The Maine brand: Value of products created here continues to grow

Photo / Courtesy of L.L. Bean Small Batch Bean Boots produced by L.L.Bean for their “Bean Boots and Brews” collaboration with five Maine craft brewers.

Photos / renee Cordes In Newburyport, Mass., two Maine-based retailers, Sea Bags and Stonewall Kitchen, are downtown.

Photo / Tim Greenway Beth Shissler, president and COO at Sea Bags, which makes bags with recycled sail cloth. It has 24 stores on the East Coast.

Photo / Jim Neuger John Stiker, CEO of Stonewall Kitchen, a specialty food maker with nine company stores.

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By Renee Cordes

Maine as a brand may be hard to define or measure, but it’s steadily gaining in value, thanks to consumer names making their mark beyond the state’s borders.

They include L.L.Bean, Sea Bags and Stonewall Kitchen, all of which have put Maine on the map as a place of innovation, quality products and home-grown craftsmanship. Though boatbuilding’s Hinckley, Sabre and Hodgdon Yachts brands are other examples, retail has a wider reach and recognition factor.

L.L.Bean has grown from a single store that opened in Freeport into 1912 into a global powerhouse with a retail presence in Japan and a website serving hundreds of countries and territories.

It still makes its Bean boots by hand in Maine and is now helping Flowfold, an up-and-coming Maine brand, gain wider recognition through a co-branding partnership. Flowfold is a Gorham-based textile manufacturing startup that makes outdoor and lifestyle bags, packs and accessories from repurposed sailcloth.

Sea Bags, which was founded in 1999 and turns sailcloth into nautically inspired totes and accessories from a Portland waterfront workshop, is another Maine brand-heavyweight. It will have 24 East Coast stores by this summer. It also owns Chart Metalworks, a niche maker of hand-cast nautical chart jewelry and accessories it acquired in 2015.

Among the Maine food brands with a national presence is Stonewall Kitchen, which was founded in 1991 and is still based in York. The maker of gourmet jams and pancake mixes has product sales in 50 countries, led by Canada, Germany and Sweden. Including the flagship campus in York, which has a full retail operation and cooking school, there are nine company-owned Stonewall Kitchen stores.

While it introduces an array of new products twice each year, its top-selling item remains Wild Maine Blueberry Jam. Though brand users are split evenly among Gen Xers, baby boomers and seniors, internal company data show that most new users are millennials.

The company, which has its test kitchen in York, touts its Maine pedigree on every label, and CEO John Stiker feels strongly about keeping production local even though costs are higher here.

“Maine is not necessarily the lowest-cost state to operate in,” he told Mainebiz last year, “but it’s an important part of who we are.”

Janine Bisaillon-Cary, former president of the Maine International Trade Center who now heads her own consultancy, Montserrat Group LLC, says that Maine has had good success coordinating marketing efforts at high-profile international trade shows, particularly in boat building, food and seafood and, most recently, in the outdoor products sector.

“I think this is a particularly effective mechanism in establishing a ‘Maine brand,’ and providing exposure to smaller up and coming businesses to new markets,” says Bisaillon-Cary. She adds that “Maine has so many amazing signature brands and new innovative products that have compelling stories.”

Her advice to all Maine companies with global growth ambitions: “Knowing your target market and leveraging those regions where Maine has an established brand can be a good first step towards expanding into the international arena.”