Salute to a Retail Pioneer: Richard Warren Sears

Long before the Internet, there was the catalog.

Catalog sales improved the lives of millions of rural Americans from the late 19th century to the late 20th century by bringing the full range of goods city dwellers could buy, at low prices, to distant rural towns and isolated farms. And the man who made the catalog a household name was Richard Warren Sears, founder of what later became the world's largest department store, Sears, Roebuck and Co.

Sears, a station agent for the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad in North Redwood, Minnesota, got his start in retail when, in 1886, a shipment of watches from Chicago arrived for a jeweler in Redwood Falls who didn't want them. Sears bought the watches himself, sold them to other station agents along the line at a nice profit, then ordered more for resale.

Sears then moved to Minneapolis and established the R.W. Sears Watch Comany. The next year, he moved to Chicago, where he met Alvah Roebuck, an Indianan who answered Sears' ad for a watchmaker. The two set up shop and soon began publishing a mail order catalog.

From watches and jewelry, the company quickly expanded. By 1893, the cover of the Sears, Roebuck catalog boasted that the firm was "The Greatest Supply House On Earth - Our Trade Reaches Around the World." While that claim may have been typical Chicago boasting, Sears did offer a huge variety of merchandise through its catalog to a growing customer base. In 1893, sales of the newly formed Sears, Roebuck and Co. topped $400,000; two years later, they exceeded $750,000.

While Sears was not the first mail order catalog house - that honor belongs to its former Chicago rival, Montgomery Ward, founded by Aaron Montgomery Ward in 1872 - it was by far the most successful. In the first decades of the 20th century, Sears offered for sale just about anything a family could want - apparel, appliances, tools, sporting goods, cars and even houses. It expanded into retail stores in the 1920s to tap growing urban markets with equal success.

The comany was one of the first general merchandise retailers to develop and emphasize private-label products, again beginning in the 1920s. A number of Sears brands, including Kenmore appliances, Craftsman tools, and DieHard auto batteries, became household names; its insurance subsidiary, Allstate, eventually became a separate company when Sears spun off its financial-services unit in the 1990s.

The years since the 1950s have not been kind to Sears or its catalog operation. The growth of the suburbs, the rise of discount department stores, and changing consumer tastes all eroded its business, and the continuing depopulation of rural America shrank the catalogs' main customer base. Sears' famous "Big Book" general catalog appeared for the last time in 1993. The company continues to produce secialty catalogs, however, and it reintroduced its famous Christmas "Wish Book" catalog, first published in 1933, in 2007 - along with an online edition, a nod to the changed retail landscape.

While Sears is no longer the "world's largest store," it remains a major force in American retailing, as the fourth-largest deartment store operator in the country after its merger with Kmart in 2004. Even as the company searches for a way to grow in the years ahead, the Minnesota railroad agent's legacy remains secure.

Page from 1917 Baby Book catalog from the Sears Archives.

By Sandy Smith

Sandy Smith is an award-winning writer and editor who has spent most of his career in public relations and corporate communications. His work has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia CityPaper, PGN, and a number of Web sites. Philly-area residents may also recognize him as "MarketStEl" of discussion-board fame. He has been a part of the great reserve army of freelance writers since January 2009 and is actively seeking opportunities wherever they may lie.