"The World's Smallest Automatic Umbrella (Plum): so compact, you might mistake it for a garnish." — Hammacher Schlemmer product listing, retrieved June 2026 The Voice That Carries the Claim No retail catalog in the United States has been mailing to customers longer than Hammacher Schlemmer. The company traces its …

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 …

A Signature, Not a Symbol In the winter of 1912, Leon Leonwood Bean came home from a hunting trip in Freeport, Maine, with cold, wet feet and an idea. He took a pair of rubber galoshes to a local cobbler and asked him to stitch leather uppers onto the rubber bottoms. The result was the Maine Hunting Shoe, and the …

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 …