When I got home from my recent trip to Minnesota, there was a package waiting for me from Lands’ End. I’m not a big customer of theirs, but I’m a happy one. For starters, there’s their order department. Moments after dialing their 800 number, a cheerful voice, a live person, answers. They’re always as cheerful at the end of the call as they are at the beginning. I might ask about the weather in Wisconsin and they might be eager to tell me about their last visit to Las Vegas. 

This thriving mail order business was started by Gary Comer who first got into mail order selling with an earlier business. Lands’ End began as a sailboat equipment company in 1963 in Chicago, Illinois. The business became so successful that it expanded into general clothing and home furnishings. When Comer realized that he had a growing business on his hands, he decided to locate to the quietly beautiful area of southern Wisconsin. After all, this wasn’t going to be a city slicker operation. The company is named from its sailboat heritage, after Land’s End, but the misplaced apostrophe in the company name was a typographical error that Comer could not afford to change, as promotional materials had already been printed.

Even though their business was conducted by post, the company was determined to delight their customers. They became known for their return policy which was “Guaranteed. Period.” 

Lands’ End endeared themselves to me with a photo in one of their catalogs showing a car driving down a country road at dawn. The copy talked about their energetic employees who came to work at Lands’ End after milking their cows at home. They promised that if we ordered from these folks we’d get the same attention as they gave to running their own farms. 

Several years ago, the Lands’ End holiday catalog arrived. After dinner one night, I began browsing through it and there, among the fleece and knits, was the most marvelous essay by Garrison Keillor called What I’m Giving You for Christmas. Of course, the piece was entertaining, but it was also bold. Here, in a catalog of merchandise being offered as potential gifts, Keillor was warning about the perils of giving and receiving.

He wrote, “A Christmas gift represents somebody’s theory of who you are, or who they wish you were…You’d like to get a gift that aims high—Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a ticket to Nepal, a MacArthur grant—and instead here is a pair of bedroom slippers with lights in the toes so you can see your way to the bathroom at night.” I was so delighted that Lands’ End shared this charming essay that I wanted to order one of everything  in the catalog right then and there.

Jerry Garcia once pointed out  (delightfully) the responsibility we must assume in order to make the world a better place  by saying, “Somebody has to do something and it’s just incredibly pathetic that is has to be us.”

What do you suppose might happen if more of us took up the cause of being delightful? What kind of business would we create? What kind of relationships? Pathetic or not, why not make it your mission to do whatever you’re doing in the most delightful way?