An airport meeting, a New London store and licensed departments.

Bradlees began in Connecticut in the late 1950s. The chain’s history in the International Directory of Company Histories (volume 12, 1996), reprinted online by Funding Universe, says it was conceived by three businessmen who wanted a store offering a wide variety of goods at discount prices. Because they met to discuss the plan at Bradley International Airport, outside Hartford, they called the store “Bradlees”. English Wikipedia gives the same origin, citing that directory.

The first Bradlees opened in New London, Connecticut. Wikipedia dates the opening to 14 March 1958, citing a report in The Day, the New London newspaper, and The Christian Science Monitor also gave New London and 1958 when it reported on the company in December 2000.

The early stores were organised differently from the chain that followed. The directory says the first Bradlees was made up of a group of departments, each run by a different licensee, rather than having all its merchandise owned by one operator. Under that system the Bradlees name was over the door while separate licensees ran the departments inside.

The arrangement changed after a larger company arrived. In 1961, three years after the first store opened, Bradlees was acquired by Stop & Shop, the New England grocery chain; both the directory and Wikipedia give that date. The directory says the purchase gave the young business capital, and that in the early 1960s it moved from the licensee system to owning its departments directly by letting its arrangements with licensees expire.

Bradlees grew through the 1960s and 1970s as a Stop & Shop division. The directory says that in the 1970s it added more clothing and accessories, gave more display space to hardware and housewares as do-it-yourself home improvement grew, and spent on renovating its stores with new racks and shelving. The company’s later headquarters were in Braintree, Massachusetts, which the Monitor named as its base in 2000.

Three decades with a grocer, then a separate company.

For three decades Bradlees belonged to a supermarket company, and its expansion reflected that. The directory records that in 1985 Bradlees bought Jefferson Ward discount stores in the Philadelphia area from Montgomery Ward, and that in the late 1980s it bought stores from the Two Guys company in New Jersey. Wikipedia adds a 2007 photograph of a vacant former Bradlees in West Deptford, New Jersey, that had been a Jefferson Ward store, a reminder that much of the chain was assembled from other retailers’ buildings.

Changes at the parent company reached the stores. The directory says that in the late 1980s Stop & Shop became the target of a hostile takeover bid from the Dart Group, and that it avoided the bid through a leveraged buyout in June 1988 that took it private. Bradlees then drew back from the southern part of its territory, the directory says, selling the leases of its stores in North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland, and concentrated on the Northeast.

In 1992 the relationship ended. The directory says Stop & Shop decided to present the grocer and Bradlees to investors as two separate companies when it returned to the stock market, and that Bradlees became a separate public company, selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange from 1 July 1992. Wikipedia gives 1961 to 1992 as the years of Stop & Shop ownership.

Wikipedia says Bradlees bought several stores from the liquidated Caldor chain in 1999, after emerging from a bankruptcy filed in June 1995. On 28 December 2000 The Christian Science Monitor reported that Bradlees had announced it was going out of business and would sell its remaining inventory to a liquidator; Wikipedia gives 15 March 2001 as the date the last store closed.

Bradlees is a closed chain, and there have been no Bradlees stores since 2001. Wikipedia says many former locations were bought by Walmart, while others became Big Lots, Staples, Kohl’s, Marshalls and other retailers, and some passed to other divisions of Ahold, which had acquired Stop & Shop in 1996.

Design and documentation.

A discount or variety store’s identity is carried by things that are easy to overlook because they were made to be used and thrown away: the sign above the entrance, the weekly circular folded into a newspaper, the receipt, the price card on the shelf and the shopping bag a customer carries out of the car park. Each of these repeats the store’s name many times a week, often for decades, and together they do more to fix a chain in local memory than any single logo drawing.

Signage had to be read from a road and a parking lot, so store names were usually set large, short and in one or two strong colours. Circulars had a different job: crowding many items onto cheap paper while keeping the name and colours instantly recognisable on a doorstep or kitchen table. Bags travelled furthest of all, into homes, schools and other shops.

Each guide in this group looks at one store name — who founded it, who owned it, what became of the stores and of the name itself — and separates what independent sources record from what the companies said about themselves.

An airport name, a buyer called Mrs. B and black-and-gold signs.

The Bradlees name is a place name turned into a store name. It comes from the founders’ meeting place, Bradley International Airport, written with a double “e”, and it stayed the same through three decades under a grocery company and through its years as a separate business.

Much of the brand’s character lived in its advertising. Wikipedia says Bradlees was known for television and print advertisements featuring a character called “Mrs. B.”, presented as the chain’s buyer, who constantly searched for bargains to pass on to customers. The directory dates a change in that campaign to April 1989, when, it says, Mrs. B was replaced in advertising in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Pennsylvania by a series of Bradlees shoppers who delivered monologues about what drew them to the store; those advertisements were shaped with input from focus groups and surveys. Wikipedia links to a Bradlees commercial featuring Mrs. B that it dates to 1996.

The same 1989 overhaul reached the shop floor. The directory says Bradlees introduced a programme of “certified values”, marked with black and gold signs throughout the stores, which offered low prices on certain items all the time rather than relying on periodic sales. It also describes a new store prototype opened in Meriden, Connecticut, in June 1989, with boutique-like selling areas marked with special signs, and nine existing stores redesigned that year with wider aisles, brighter lighting and more vivid styling.

Wikipedia also shows the final Bradlees logo and slogan in use before the chain closed, under a caption that ties them to its last years of trading.

For a design guide, Bradlees shows how a store brand can be carried as much by a spokesperson and by in-store signs as by a logo, and how a borrowed place name can outlast the company that used it. Compare it with Caldor, its Northeast competitor, and Walmart. For this guide we use Braintree navy, value gold and sign black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bradlees’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.