Variety stores, a wholesale business and a catalogue that took over.

Service Merchandise began as a family business in Tennessee. The New York Times reported in March 1999 that the company was started in 1960 by Harry Zimmerman, his wife Mary and their son Raymond, as a catalogue showroom in Nashville that sold branded jewellery, toys and appliances kept in an adjacent warehouse. English Wikipedia and a 2019 local history in the Williamson County news site Williamson Source trace the family’s retail roots further back, to a variety store Harry and Mary Zimmerman opened in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1934.

The catalogue came out of the wholesale trade. In a 1988 profile, The New York Times said the Zimmermans ran a wholesale operation to supply their own chain of variety stores, and that they decided to mail out a catalogue. That business, Raymond Zimmerman told the paper, “got so big we got rid of our wholesale business.” The same profile described him as having helped his parents start the Service Merchandise Company, and said the family had initially run it as an adjunct to their wholesale-goods operation.

The format the family settled on was the catalogue showroom: a store in which customers browsed working samples and printed pages, then collected boxed goods from a stockroom. The New York Times reported in 1988 that Raymond Zimmerman became chairman in 1981, when his father retired, and that he was by then also president and chief executive. Asked that year about critics of catalogue showrooms, he said, “We think it’s fantastic,” and spoke of adding further showrooms.

The company moved its headquarters from Nashville to nearby Brentwood, Tennessee, in the early 1980s, according to Wikipedia and Williamson Source; The New York Times described it as based in Brentwood in 1999. Through those years the company kept the Service Merchandise name it had used since 1960.

Order forms, a conveyor belt and a long restructuring.

Wikipedia describes the ordering process that defined a visit. A customer collected a carbon-paper order form and a clipboard, wrote down the catalogue numbers of the goods they wanted, and could test display items that were set out in working order; current catalogues stood on stands around the showroom for goods that were not on display. A clerk keyed the order into the stockroom system and took payment, and the goods then emerged on a conveyor belt at a “Merchandise Pickup Area” near the exit. Wikipedia says that from the late 1980s customers could also place orders at self-service computer kiosks called Silent Sam, later renamed Service Express. Williamson Source recalled the system in 2019 as one in which an order went in at one place and came out on a conveyor at the other end.

The company grew partly by acquisition. The Los Angeles Times reported in April 1985 that the Nashville-based catalogue-showroom operator had acquired H. J. Wilson Co. of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Ellman’s Inc. of Smyrna, Georgia. The New York Times wrote in 1988 that the company had also bought, and then divested, a do-it-yourself home-improvement warehouse business called Mr. How. Wikipedia and Williamson Source both say Service Merchandise supplied prizes to television game shows including Wheel of Fortune and The Price Is Right.

By the mid-1990s the company was trying to change the format itself. The Orlando Sentinel reported in August 1995 that Gary Witkin, who had joined from Saks Fifth Avenue the previous November as president and chief operating officer, wanted to turn the catalogue showrooms into conventional stores, and that rivals including Target had been drawing shoppers away. Wikipedia says later restructuring plans dropped product lines such as electronics, toys and sporting goods to concentrate on jewellery, gifts and home décor.

Five vendors filed an involuntary Chapter 11 petition against the company in March 1999, The New York Times reported, and in January 2002 it said it would close its remaining stores and liquidate, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The name did not disappear with the showrooms. An archived copy of servicemerchandise.com from December 2014 shows an online store trading as Service Merchandise, selling jewellery, watches, gifts and home décor under a 2014 copyright line.

Design and documentation.

A store chain that has closed leaves its identity behind in a scattered set of objects: the lettering that once ran along a shopfront, the cover of a mail-order catalogue, a printed shopping bag, a receipt, a gift card or a television advertisement recorded off the air. None of these was made to last. Signs were taken down when leases ended, catalogues went out with the recycling, and bags were reused until they wore through, so what survives tends to be whatever someone chose to keep.

That makes the visual record of a defunct retailer patchy and uneven. Photographs of storefronts, archived web pages and library or museum holdings can show how a name was set and coloured at particular moments, but they rarely show the whole sequence of changes, and they almost never explain who designed a mark or why it was redrawn. A name may also outlive its stores, passing to new owners who use it online or on a different kind of business.

Each guide in this group therefore keeps to what dated sources record about the chain, its owners and what became of its name, and treats the palette and typeface here as an interpretation rather than a reconstruction.

A store that was really a printed book.

The Service Merchandise identity lived in print as much as on a shopfront. Its showrooms were built around the catalogue: the printed pages told customers what was in stock, the catalogue number was what they wrote on the order form, and the store itself served as a place to see samples and collect the boxes. Wikipedia’s description of the showroom — catalogues on stands, forms on clipboards, a conveyor at the exit — sets out each step of a visit, from the printed page to the pick-up belt.

In 1995 the catalogue was redesigned to change what that name meant. The Orlando Sentinel reported that the fall issue of that year had magazine-style layouts, with graphic messages running through its pages, and that Witkin described the revamped catalogue as the company’s main marketing vehicle. The paper said the catalogue had become an introduction to the store rather than an end in itself, and that the stores were being remodelled so that goods were displayed to catch the eye — in cookware, for example, under an “Italian Marketplace” banner. “Today, we are not a catalog showroom retailer,” Witkin told the paper. “Today, we are a retail store.”

The self-service kiosks that Wikipedia says were introduced in the late 1980s as Silent Sam were later renamed Service Express. The 1995 catalogue redesign and store remodels tried to move the brand from the counter to the shelf while keeping the same name over the door.

The family story is part of the identity too. The New York Times described a company that grew out of a wholesale business and a mailed catalogue, run by the Zimmermans from 1960 and led by Raymond Zimmerman as chairman from 1981. The game-show prizes recalled by Williamson Source and Wikipedia put the name in front of television audiences.

For a design guide, Service Merchandise shows how a retail brand can be built on a printed catalogue and a counter-service routine, and how a 1995 redesign set out to move that identity from the counter to the shelf. Compare it with Target, which the Orlando Sentinel named as a rival in 1995, and Bed Bath & Beyond, which Wikipedia names among the discounters that took housewares trade from Service Merchandise. For this guide we use showroom red, catalogue cream and order-form blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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