A watch seller, a watchmaker and a catalogue.

Sears began with watches. English Wikipedia says Richard Warren Sears, then working as a railroad station agent in Minnesota, started a mail-order watch business in Minneapolis in 1886 under the name R.W. Sears Watch Company; CNN, in a 2025 photo history, places that side business in North Redwood, Minnesota, in the same year. In 1886 Sears met Alvah Curtis Roebuck, a watch repairman, and in 1887 the business moved to Chicago, Wikipedia says. Sears sold that firm in 1889, came back to Chicago in 1892 and set up a new mail-order company with Roebuck as his partner. On September 16, 1893, according to Wikipedia, the partners renamed it Sears, Roebuck and Co., and the catalogue began to range well beyond watches and jewellery. The company itself has celebrated 1892 as its starting date, Wikipedia says.

The partnership did not last long in its original form. Roebuck left in the mid-1890s; the Sears Archives, the company’s own history site, says he resigned in ill health but that the firm kept his name. In August 1895 the Chicago businessmen Julius Rosenwald and Aaron Nusbaum bought his half, Wikipedia says, and the Sears Archives describes Rosenwald, a Chicago clothing manufacturer, as the organiser who built the systems to handle the orders that Sears’s advertising brought in. In 1906 the company sold shares on the open market and was reincorporated in New York; two years later Richard Sears gave up the presidency and Rosenwald succeeded him, according to Wikipedia.

Richard Sears’s own contribution, the Sears Archives says, was the copy: he wrote nearly every line of the early catalogues himself, in language meant for farmers and rural households. The archive adds that the mail-order trade was helped by the spread of the railroads, by cheap postal rates for catalogues and by Rural Free Delivery, introduced in 1896. Before there was a catalogue at all, it says, the name “The R.W. Sears Watch Co.” appeared on a printed mailer advertising watches and jewellery, with a written guarantee on every American watch sold.

The catalogue as the brand.

For its customers, Sears was a book before it was a building. The Sears Archives quotes the cover of the 1894 catalogue, which billed itself as the “Book of Bargains: A Money Saver for Everyone,” and claimed that “Our trade reaches around the World.” The same catalogues carried customer testimonials and the line “We Can’t Afford to Lose a Customer.” By 1895, the archive says, the range took in shoes, clothing, stoves, furniture, musical instruments, saddles, firearms, buggies and bicycles; in 1896 Sears added separate spring and fall catalogues and began charging for them, and a colour section appeared in 1897.

Seasonal books became sub-brands of their own. The Sears Archives says the Sears Christmas Book catalogue appeared in 1933, that from the following year its covers carried warm Christmas scenes, and that in 1968 the company made official the name customers had long used, renaming it The Wish Book. From 1908 to 1940, Wikipedia says, the catalogue also sold ready-to-assemble kit houses. The general catalogue — the “big book” — was discontinued in 1993, the archive says, and Sears brought the Wish Book back in 2007.

Stores came later. Wikipedia says the company opened a retail store on February 2, 1925, inside its West Side Chicago complex at Homan Avenue and Arthington Street, and that many of the stores that followed were designed by the architect George C. Nimmons, set apart from downtown shopping districts with free off-street parking for drivers.

The Sears name also went onto products, and onto names of its own. Over the decades the company built house brands including Kenmore, Craftsman and DieHard, according to Wikipedia, and it placed Allstate insurance representatives in its stores from 1934. Wikipedia says Craftsman was sold to Stanley Black & Decker in 2017 and DieHard to Advance Auto Parts at the end of 2019.

And it went onto a skyline. Skydeck Chicago says Sears, Roebuck and Company commissioned the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design a single headquarters building, with the structural engineer Fazlur Khan devising its “bundled tube” structure; ground was broken in August 1970 and the Sears Tower was finished in May 1973. Sears moved out in 1988, Skydeck says, but the building kept the Sears name until 2009, when it was renamed after the Willis Group, a London insurance broker. Sears later moved its offices to Hoffman Estates, outside Chicago, between 1993 and 1995, Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

A department store brand is carried less by any single product than by the things a shopper sees on the way in and on the way out: the name above the entrance, the lettering on the shopping bag, the colour of a carrier or a box, and, for many stores over the years, the cover of a printed catalogue. Each of those surfaces works at a different distance. Signage has to read from across a car park or a city street; a bag has to read from a few steps away, often folded or creased; a catalogue cover has to read on a doormat or a kitchen table.

Store identities also change as companies change hands. A name may be redrawn, shortened, recoloured or moved onto a new mark when a business is sold, merged or reorganised, and older versions can stay in view for years on buildings that are not refitted at once.

From Sears Holdings to Transformco.

The modern ownership story runs through Kmart. In November 2004 Kmart Holding Corporation announced it would acquire Sears, Roebuck and Co., and in 2005 the two were combined under a new parent, Sears Holdings Corporation, which said it would keep trading under both names, according to Wikipedia. The hedge-fund manager Edward S. Lampert ran Sears from 2005, The New York Times reported in 2018.

Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York on October 15, 2018, The New York Times reported. In February 2019 a federal bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the business to an affiliate of Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL, the Los Angeles Times reported. That buyer operates as Transformco, which has owned Sears since 2019; its website, under the name Transform SR Brands, lists Sears and Kmart among its brands.

The store network has since shrunk sharply. In November 2025 CNN reported that more Sears stores had closed during the year, and that the remaining ones included a standalone store in Coral Gables, Florida, and mall stores in Braintree, Massachusetts; Concord, California; El Paso, Texas; and Orlando, Florida. Sears.com remains active for online orders, Wikipedia says. Outside the United States the name has its own history: Sears Mexico belongs to Carlos Slim’s Grupo Sanborns, according to Wikipedia, and operates apart from the American company.

What survives visually is mostly a paper and steel record: catalogue covers that sold a whole household by mail, Christmas books with painted seasonal scenes, the house names Kenmore, Craftsman and DieHard, and a company name set on a Chicago tower from 1973 until 2009.

For a design guide, Sears shows how a retailer’s identity can live in its catalogue covers, slogans and buildings as much as in a logo. Compare Kenmore and Craftsman, two house names Sears built, and Kmart, its corporate partner from 2005. For this guide we use catalogue navy, Wish Book red and newsprint cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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