A mail-order business on the Chicago River.

Montgomery Ward began in Chicago in 1872, when Aaron Montgomery Ward set up a mail-order business, the Associated Press wrote in 2006. English Wikipedia notes conflicting reports of where he started: a single room on North Clark Street, or a loft above a livery stable on Kinzie Street. The business sold by catalogue to customers who ordered by post, and the Associated Press described the Wards holiday catalogue as standard fare in American households for decades. English Wikipedia says serious competition arrived in 1896, when Richard Warren Sears introduced his own general catalogue, and that in 1930 Montgomery Ward declined a merger offer from Sears. The same source lists two histories of the business: Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1973 article in Chicago History, and the company’s own centenary book, 1872–1972: A Century of Serving Consumers.

The company’s headquarters became a landmark in its own right. English Wikipedia says the Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalog House, opened in 1908 along the Chicago River north of downtown, served as the company’s headquarters until 1974, when the offices moved across the street to a new tower designed by Minoru Yamasaki. The Catalog House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1978 and a Chicago landmark in 2000, the same source says, and the company also built large distribution buildings in cities including Baltimore, Kansas City, Portland and St. Paul.

Shops came later. English Wikipedia says the company began opening retail stores in 1926, starting in Plymouth, Indiana, while keeping its catalogue business, and built outlets across the country in the late 1920s. Its small-town branches were known as “green awning” stores, the same source says, and shoppers gave the chain a nickname, “Monkey Wards.” The company’s own shortened name, Wards, would later become its official one.

Rudolph, 1939.

The company’s contribution to Christmas was a character rather than a product. In 1939, NPR reported in 2013, a manager at Montgomery Ward in Chicago decided the store should produce its own children’s book for its annual holiday promotion, and gave the job to Robert L. May, an advertising copywriter at the company who spent his days writing catalogue copy. May came back with the story of an underdog reindeer with a red nose who turns up just when Santa Claus needs a reindeer with unusual skills.

His boss was not convinced at first, NPR reported, citing May’s own account published in the Gettysburg Times in 1975. May asked a friend in the company’s art department to draw sketches, and together they won the boss over. NPR reported that May considered other names before settling on Rudolph. The booklet, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, was printed by Montgomery Ward and shipped to its stores across the country for the holiday season; May’s original manuscript is held by the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, which supplied the images NPR published.

The character then left the company. After the Second World War, NPR reported, Montgomery Ward’s chief executive, Sewell Avery, gave May the rights to Rudolph. May’s brother-in-law, a songwriter, wrote a song about the reindeer, which was recorded by the singing cowboy Gene Autry, and the story later became a Rankin/Bass stop-motion film. In 2006 the revived Wards sold Rudolph yard decorations, the Associated Press reported.

Behind the character, the company changed hands several times. English Wikipedia says that in 1968 it merged with Container Corporation of America under a new parent called MARCOR, that the oil company Mobil took a controlling stake in 1974 and full ownership in 1976, and that management took the company private in 1988. The catalogue on which the business had been founded closed in 1985, the same source says, and in 1973 the company bought a small Miami discount chain and renamed its shops Jefferson Ward.

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.

From Montgomery Ward to Wards.

The original company’s last years were a contraction. English Wikipedia says Montgomery Ward filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1997; when it emerged in August 1999 it had been acquired by GE Capital, had shortened its name to Wards and had begun renovating its stores, Bloomberg News reported in The New York Times. On 28 December 2000 the company announced that it would close its stores and cease operations in 2001, United Press International reported; its chairman and chief executive, Roger Goddu, blamed weak holiday sales and a difficult retail environment.

The name came back without shops. Direct Marketing Services Inc., a catalogue marketer, acquired the Wards name out of bankruptcy in 2004 and revived it as an online retailer with a holiday catalogue, the Associated Press reported in December 2006; its president and founder, David Milgrom, said the business shared Wards’ Chicago roots, and several former Montgomery Ward vendors and employees were part of it. At a public auction on 5 August 2008, Midwest Catalog Brands, a newly formed subsidiary of the Wisconsin catalogue company Swiss Colony, bought the bulk of DMSI’s assets, including Montgomery Ward, Multichannel Merchant reported, and planned to run them from Monroe, Wisconsin. English Wikipedia says Swiss Colony renamed itself Colony Brands in 2010, and in 2026 the wards.com website listed itself among Colony Brands’ affiliated sites.

For a design guide, Montgomery Ward shows a retail name carried largely on paper: catalogues, a holiday booklet and a reindeer that the company gave away. Compare Bradlees, then a division of Stop & Shop, which English Wikipedia says bought the northern stores of Ward’s Jefferson Ward chain in 1985, and Woolworth, another American store name whose shops have closed. For this guide we use an awning green, a reindeer red and a catalogue cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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