A Catalog That Started With Eight Novelty Items Max Spencer Adler was flying as a bomber crewman in World War II when he was shot down over Hungary and imprisoned by the Nazis. Back home, The Hustle's history of the company recounts, he expected a postwar boom and wanted to open a gift shop, but investors weren't …

A Hardware Store That Decided to Become Something Else Stephen Gordon started Restoration Hardware because he could not find the parts for his own house. According to RH's investor relations page, Gordon was restoring a Queen Anne Victorian in Eureka, California, and after "spending days tracking down authentic period …

The Company That Invented the Catalog — and Lost the War On August 18, 1872, a 28-year-old Chicago dry-goods salesman named Aaron Montgomery Ward mailed out a single sheet of paper listing 163 products with prices and ordering instructions. Total startup capital: $1,600, split between two employees and a rented room on …

The World's Most-Printed Commercial Publication For seven decades, the IKEA catalog was a fixture in homes across dozens of countries — a thick, glossy invitation to reimagine domestic life through flat-pack furniture and Scandinavian minimalism. At its peak, IKEA printed more than 200 million copies annually in 32 …

The Original Everything Store Before Amazon, before Walmart, before the modern big-box retail era, there was the Sears catalog. Beginning in 1888 as a watch-and-jewelry circular, the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog grew into the defining retail document of American life — a thick, annual publication that delivered …

A 100-Year Publishing Enterprise, Shut in 90 Days On January 11, 2010, JCPenney announced it would shut down its catalog division entirely. The company would close its catalog distribution centers, eliminate approximately 3,500 jobs, and end a direct-mail publishing enterprise that had been a central part of its …

Catalog Logic, Reinvented When Warby Parker launched in 2010, it did something that most of the venture-backed startup world was not paying attention to: it brought a physical product into the home before the customer had committed to buying it. The home try-on program — five frames, five days, free shipping both ways …