(1863–1914). American entrepreneur Richard W. Sears began his business career with a mail-order jewelry business. He eventually developed it into the huge retail company Sears, Roebuck and Company.
Richard Warren Sears was born on December 7, 1863, in Stewartville, Minnesota. His father had been wealthy but lost his fortune in a risky financial deal. After his death the young Sears, at age 17, went to work for the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway to support his mother and sisters. He worked first in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, as a station agent. In 1886 he obtained permission to sell a shipment of watches that had been refused by a local jeweler and wrote letters offering the watches for sale. Sears was highly successful in that endeavor. He subsequently used his $5,000 profit to start a mail-order watch business in Minneapolis in 1886, under the name of R.W. Sears Watch Company.
Within a year Sears had hired Alvah C. Roebuck as a watch repairman and moved his business to Chicago, Illinois. In 1887 Sears published a mail-order catalog offering watches, diamonds, and jewelry, all with a money-back guarantee. Two years later he sold his business for $100,000 and moved to Iowa, intending to be a rural banker. He became restless, however, and returned to Minnesota. There he established a new mail-order firm selling watches and jewelry, with Roebuck as his partner. This A.C. Roebuck & Company later became Sears, Roebuck and Company and in 1893 moved to Chicago.
By 1893 the company’s mail-order catalog had 196 pages advertising a wide variety of goods, including sewing machines, saddles, bicycles, shoes, and musical instruments. By 1894 the catalog had expanded to 507 pages, written almost entirely by Sears. Sears also wrote all the copy for the company’s extensive newspaper and magazine advertisements. He had a talent for appealing to the company’s predominantly rural, Midwestern customers. He experimented with ideas constantly, first writing the copy, then trying to locate a producer after the orders had started flowing in.
In 1895 Roebuck sold his interest in the firm to Julius Rosenwald. Rosenwald’s administrative skills proved a successful complement to Sears’s creative marketing. While Sears’s catalogs brought in orders, Rosenwald reorganized the business, speeding up the customer service system. As a result of a disagreement over the advertising budget, Sears resigned as president in 1909. He thereafter lived on his farm, north of Chicago. Sears died on September 28, 1914, in Waukesha, Wisconsin.