L.L. Bean's Ugly Duck Boots: Suddenly Hip, and Sold Out for Winter

L.L. Bean, the Freeport, Maine-based clothing and camping company, has been making its signature leather-and-rubber Bean “Duck” Boots by hand for the past 102 years. It sells about 100,000 pairs of them annually, mostly to “loggers and farmers—the kind of folks who’re outside a lot,” says Mac McKeever, L.L. Bean’s spokesperson. “People in cities, not so much.” Or, at least, that’s how it used to be. This winter, the boots are so popular among urbanites that the company can’t keep them in stock.

Sales of the style have quadrupled over the past three years and are on track to hit more than 450,000 in 2014. Now that it’s the holiday shopping season, L.L. Bean has more than 60,000 orders it can’t fulfill. It expects the shortage to grow to 100,000 by the end of December. Nearly every size and style of the boot is on backorder until at least February, although you can still find errant pairs at third-party retailers like Zappos. “We saw this coming months ago and tried to gear up appropriately,” says McKeever. “But demand outpaced even our most ambitious projections. We’re trying to make them as fast as we can.”