A proper fit
For 90 years, Lamey Wellehan has been pairing shoes with satisfied customers.
LEWISTON
It was a bitter cold day just around Christmastime two years ago and Jim Wellehan was in his family’s shoe store in Augusta.
A woman came in, asking for help with a handicapped, immobile passenger in her car who needed to be fit for shoes.
Without hesitating, the president of the company went outside and spent the next 35 to 40 minutes measuring the woman’s feet and fitting her for a pair of shoes as traffic whizzed by his backside.
When he was done, there was a pile of not-quite-right shoes on the car’s hood and a well-shod, satisfied customer within.
“It was fun for me,” said Wellehan. “But more importantly, I knew if I wasn’t there, the same thing would have happened.”
That’s because at Lamey-Wellehan, customer service is the priority. It’s one of the reasons the small, family-owned shoe retailer has bucked industry trends and continues to expand while national shoe retailers have gone bust.
Last week, Lamey-Wellehan celebrated its 90th anniversary, marking the milestone by opening the company’s seventh store, this one in downtown Waterville. For the past 40 years, Wellehan has overseen the expansion of the company that was started during World War I by his father, Dan, and his business partner, Charlie Lamey.
A window dresser at Peck’s, Wellehan decided to team up with co-worker Lamey, who was a shoe buyer for the former Lewiston department store. Together they opened the first Lamey Wellehan store in an art deco building at 110 Lisbon St. on St. Patrick’s Day, 1914.
Customer service was always the watchword.
“Dad knew everyone,” said Jim Wellehan. “People came to shop at the stores of people they knew. You treated everyone well. That was how you did business then.”
Today, Wellehan points with pride at the company’s expansion. While the volume of shoes purchased nationally in 2002 decreased 5 percent in every medium (shoe chains such as Payless, as well as mass retailers such Wal-Mart) in dollar value, sales at Lamey Wellehan grew. According to its figures, the Maine retailer now approaches 8 percent of the total shoes bought in Maine.
“Not a bad job,” Wellehan says with a smile.
He counts luck and hard work among the reasons for the company’s success. But the company hangs its hat on customer service.
“We treat our customers and associates and suppliers as friends, because they are friends,” he said. “Show me a national company that can do that and they’ll beat the blazes out of us.”
It isn’t just good business sense to emphasize customer service. For Wellehan, he calls it a “moral responsibility” and an obligation to give people a shoe store where they can have their feet properly measured, foot pressure checked, get the expertise of on-site shoe technicians and even consult staff pedorthists – someone who is trained in devices and footwear that can alleviate debilitating foot pain.
“Selling shoes is not the dumb thing (it is) made out to be in TV shows and cartoons, but it does require humility,” said Wellehan. “This business is all about customers – customer relationships, feet, our products – and how we take care of them.”
You can tell Wellehan measures success in more than profit margins.
A recent visitor was given a tour of the offices at 110 Lisbon St. Wellehan stopped at several plaques the company has received – from the 1994 governor’s award for Recycler of The Year, to an appreciation plaque from Goodwill Industries, to one from a local soccer association – and explained the story and meaning behind each. He delighted in pointing out snapshots of company picnics and Christmas parties, and the constellation of children and grandchildren whose photos pepper the walls.
He’s pleased the company has done so well, but he’s just as happy knowing it has provided good livelihoods for its 90 or so employees and has been an upstanding corporate citizen. He expects the company will expand further by opening a new store in Falmouth this year, refurbishing its store in Brunswick next year and expanding its presence in Portland where there are already two locations.
Although none of his three sons appear interested in taking over the family business right now (they each have successful careers out of state), Wellehan doesn’t dwell too much on the future. He’ll turn 65 this summer and his own father ran the business until he was 75.
But he does harbor a desire to some day study linguistics and become a Latin teacher. He studied the ancient language in school, learned French from growing up in Lewiston and then picked up Portuguese in preparation for business trips to Brazil when that country was a shoe-making powerhouse.
The changing picture among global shoe manufacturers has him worried, though.
“I hope I don’t have to learn Chinese,” he said
Comments are no longer available on this story