Sears catalog distribution center/retail store on Ponce De Leon Avenue in Atlanta in 1979The beginnings of Sears:
Richard Warren Sears was born in 1863 in Stewartville, Minnesota, to a wealthy family which moved to nearby Spring Valley. In 1879, his father died shortly after losing the family fortune in a speculative stock deal. Sears moved across the state to work as a railroad station agent in North Redwood, then Minneapolis.
While he was in North Redwood, a jeweler refused delivery on a shipment of watches. Sears purchased them and sold them at a low price to the station agents, making a profit. He started a mail-order watch business in Minneapolis in 1886, calling it the R.W. Sears Watch Company. That year, he met Alvah Curtis Roebuck, a watch repairman. In 1887, Sears and Roebuck relocated the business to Chicago, and the company published Richard Sears's first mail-order catalog, offering watches, diamonds, and jewelry.
In 1889, Sears sold his business for $100,000 and relocated to Iowa, planning to be a rural banker. He returned to Chicago in 1892 and established a new mail-order firm, again selling watches and jewelry, with Roebuck as his partner, operating as the A. C. Roebuck watch company. On September 16, 1893, they renamed the company Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and began to diversify the product lines offered in their catalogs.
Before the Sears catalog, farmers near small rural towns usually purchased supplies, often at high prices and on credit, from local general stores with narrow selections of goods. Prices were negotiated and relied on the storekeeper's estimate of a customer's creditworthiness. Sears built an opposite business model by offering in their catalogs a larger selection of products at published prices.
By 1894, the Sears catalog had grown to 322 pages, including many new items, such as sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods and automobiles. By 1895, the company was producing a 532-page catalog. Sales were over $400,000 in 1893 and over $750,000 two years later. By 1896, dolls, stoves, and groceries were added to the catalog.
