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Click here to read more about the history of the Sears catalog or Big Book. Sears has opened the doors to its vast archival collection and invited the public to peek inside. More than 100 years of stories, product and brand histories, photographs, catalog images and more are now available online.
- History of The Big Book
The 1943 Sears News Graphic wrote that the Sears catalog,...
- History of the "Wish Book"
The 1933 Christmas Book catalog started a tradition that...
- Catalog chronology
The R.W. Sears Watch Co., the first catalog issued by...
- Does Sears buy old catalogs
Does Sears buy old catalogs - The Sears Catalog - Sears...
- Where can I find old catalogs
Where can I find old catalogs - The Sears Catalog - Sears...
- When did Sears stop distributing the catalogs
The company continued to distribute the extremely popular...
- Will Sears give permission to reproduce catalog pages or images from its catalogs
Permission to reproduce any images and/or video footage from...
- Sears Archives Home Page
Sears Archives Home Page - The Sears Catalog - Sears...
- History of The Big Book
Collection consists of seasonal catalogs and wish books spanning the years 1910-1994. Catalogs featured the full range of items sold by Sears, from clothing to appliances and toys, and served as a bridge between the company's walk-in department stored and direct marketing mail order business.
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- Sears Started with Watches.
- 'Cheapest Supply House on Earth
- Customer Service Was Key to Early Growth.
- Sears House Kits Become A Big Seller.
- Sears Expanded by Opening Stores.
- Profits Didn't Stop During The Great Depression.
- A Business Built on Inexpensive Essentials.
- Sears Stores Anchored Shopping Malls.
- The 'Wish Book' Topped 600 Pages.
- Competitors Emerge in The 1960s.
The story of Sears begins in 1886, when a railroad station agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota named Richard Sears started selling gold watches at $14 apiece. The next year, he set up shop with watchmaker Alvah Roebuck on Dearborn and Randolph Streets in Chicago. With the help of investor Julius Rosenwald, who joined the firm in 1895, their mail-order ...
Early Sears catalogs billed themselves as the “Cheapest Supply House on Earth” or “the Book of Bargains,” and featured a mind-boggling array of products, including medical and veterinary supplies (pictured here), musical instruments, firearms, bicycles, sewing machines and baby buggies. By 1894, the page count of the catalog was 322 pages. Richard ...
Sears’ simple, warm and customer-service-centered approach helped it stand out among mail-order competitors like Montgomery Ward and Hammacher Schlemmer. When Sears first sold stock to the public in 1906, the company was worth some $40 million, with close to $50 million in annual sales and around 9,000 employees. That same year, it built a distribu...
Among the catalog giant’s astounding range of offerings were house kits, which the company began marking in 1908. The kits came in 447 different designs, from the grand “Magnolia” ($5,140 to $5,972) to the more humble, but popular “Winona” ($744 to $1,998). Sears advertised the kits with the promise that “We will furnish all the material to build t...
With the rise of the automobile, the mail-order boom in the United States slowed down, but Sears managed to stay successful by expanding consumer credit with its “No Money Down” policy and, in 1924, opening its first retail store in Chicago. More than 300 Sears stores would open across the country by 1929. After launching the Kenmore brand (applian...
Even in the depths of the Great Depression in 1931, Sears’ catalog, retail and factory profits totaled more than $12 million, or more than $201 million in 2018 dollars. That year marked the first year retail sales outstripped catalog sales. In 1932, the company opened its famous flagship store on State and Van Buren Streets in the Loop district of ...
While traditional department stores (Marshall Field’s, Wanamaker’s) sold higher-end fashion, Sears had made its reputation selling less expensive but necessary items like socks, underwear, towels and bedding, which helped keep sales going even during the Depression. In fact, by the end of the 1930s, the number of Sears retail stores had nearly doub...
By the 1950s, Sears had opened more than 700 stores in the United States and had expanded into Mexico and Canada, where it joined forces with a Canadian mail-order company and became Simpson-Sears. As shopping malls became ubiquitous across the nation, Sears stores served as familiar anchors, along with fellow chains like J.C. Penney and Montgomery...
Sears issued its first Christmas catalog in 1933, featuring such must-have items as a Mickey Mouse watch, a Lionel electric train set, a “Miss Pigtails” doll and live singing canaries. In the decades that followed, the catalog would be adorned with Christmas scenes, even as its pages swelled. By 1968, when it was officially renamed the “Wish Book,”...
The 1960s brought more competition, in the form of new discount department store chains like Target, Walmart and Kmart. Annual sales rose to $10 billion by the early ‘70s, and the company moved its headquarters into what was then the world’s tallest building, the Sears Tower in Chicago, in 1973. But its competitors were gaining ground, and by 1991 ...
- Sarah Pruitt
Get an idea by looking at the Sears Catalog through the years. The original 1888 mailer carrying watches and jewelry expanded into a catalog in 1894 that kept growing offering an ever-widening range of products: sewing machines, sporting goods, musical instruments, saddles, firearms, buggies, bicycles, baby carriages, and clothing.
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