FREEPORT – Sales at L.L. Bean jumped about 10 percent last year, the first sizable sales increase in nearly a decade.

The outdoor outfitter said it had sales of about $1.2 billion in 2003. Annual sales had been holding steady at about $1.1 billion since 1995.

“It feels like we just won the Super Bowl,” said Chris McCormick, Bean’s president.

The surge in sales is good news for Bean employees, who will receive a record $36 million in bonuses. Bean hadn’t paid bonuses at all in five of the last eight years because sales stagnated and profits were down.

The healthy bonuses – 15 percent of pay for year-round workers – represent a return to the company’s heydays of the 1980s and early 1990s, when double-digit annual payouts were the norm. Seasonal employees will receive bonuses of $165 each, company spokesman Rich Donaldson said.

McCormick said the company now has momentum that he hopes will translate into annual sales growth of 5 to 10 percent a year.

Donaldson said Bean’s sales last year were strong in all three sales channels: catalogs, retail stores and the Internet.

McCormick said sales in the company’s stores, particularly its flagship locations in Maine, Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey, vindicated a strategy of trying to shift more sales that way.

Sales in stores that have been open more than a year jumped 30 percent in December, he said. That growth is as much as three times the industry average.

Donaldson said the year started out only marginally better than 2002, but gained steam as the year progressed.

The holiday season was particularly strong, and Bean had record single-day sales for telephone orders, online and in the stores during December. Donaldson said early indications are that those strong sales have continued into the beginning of this year.

Another high point for the company was its ability to draw new customers. McCormick said a record 5.3 million households bought from Bean last year.

“That’s a leading indicator of health for a direct marketing company and that will bode well for us in ’04,” he said.

The company will invest more in marketing, particularly television ads, to try to increase the number of customers even more.

McCormick said Bean still is concerned about price deflation, but noted the company was able to keep a lid on prices last year to stay competitive and still boost overall sales through greater volume.

The company also intends to expand its retail presence.

After developing three new stores outside Maine, not counting about a dozen factory stores for closeouts and seconds, Bean paused for more than a year to assess the results of the push into more direct retail sales.

Now, Bean’s retail executives have been told to start scouting new locations with a goal of opening new stores by next spring, McCormick said. How many will depend on the quality of the locations, he said.