From a cramped office on North Clark Street, surrounded by hoop skirts, lace curtains, red flannel, wool socks and more–and with Christmas a mere four months away–Aaron Montgomery Ward launched the nation’s first mail-order business.
It began with a one-page price list boasting 163 items, which he sent to farmers’ cooperatives throughout the rural Midwest. It had not been a particularly easy launch. Less than a year earlier, Ward had been nearly ready to start business when his entire stock of merchandise was destroyed in the Chicago Fire.
Unlike existing mail-order businesses that dealt only in individual items, Ward offered the rural consumer a variety of merchandise and, by eliminating the middleman, kept prices low. His new business found a ready market as homesteaders pushed west across the frontier. By the spring of 1874, his price list had grown to 32 pages and was bound into a catalog. Color illustrations, woodcuts and drawings by Charles Dana Gibson followed. Ward, who had worked for Marshall Field, offered customers the same guarantee as Field–“Satisfaction or your money back!”–and peppered the catalog with information from the manufacturer. It was dubbed the Wish Book.
Wards was the first, but ultimately not the biggest, mail-order business in Chicago. In 1887, Richard Warren Sears, who had sold watches in Minneapolis, moved to the city and with the help of Alvah Curtis Roebuck, a watchmaker, began a mail-order business selling watches. By 1893, the Sears catalog, soon to be called the Big Book, was selling furniture, baby carriages and musical instruments–and carrying some clever advertising. One item–a sewing machine, price $1–was really a needle and thread.
Over the years, both companies opened stores, and the mail-order business became secondary. In 1985, Montgomery Ward ceased publishing its catalog; Sears ended the Big Book in 1993. Yet the mail-order catalog’s place in American life was undeniable. In 1946, a book-lovers society included a Montgomery Ward catalog on its list of the 100 American books that had most affected American life, noting “no idea ever mushroomed so far from so small a beginning, or had so profound an influence on the economics of a continent, as the concept, original to America, of direct selling by mail, for cash.”
