Richard Sears
Richard Sears was an American businessman who started by selling watches by mail and co-founded Sears, Roebuck and Co., which became the largest US mail-order retailer.
What they did and why it matters
Sears turned mail order into mass-scale remote retail, the closest historical parallel to today's large e-commerce operations. Starting with watches sold to railroad station agents in 1886, he built a catalog that passed 500 pages by the mid-1890s, and Sears, Roebuck overtook Montgomery Ward in sales around 1900. Handling that volume required large central warehouses and systematic order processing, refined under his successor Julius Rosenwald. The challenges Sears faced, including assortment breadth, order accuracy, shipping cost, and returns, are the same ones a modern fulfillment center manages.
Related people
Events
Sources
- Richard Warren Sears (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
- Sears, Richard (Encyclopedia.com) encyclopedia.com