In its 107-year history, L.L.Bean has never released a version of its iconic Bean Boot with anything but an L.L.Bean logo. Until now.

On Thursday, the Freeport-based outdoor retailer announced it was releasing a limited edition Bean Boot that is co-branded with local startup, Flowfold. There will be about 3,600 boots total across three colors in men’s and women’s sizes.

James Morin, COO of Flowfold, called it a “monumental moment” for the company, which recently expanded into a new manufacturing facility in Gorham. The boots marry “innovation and tradition” in one of the outdoor industry’s most iconic products, Morin said.

Flowfold, founded by Charley Friedman and Devin McNeill in 2010 on Peaks Island, made its name creating wallets out of ultra-lightweight, high-tech sailcloth. Just a few years ago, the small company was selling wallets off a table on Commercial Street to tourists. How did they in such a short amount of time go from that to landing a co-branding deal with L.L.Bean, especially considering that L.L.Bean could have hooked up with any big-name brand on a co-branded Bean Boot?

Morin said it’s a result of a lot of work and persistence.

“If three years ago I would have walked into L.L.Bean and asked them to do a co-lab Bean Boot, they would have laughed me right out of the building,” Morin told Maine Startups Insider. “I would have had a better shot of designing Mars boots for NASA… and then actually wearing them on Mars.”

Between 2010 and 2015, Flowfold sent L.L.Bean so many samples of its products “that they started sending them back,” Morin said. In November 2015, L.L.Bean finally conceded and agreed to sell Flowfold wallets in four of its stores during the 2016 holiday season. After that trial was successful, L.L.Bean moved them into all stores and online. In 2017, they started carrying Flowfold bags, then later that year announced the first collaboration in a Made in America backpack.

“Might have just been Mainers helping Mainers. Could have been a feel-good moment for them. Who knows what the long term intentions were, but at the end of the day we were three 26-year-old kids asking a $1.6 billion company to trust us. They did, and we haven’t stopped trying to prove them right ever since,” Morin said.

Eric Smith, a L.L.Bean spokesperson, said the collaboration with Flowfold was an “organic development” from the companies’ ongoing relationship. When L.L.Bean began looking around for a lightweight material for a spring boot design, it wasn’t a far leap to utilize Flowfold’s ultralight sailcloth, which had already been used in previous collaborative products.

“L.L.Bean boots are an outdoor original. They’re a practical innovation designed to meet the needs of an avid outdoorsman using a unique combination of available materials. That’s exactly what this collaboration is all about,” Smith said.

Smith continued: “We’re not trying to make a fashion statement, even though they do look extremely cool. We didn’t go looking for a collaborator with big brand name. Our partners at Flowfold are our Maine neighbors and our friends. We know they make great products we’ve been selling for years and they share our love of the outdoors. Our shared values are the key to the success of this collaboration.”

Morin thinks what Flowfold brings to the relationship is its audience. Roughly 50% of Flowfold’s customers are 18-35 years old, an attractive customer demographic for L.L.Bean. Morin said rather than just an age range, though, the millennial demographic can also be defined by how they think in buy, which in marketing they call a psychographic.

“This millennial psychographic supports small businesses more than any other current living generation,” Morin said. “And a report showed that 60% of millennials (an important buying segment) are belief driven buyers and have deliberately purchased or stopped purchasing a brand because of its ethics.”

The millennial demographic makes up a quarter of the U.S. population and has $1.2 trillion in buying power, so the economics were there, but Morin said that’s not enough—there still needs to be a reason to buy.

“It’s a noisy market out there. It’s not about the product any more, it’s about the story. Advertising the product is a waste of money. You need to tell a story. Co-branding can be an effective way to build business, boost awareness, and break into new markets, and for a partnership to truly work, it has to be a win-win for all players in the game,” Morin said.

The collaboration marries a large, well-known company with a powerful distribution network and iconic product with a small company with new and innovative materials and design, Morin said.

“Two big companies coming together to make a boot just wouldn’t have been as interesting,” he said. “Likewise, two small companies coming together to do the same thing wouldn’t nearly have made as big a slpash. In this case, it really was the perfect combination.”