A Business Transformed

"Three or four years ago," he concludes, "it took us about six weeks to put an order through. Now it's a week and a half, and we want to get down to two or three days." Quality is up, too. Customers can see the difference and the reason for it. "Under their modular manufacturing setup they have the same people working on each type of construction," says Mary Beth Adams, a product manager for Lands' End. "That really assures us that the quality is in there."

Part of Leegin's story -- and Kohl's accomplishment -- is told in the numbers accompanying this article, the dry figures of throughput and receivables and sales per account, gathered and charted by the day and the week in the Industry headquarters. What's curious on this score is that a compulsive counter like Kohl can't quite say how much the transformation of his company cost. The salespeople's computers he figures at more than a million dollars, all told. The reorganization and training of account specialists and factory workers, he isn't sure about. Press him and he shrugs. The company has always made money, he says, sometimes more, sometimes less, and it owes the bank less than it used to. What's to worry about?

Which may, of course, be exactly the attitude you need when you're investing in something hard to put a price tag on.

Consider this: Leegin now makes more than a thousand styles of belts, up from a couple hundred in the bad old days. It sells to more than 6,000 accounts, up from maybe 2,000. It doesn't advertise, because it doesn't need to: a salesperson visits the stores at least once a season. A new telemarketing operation keeps the company in touch with stores that are too small, or too remote, for a visit. Quality levels, delivery times, and prices are among the best in the industry, say buyers such as product manager Rodney Lane of L. L. Bean.

That kind of capability itself makes Leegin difficult, maybe impossible, to compete with. "We have 60 soldiers out there," says Kohl, "and each soldier calls on three customers a day. Unless you have the ability to call on 180 customers a day" -- not to mention the ability to provide them with up-to-the-minute sales information, or the ability to produce and ship thousands of orders a week, including 250 for a single belt -- "how are you going to compete with me?" Indeed, the company has slowly been acquiring lines from competitors who decided not to try.

But Leegin's real advantage is that it has become a moving target, poised for continual improvement on any number of fronts. The company recently introduced a line of handbags, for example. And why not? It has a distribution channel to women's specialty stores. It has the expertise to help the stores merchandise the bags. It can gather instant information, via the laptops, on how well they sell. Planned refinements of office and production systems should allow the company to expand in other ways, too -- by adding more belt lines, say, or by continuing to add salespeople.

Jerry Kohl, in addition to his many other traits, is a business junkie, a voracious reader of business magazines and eager attender of conferences, a man who swaps stories of manufacturing and selling and customer service the way others talk about baseball or movies. Somehow, all the information he gathers seems like more grist for the company-changing mill, the single-minded and in some ways single-handed metamorphosis he has set in motion at Leegin Creative Leather Products. "He has no hobbies," remarks one associate. "Other than his family, the business is his life." A maniacal existence, no doubt. But a pretty successful one, too.

LEEGIN: BY THE NUMBERS

*projected