Catalog cover looks familiar

The L.L. Bean summer catalog cover photo may look familiar to Southwest Florida residents.

That's because it was shot at Cabbage Key, a small barrier island in Lee County with a famous restaurant and inn. The island is a popular stop for boaters and tourists on the Intracoastal Waterway.

Robert Wells, the president of Cabbage Key whose family owns the island, knew a photographer took shots of models but got no advance warning of publication. “Whoa, we got the cover shot,” he exclaimed when the catalog showed up in his mail recently. “I didn't know if it was going to make it to print.”

The 78-page summer catalog mails out to 400,000 L.L. Bean customers. Freelance photographer Noe DeWitt shot the photos for the catalog in early December, and Wells recently saw a few of the shots appear on L.L. Bean's website. He suspected a few of those would make the catalog, but not the cover shot.

“We're all about celebrating the outdoors,” says Marcia Minter, vice president and creative director at L.L. Bean. Art Director Greg Gorman scouted the site last year and recommended it for the shoot.

“Our timing for when we shoot is dictated by when we get product samples,” Minter says. “We're working six to nine months in advance of the season.”

Although L.L. Bean doesn't disclose the location of the photos in its catalog, Wells says he is promoting it on Facebook and other social media outlets. And this isn't the only publication that has picked Cabbage Key for a location shoot, Wells says. In the last three years, models have posed on the island for catalogs from Lands' End and Abercrombie & Fitch.