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Long before smartphones and Amazon, shopping from home was already a global phenomenon thanks to the printed catalog.
The massive Sears Catalog became an American icon, serving as a vital lifeline for isolated rural homesteads and a book of wonders for generations of children who spent hours scouring its pages to build their holiday wish lists.
But the famous ‘Wish Book’ was far more than a toy guide; it was part of an economic revolution whose roots trace back to the Renaissance.
Learn more about the history of catalog shopping on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The revolution in e-commerce is actually not particularly revolutionary; it is actually more evolutionary, the latest step in a business model that dates back hundreds of years.
Like Amazon, the first catalog was issued by a bookseller. In 1498, just decades after the Gutenberg press changed the world, Aldus Manutius published his Libri Graeci impressi in Venice to sell his editions of Greek classics across Europe.
Unlike the massive catalogs of the 20th century, the Manutius catalog was a single large page listing titles for purchase and the prices to print them. More of a pamphlet than a book, Manutius designed this single-sheet catalog to fold up, tuck into travel bags, and travel easily to trade fairs and town markets across Europe.
In an age before standardized currency, Manutius faced significant challenges in conducting his catalog business. Transporting payment in gold or silver across bordersthat were rife with banditry, the earliest catalogs had to rely on the evolving banking system and the issuance of bills of exchange.
Through major banking networks, such as those offered by the Medici or Jacob Fugger, which I have covered in previous episodes, buyers didn’t need physical cash. Instead, they issued what was essentially an early version of a check, known as a bill of exchange.
Other catalog makers built on this legacy and sold everything from spices to plant bulbs.
The power of the catalog evolved alongside that of printing. As printing technology advanced, catalogs evolved from a list of text to more visual layouts that paired product images with their prices. Dutch plant dealer Emmanuel Sweerts created the world’s first visual catalog, proving the adage: a picture is worth a thousand words.
Sweerts capitalized on the explosion of wealth during the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, fueled by the Netherlands’ control of the international spice trade.
At the same time, a rare flower craze was sweeping the continent. Europe’s wealthiest families had become obsessed with collecting exotic plants brought back through Indian Ocean and Ottoman trade routes.
Having an elite garden filled with these plants became a status symbol among the wealthy across the Europe, and the best way to fill these gardens was with bulbs purchased from visual catalogs.
The catalog soon came to America and its founder was none other than Benjamin Franklin. In 1744, Franklin began publishing a brief 16-page catalog called A Catalog of Choice and Valuable Books.
Franklin realized that books were scarce and available only to the wealthy, as many parts of the colonies lacked booksellers. To meet the growing appetite of the American consumer, Franklin began importing scholarly works directly from London.
He used his printing press to produce a catalog of nearly 600 titles, bringing world-class literature and philosophy to the growing colonial intelligentsia. Franklin’s position as the deputy postmaster in Philadelphia also allowed him free postage not only on his catalog but on the parcels he shipped out.
Franklin’s innovations didn’t stop there; he also revolutionized the payment process for his books. Colonial buyers were unwilling to send cash, and Franklin, fearing debt, was unwilling to extend credit, so he created the cash-on-delivery system.
Buyers would bring their list of books and the cash to pay for them to the post office, and, in essence, the post office handled it like a bank transaction.
By the mid-18th century, colonial post offices carried high levels of public trust. Customers willingly handed their cash to the local postmaster, who used the postal network to route payments to Franklin across three or four colonies.
Innovations in steel production enabled the rapid expansion of America’s rail system, with the transcontinental railroad completed by 1869, linking remote western outposts with eastern commercial hubs. The development of the telegraph allowed catalog producers in large cities like New York and Chicago to coordinate their inventory with the publication of the catalog.
When customers knew what they ordered would be available, it enhanced their confidence and trust in shipping to rural areas.
The availability of paper exploded in the 19th century as innovations shifted it from scarce to widely available through the technology of wood-pulp paper made with the fourdrinier machine.
By lowering printing costs, more companies began producing catalogs, and, thanks to the railroad, they could deliver them to their customers much faster. Gone were the days of 16-page catalogs; now companies could mass-produce catalogs many times that size at inexpensive rates.
One of the first innovative companies to harness the power of the catalog was Montgomery Ward. Aaron Montgomery Ward, a former salesman in the rural Midwest, founded the company in 1872 and became a catalog-sales giant.
He saw the potential for catalog sales to farmers. Ward saw firsthand how the rural farmers were being taken advantage of by local “general stores”. These farmers had nowhere else to purchase essentials, and the general store took advantage by gouging them with high prices and extending credit, perpetuating a cycle of debt that tied the farmers to the store.
Ward’s goal was to establish a central warehouse in Chicago, taking advantage of the massive railway networks there and shipping goods directly to rural railroad depots, where farmers could pick them up, cutting out intermediaries and general stores.
Ward promoted his business by partnering with organizations across the region called the Grange. Midwestern farmers established the Grange in 1867 to gather socially and form cooperatives to combat abuses by the railroads, which were constantly changing shipping rates for their crops.
The Grange endorsed Ward’s organization, realizing that it would lower prices and give farmers more control.
Ward’s innovations didn’t stop there; he converted skeptical farmers into lifelong customers by pioneering a simple, radical policy: ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back.
The cooperative spirit of the Grange soon drove the next development in rural housing: the kit home. By the early 20th century, farmers could order an entire home from companies like Aladdin or E.F. Hodgson that arrived in a railroad boxcar, packed with all the lumber, nails, and paint needed to build a complete house.
Rather than hiring someone to put the house together, the Grange offered farmers a communal opportunity to gather and do the work.
One latecomer to the catalog business was a company named Sears, Roebuck and Company. Founded in 1893 as a watch sales scheme between railway station agent Richard Sears and repairman Alvah Roebuck, Sears, Roebuck and Company quickly became a catalog powerhouse.
Sears waited for Ward to publish its catalog first, then cut its prices by 5% to undercut the competition, counting on sales volume to offset the resulting profit shortfall. Sears was so obsessed with beating Montgomery Ward that they trimmed their catalog to be slightly smaller, ensuring that whenever a family stacked the two on the table, the Sears catalog naturally sat right on top.
Sears expanded their inventory as well; the catalog was more than 1,500 pages by the start of the Twentieth Century, designed to meet urban, suburban, and rural populations. The catalog was packed with everything from fashion wear to tractors, sewing machines, musical instruments, and even medicine.
Over time, Sears began to pivot towards brick-and-mortar stores. As they did, they remained a leader in catalog sales, particularly with the famous Sears Christmas Catalog. The Christmas catalog became synonymous with the holiday; children would run to the mailbox in the late summer just to be the first to peruse its pages.
Author Jean Shepherd, who wrote the classic film A Christmas Story, clarified its importance when he wrote: Every Christmas it came, and every Christmas it was devoured page by page, item by item, dream by dream.
Given the sheer diversity of options, it’s no exaggeration to say that before the age of Amazon, there was the Sears catalog. In fact, Amazon borrowed directly from the Sears operational playbook.
In 1906, Sears opened a massive, 40-acre, five-million-square-foot fulfillment complex on Chicago’s West Side, using pneumatic tubes, gravity chutes, and miles of conveyor belts to process thousands of orders a day with factory-like precision.
Farmers weren’t the only ones liberated by the mail-order revolution. Civil Rights leaders of the time, including Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, applauded the catalog as an instrument of social change. For Black Americans living under Jim Crow, buying through a catalog offered a rare form of economic equality.
Historian Louis Hyman of Cornell University noted: The catalog undid the power of the storekeeper, the landlord, and, by extension, the racially marked consumerism of Jim Crow. All of a sudden, Black families could buy whatever they wanted without asking permission… It offered them a choice where they didn’t have to feel second-class in their shopping lives.
Montgomery Ward and Sears adapted their catalogs with the times during the Great Depression. Recognizing that farmers were in a financial crisis, the catalogs shifted to survival mode.
Instead of pushing new equipment, they highlighted affordable repair parts to keep aging tractors running, which helped families maintain their livelihoods when they couldn’t afford to replace their machinery.
During both the Great Depression and the early years of WWII, catalog providers knew that families were making dresses and shirts out of cotton, flour, and feed sacks. To try and make those a little more fashionable, catalog producers pivoted their sack designs, offering floral and geometric patterns, as well as patterns for seamstresses to follow.
WWII presented significant problems for catalog retailers as the nation’s industries pivoted to wartime production.
Catalog companies met the challenge by partnering directly with the federal government as rationing took hold. To buy restricted items like bike tires or work boots, customers had to enclose their government ration coupons along with their payment.
Families used the catalog to send comforts of home to their sons and brothers serving overseas, while deployed service members relied on it to surprise their kids back home with Christmas gifts.
The catalog remained an important part of commercial life in America through the 1970s. One of the biggest factors in the decline of catalogs in the 1980s was the mall. Malls functioned almost like a architectural catalog, where customers could buy everything from a wire whisk to stereo components to the newest Nike shoes, all with friends.
The rise of specialty stores catering to all the items that would have filled the pages of giant catalogs slowly eroded the Sears catalog’s influence. Buyers looking for flannel shirts could visit Eddie Bauer at the mall; those seeking lingerie could head to Victoria’s Secret; and those shopping for soap could go straight to Bath and Body Works.
These new shopping options rapidly eroded consumer interest in traditional print catalogs. One by one, the catalogs began to end their publication.
Montgomery Ward was the first of the catalog giants to yield, shuttering its mail-order division in 1985 before its remaining retail stores officially closed in 2001. Things finally caught up with Sears in 1993, when the retail giant shuttered its catalog after exactly one hundred years.
As of the recording of this episode, Sears now only has 5 remaining stores, down from its peak of 2,700.
Every time we click “Buy Now” on a computer screen, we are participating in a system that began with Renaissance printers, was refined by Benjamin Franklin, and was scaled by Chicago mail-order visionaries who paved the way to allow us to shop from home.
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