Sitting in the middle of a 40-acre cornfield in Dodgeville, Wis., Lands’ End is more than a little off the beaten path of mainstream retailing. Residents sometimes say that, while Dodgeville isn’t the end of the world, you can see the end of the world from there.

Even the misplaced apostrophe in the corporate name—the result of an enduring typo in its first catalog—underscores the catalog retailer’s quirky positioning as a seller of canvas luggage, casual clothing, and, among other current oddities, trousers that zip off above the knees to form shorts.

Still, Lands’ End has been in the right place—at exactly the right time—in one place: the Internet.

Lands’ End opened its first customer Web site back in July 1995. It pioneered such slick innovations as Shop With a Friend, which lets two people move around the Web site in tandem while conversing with each other. It has also done well at handling the messy issues—delivery, returns, customer service—that have tripped up many e-tailer start-ups, which lack Lands’ End’s long history of dealing with similar problems in the catalog business.

While the site initially had just 90 items, today www.landsend.com sells more than 1,000 products. It is the No. 1 site for selling apparel on the Internet and the 16th most popular retail site on-line, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group.

The e-commerce division’s sales soared to $61 million in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 1999, up from $18 million the previous year. The company indicated that the division’s sales more than doubled again in fiscal 2000, accounting for more than 10% of the company’s roughly $1.4 billion in revenue.

Lands’ End, which has a long history of reinventing itself, seems to be doing it again. While a series of mistakes in its traditional catalog business have put a revolving door on the chief executive’s office—there have been four CEOs in seven years—the company is pouring resources into e-commerce and may have found a future there.

In any case, in these days of e-commerce, the Lands’ End story shows the value of being early, innovative, and flexible, of combining traditional approaches with new ones—and of getting a bit lucky.

Lands’ End traces back to Gary Comer’s love for sailing. He tinkered with ideas for improvements to equipment and was good enough at it that, in 1963, he launched an annual mail-order catalog selling equipment and hardware. As customers requested additional items, Comer added duffel bags, then luggage, then clothing for boating, and, finally, general clothing. Eventually, he cut out yachting hardware entirely.

In the late 1970s, Comer packed up the entire company and relocated it from the oil-tanning district along the Chicago River to rural Wisconsin. He liked the work ethic of farm communities, where employees might get up before dawn to milk a cow or two before coming to work.

Long before anyone but research scientists had heard of the Internet, Lands’ End experimented with all sorts of technologies to reach customers. It was, for instance, the first catalog retailer to offer customers toll-free lines, 20 years ago. But the adventures mostly flopped, because the technologies were still immature when Lands’ End tried to exploit them or were just too awkward. Among the duds: Lands’ End tried selling in partnership with America Online and CompuServe several years back; it sent out CD-ROMs; it tried interactive TV. It even tried selling over the phones on commercial airlines.

Lands’ End hit its stride with the Internet—this is where the luck comes in—partly because it didn’t have a huge network of physical stores to placate and partly because there are a lot of analogies between catalog and on-line retail sales. "What you are seeing is the migration [to the Internet] of the catalog customer, who is predisposed to buying apparel products without having the need to touch or try out the item in the store," says Rakesh Kaul, chief executive of Hanover Direct, another innovative on-line retailer.

Lands’ End has also been fortunate because its customer base corresponds exactly with the Internet audience. Its shoppers typically range in age from 35 to 54, have a college degree, professional jobs, and a median income of $60,000 a year. They are twice as likely as the average American to have computers in the home.

Still, Lands’ End has done far more than just sit back and ride the wave. Since 1998, for instance, landsend.com has offered Your Personal Model, which lets women enter personal measurements and hair and skin color, then build a virtual "3-D" personal model to see how clothes will look on them. The model recommends outfits that flatter the customers’ body profiles and suggests sizes based on the customers’ measurements.

"It is a work in progress," says Kate Delhagen, who covered Lands’ End as the on-line retail analyst at Forrester Research and is now vice president of business development for Lucy.com, a retailer of women’s sports apparel. But she says the idea was intriguing enough that it drew lots of women to the site. "That alone is probably worth what they have invested in it."

For men, there is Oxford Express, which helps consumers move quickly through a graphic database of colors, collar types, patterns, and cuts, to choose from among more than 10,000 shirts. (As with all technical innovations, glitches do crop up. When Context visited landsend.com just after Christmas, Your Personal Model had been down for two nights.)

Bill Bass, who became the head of landsend.com in May 1999, now hopes to take the business to the next level. Bass is a boyish, 37-year-old former Army paratrooper and flight instructor who reached the rank of captain and earned a master’s in business at Stanford University. Bass entered the digital frontier as development director at the Boston Globe’s Boston.com. He left operations for the ivory tower of analysis with Forrester, forecasting Internet trends. He was among the first to describe the revenue streams, including advertising and sponsorships, that on-line media concerns would have. He issued a seminal report describing how direct marketing would be a key trend on the Internet. But he decided to leave Forrester to jump back into the fray, putting his ideas on direct marketing to work.

In September, Bass introduced Lands’ End Live, a service that links customers to a text chat area where they can ask questions of personal shoppers.

If a customer clicks an on-line button, a personal shopper quickly calls. The shopper can lead the customer around the Web site by "pushing" pages to his computer, while the two talk about the items. (This assumes, of course, that the customer has more than one phone line or connects to the Internet via a cable modem or DSL line.) Bass says the live feature doesn’t just help customers, but also helps Lands’ End by providing immediate feedback about any problems on the site. "When you get three or four similar calls, you can re-jigger the site," he says.

Kaul, of Hanover Direct, says consumers find the live operators reassuring. He says Hanover Direct will soon add some to its Web site.

As part of Lands’ End’s attempts to find ways to let people shop on-line much as they do in the physical world, Bass also introduced the Shop With a Friend feature.

He added a hotline, too, to make sure that customers’ e-mails are answered within three hours. Most answers are sent within 30 minutes. Other e-tailers, meanwhile, usually shoot for answering e-mail within 24 hours. Many don’t even answer most of their e-mail. Because of the hotline and Lands’ End Live, a recent on-line survey by Forrester ranked landsend.com the No. 1 apparel site. "Good value, speedy e-mail replies, and immediate phone response catapult Lands’ End to the top," the survey says.

Ken Cassar, a digital commerce analyst with Jupiter Communications, says that while Bass is delivering technological innovations, "he strikes me as a person who wants to treat the customer fairly and not get too caught up in the whiz-bang things that can be done with the Internet."

Bass says other new features are on the way, though he is cagey about specifics for competitive reasons. Look, he hints, for upgrades of the sluggish Oxford Express, improved search capabilities, and possibly radically new technologies. One might even allow shoppers to, in effect, design their own clothes.

Sitting in his office, dressed head-to-toe in Lands’ End garb, the soft-spoken Bass says Lands’ End will also focus on expanding internationally. This past fall, it launched operations in Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, and it will be making more global moves, taking advantage of the company’s Web presence.

Even more important, Bass will integrate the on-line operations more effectively with the rest of the business, something that he says has already proved itself to be crucial. He says, for instance, that the company’s catalog mailings drive lots of traffic to the Web site.

In fact, little of what Lands’ End is doing on-line would be possible if not for the massive back-office systems already put in place to support the catalog business. Once an order is placed, via phone, fax, U.S. mail, or Internet, it enters the company’s slick order-entry system. Then, Lands’ End’s awesome fulfillment machine takes over, sending out 15 million packages a year to six million customers in 175 countries, all within hours of receiving the customer orders. (Orders for monograms and alterations only slightly slow the process.) Indeed, while many e-tailers stumbled over unexpectedly strong demand this holiday season, landsend.com smoothly moved its goods. "We were able to take orders up until midnight on the 22nd of December and have your package delivered by Christmas. And it didn’t cost you anything extra," Bass boasts. "We were able to do that because we ship so many packages that we get a good deal from UPS." Landsend.com’s revenue more than doubled during the 1999 holiday season from the year before, even though Lands’ End as a whole saw sales drop 15% because it mailed out too few catalogs.

As time passes, Bass sees the company’s outlet stores, catalogs, and Web site as continuing to support each other, while taking on more specialized roles. Although Lands’ End closed two of its stores last year because on-line services proved an efficient way to dispose of excess merchandise, Bass says bricks-and-mortar stores satisfy shoppers’ desire for options. Catalogs, he says, are the best way to browse. "You can flip through the pages, and it’s a pleasant experience," he says. "It is very unpleasant to browse through the Internet. You don’t curl up in front of your fireplace and page through the Internet images."

The Web site provides flexibility because it can offer so many products, even if they’re out of season. "We sold about 300 swimsuits during Christmas week," he says, mainly to people who were going on vacations and had trouble finding swimwear in physical stores. "You don’t get walk-in business in a catalog," Bass says. "By having the Internet site up, anybody can find Lands’ End at any time." He says that’s one reason why 20% of Lands’ End’s on-line customers are people who hadn’t previously shopped with the company—a startlingly high percentage that bodes well for the future.

The question, of course, is whether Lands’ End can maintain its growth and its lead over most competitors. Internet usage, while continuing to explode, is drawing in lots of less-affluent consumers, who are less likely to fit the Lands’ End profile. If problems continue at the rest of the company—which announced weakness in sales in November and saw the stock tumble 65% in the following two months—they could undercut the brand and hurt landsend.com. Mass marketers such as Target and Wal-Mart have gone on-line, and many e-tailers, having seen the importance of on-time delivery and good customer service, are working hard to catch up with Lands’ End.

But at least, as Lucy.com’s Delhagen says, "Lands’ End has a jump-start on the pack."

Wolinsky is a technology reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. He can be reached at wolinsky@ameritech.net.