Some of the salespeople who left Taylor Shoe were working for Interqueros and they kept saying, “You ought to hire George Denney; he can run this company and do a good job,” so I went down to New York and they hired me. I said, “The only way I will run this business is if I can run it out of Maine,” and they agreed.
So I shipped everything up here, warehoused it, and started the organization with two ex-Taylor Shoe employees. We started manufacturing shoes right here in Maine and in Massachusetts, and within three years, 80% to 90% of everything we were selling was under the Cole Haan label. They [Interqueros] got to a point where they said, “Hey, George, we don’t own this label and you do, so we need to form a partnership.” They said, “Cough up $50,000 and you can join the company,” which I did. Cole Haan was a brand that had started in 1928 and had a special arch; we introduced genuine hand-sewn shoes under the Cole Haan label, classics like penny loafers, tassels, and it really worked. The brand was so strong, we changed the name of the company to Cole Haan.
How did you grow it into the icon it came to be?
It was evolutionary. When we started out, our product was pretty much classic and we were only making men’s shoes. Then we started doing women’s hand-sewns. We started to expand and did some manufacturing in Italy. The brand all of a sudden became extremely strong because we were in all these specialty stores. Then the major department stores saw that and they started to come to us. Saks 5th Avenue, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Dillard’s, on and on. They saw that our product was hot and it was selling and they wanted it. And so we started to sell to the department stores, and from there our business really began to grow.
What kind of things did you do to develop professionally? Did you read or attend conferences or have a mentor?
I just operated by the seat of my pants, I guess. I basically had a good feel for business and for the footwear. Quality and service was a big thing for me, something I learned when I worked that year at L. L. Bean. That’s what built that company, and I applied that to Cole Haan. It worked: We were known for our quality, and also for taking care of the customer.
In 1982, you opened Cole Haan’s first retail store, in Freeport. Why there?
Back then, L. L. Bean was a growing company, as it is right now. I was standing on the street watching cars go by, looking at the license plates and at the style and make of the cars, and I kept saying, “Boy, those are our customers,” and saw it as an opportunity to open up an outlet store in Freeport.
When we opened, the first floor was all regular-priced product. The basement was all outlet, and, eventually, I put good-quality clothing on the top floor, and people loved it because you couldn’t find that type of clothing here in Maine. We opened up on Memorial Day at 12 noon, and closed the doors at 6, we made over $6,000. In today’s dollars that would be like $15,000 to $18,000. I felt like I had hit the ball out of the park.
So that store, along with a Dansk store, was the beginning of what would become a regional shopping hub in Freeport. Is that when you created what is now called the Denney Block?
Yes. I bought the two adjoining buildings and renovated those completely and put in really good retail companies. There was a big retail expansion at that time, so my timing couldn’t have been better, and that’s what really established Freeport as a retail destination, with L. L. Bean as the anchor.
Without L. L. Bean, would Freeport be able to sustain itself?
To a certain degree. But L. L. Bean is huge. It is the anchor for Freeport. Freeport’s really very good to L. L. Bean and L. L. Bean is likewise very good to Freeport. It employs a tremendous number of people, and it’s a company that’s still continuing to grow. When I worked there, it was a $3 million company. Today, they’re at $1.6 billion. But their standards are the same: quality, service, taking care of the customer.
In 1988, Nike purchased Cole Haan for $95 million, and you stayed on as CEO. What changed at the company?
At first there were almost no changes. Nike wanted me to put Air in our dress shoes because they thought that the Air technology would help sell more shoes. I put the Air technology in the shoes, but you couldn’t feel it, you couldn’t see it, and it added about another five bucks a pair. And so it went away, because we were manufacturing the footwear right here in Maine. Nike’s business was growing very rapidly, and so was ours, so we really didn’t cross swords until probably seven or eight years after they bought us.
Then they decided to become more involved in the company and started to bring in some of their own people and shipped them here to Maine to do Cole Haan. In 1998, they wanted me to move up to chairman and brought in another president, Matt Rubel. Then they had a design person come in and he built a line of footwear that didn’t have any resemblance to Cole Haan whatsoever. It was totally off the wall, and people were looking at that saying, “This isn’t Cole Haan anymore.” They were turning off the customers, because the stuff they were making looked like junk and it was junk.
Since I left the company, they’ve hired three different presidents, at least. Now Cole Haan has come back to more of what it used to stand for, I believe, because they’ve gone through these changes and they’ve seen that some of them have not been that good.
Shoe manufacturing used to be huge in Maine, but has nearly disappeared. What happened, and what would it take to get it back here again?
Well, it’s all about the money. The cost of labor was way too high, so people in the shoe business started going to China, to India, to Mexico, and to other countries to manufacture footwear. At Cole Haan, we couldn’t compete, so I went to other countries and established factories there.
But now, wages are going up in China. There is a bigger stream of middle income families, also more millionaires and billionaires, and that is driving the prices up. We’re now seeing some of the companies thinking about manufacturing here in the United States. This is because when you go over to China or to India or to any of these other countries, you have to buy large quantities. You buy your fall merchandise in the spring, so you buy what you think you’re going to sell, but if you don’t sell it, you’re stuck with it. That’s probably one of the reasons we have so many outlets.
The cost of shipping is expensive, and you can’t order the small quantities that you could if you were manufacturing or buying from a manufacturer here in the United States. When you ship it over here by boat, you’re talking four weeks or more. You fly it over, it’s at a cost of $5 or $6 a pair, if not more, plus the duty. So one of the things the shoe manufacturers here should be doing is making the uppers in India or China or some other country and finishing them here in the United States, because then you don’t have to pay the high duty on a finished shoe. If I was going to be in the shoe business again, that’s the first thing I would do. I’d set up my own plant up here, import the uppers, and finish them here.
While you were still at Cole Haan, you also helped found the Freeport Merchants Association, which is unusually successful in helping market Freeport. How do you fund the organization?
We created a map of Freeport, and if you want to be on the map, you have to join. That’s what funds our website, and all the marketing that we do. It all helps Freeport to become Freeport, bringing people here so that they shop and dine. We recently changed our name to FreeportUSA because we wanted the restaurants and the hotels, and Freeport Merchants Association sounded like just retail. Now FreeportUSA is the umbrella for all of Freeport.
We’re getting a six-screen movie theater this fall, so Freeport’s actually becoming more of a destination rather than just a pass through, which is a good thing. We should do better in all four seasons rather than just spring, summer, and fall.
You’ve also done work with the Freeport Community Improvement Association. How did that get started?
I established it in 2001, and our first board meeting, unfortunately, was on 9/11. The whole idea is to take care of Freeport and have Freeport take care of itself. Back then, the exits were being taken care of by the state of Maine and they were in terrible shape. So I spoke to Dale Olmstead, the town manager, and he got in touch with the state, and they agreed to allow us to plant some trees, plant some flowers, that type of thing. Now every year we clean them up and make them beautiful again. We built West Street Park; I raised the money for that. We built the stone walls, put in the gardens, planted trees; we had a hand-carved “Welcome to Freeport” sign made. This isn’t just for people who are coming to visit Freeport. This is for the people who live there. It’s a way to say “Freeport cares about Freeport.”
Since you retired as Cole Haan’s chairman in 2001, you’ve been involved in real estate here in Maine. Have you slowed down any?
In the last 10 years, I’ve been working just as hard, if not harder, than when I was at Cole Haan. I work seven days a week. Quite honestly, I’ve been a lot more successful doing what I’m doing from a monetary standpoint than running Cole Haan.
It’s been an interesting period. When real estate was going up, I was involved in it, and when it came down, I was involved in it, because there are always opportunities. Now I buy short sales. I have crews that go in and clean them up and we put them right back on the market. But we do it right; we do good quality work. We’re not a cheap operation.
And you continue to be a champion for Freeport. What’s in it for you?
I just like seeing things done well and the quality of Freeport is important to me. I love Freeport. I grew up here and I’ve lived here 67 years. Freeport’s been good to me, and I want to be good to it. I’ve seen the changes, I’ve helped make the changes, and it’s been a fascinating life. I wouldn’t want to change it for all the money in the world.
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