Montgomery Ward

Montgomery Ward (later known as Wards) is an online retailer that carries the same name as the former American department store chain, founded as the world's #1 mail order business in 1872 by Aaron Montgomery Ward, and which went out of business in 2001. At its height, it was one of the largest retailers in the United States, but declining sales in the late 20th century forced the original Montgomery Ward to close all of its retail stores and catalog operations by early 2001. After a near four year absence, the Montgomery Ward brand was revived as an online and catalog-based retailer headquartered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in late 2004, when Direct Marketing Services Inc. purchased much of the intellectual property assets of the former Wards, reviving the brand as an online retailer with no physical stores. In 2008, ownership changed over to Swiss Colony in Monroe, Wisconsin.

Expansion into retail outlets

Ward died in 1913, after 41 years running the catalog business. The company president, William C. Thorne (eldest son of the co-founder) died in 1917, and was succeeded by Robert J. Thorne. Robert Thorne retired in 1920 due to ill health.

In 1926, the company broke with its mail-order-only tradition when it opened its first retail outlet store in Plymouth, Indiana. It continued to operate its catalog business while pursuing an aggressive campaign to build retail outlets in the late-1920s. In 1928, two years after opening its first outlet, it had opened 244 stores. By 1929, it had more than doubled its number of outlets to 531. Its flagship retail store in Chicago was located on Michigan Avenue between Madison and Washington streets.

In 1930, the company turned down a merger offer from rival Sears. In 1939, as part of a Christmas promotional campaign, staff copywriter Robert L. May created the character and illustrated poem of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Six million copies of the storybook were distributed in 1946. The song was popularized by Gene Autry.

Government seizure

In April 1944, four months into a nationwide strike by the company’s 12,000 workers, U.S. Army troops seized the Chicago offices of Montgomery Ward & Company. Montgomery Ward refused to comply with a War Labor Board order to recognize the unions and institute the terms of a collective bargaining agreement. Eight months later, with Montgomery Ward continuing to refuse to recognize the unions, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an Executive Order seizing all of Montgomery Ward’s property nationwide, citing the War Labor Disputes Act as well as his power under the Constitution as Commander in Chief. In 1945, Truman ended the seizure and the Supreme Court ended the pending appeal as moot.

Downfall

In 1955, investor Louis Wolfson waged a high-profile proxy fight to obtain control of the board of Montgomery Ward. This fight led to a state court decision that Illinois corporations are not entitled to stagger their boards under that state's laws, to tax litigation over whether the costs of a proxy fight are an "ordinary and necessary business expense," and, in time, it helped inspire new Securities and Exchange Commission rules concerning proxies.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1950s, the company was slow to respond to general movement of the American middle class to suburbia. While its old rivals Sears, J.C. Penney, Macy's, McRae's, and Dillard's established new anchor outlets in the growing number of suburban shopping malls, the top executives thought such moves as too expensive, sticking to their downtown and main street stores until the company had lost too much market share to compete with its rivals. Its catalog business had begun to slip by the 1960s. In 1968, it merged with Container Corporation of America to become Marcor Inc.

Bankruptcy

By the 1990s, however, even its old rivals had begun to lose ground to low-price competition from Kmart, Target, and especially Wal-Mart, which stripped away even more of Montgomery Ward's old customer base. In 1997, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, emerging from bankruptcy court protection in August 1999 as a wholly owned subsidiary of GE Capital, by then its largest shareholder. As part of a last-ditch effort to remain competitive, the company closed 250 retail locations in 30 U.S. states, closed all the Lechmere stores, abandoned the speciality store strategy, renamed and rebranded the chain as simply Wards (although unrelated, Wards was the original name for the now-defunct Circuit City), and spent millions of dollars to renovate its remaining outlets to be flashier and more consumer-friendly. But GE reneged on promises of further financial support of Wards' restructuring plans.

Ownership change

In July 2008, it was announced that DMSI was on the auction block, with an auction scheduled for August 2008. Catalog retailer Swiss Colony purchased DMSI on August 5, 2008. Swiss Colony has announced that it will keep the Montgomery Ward catalog division open. The Web site launched on September 10, 2008, with new catalogs mailing in February 2009. A month before the catalogs' launch, Swiss Colony President John Baumann told United Press International the retailer might also resurrect Wards' Signature and Powr-Kraft store brands.

Distribution centers

Four of the six massive catalog distribution centers built by Montgomery Ward from 1921 to 1929 remain and three of these have been the focus of projects of adaptive reuse that have become perhaps the most tangible legacy of Montgomery Ward. Two others have been demolished for various types of redevelopment.

In Baltimore, the eight-story, 1,300,000-square-foot (121,000 m2) building at 1800 Washington Blvd. southwest of downtown Baltimore, now known as Montgomery Park, has been restored for office use as a green building with a green roof, storm water reutilization systems, and extensive use of recycled building materials.

The eight-story Fort Worth facility at West 7th St and Carroll was built in 1928 to replace the previous operation in a former Chevrolet assembly plant across the street. In its history the warehouse went through a flood in 1949 (to the second floor) and a direct hit from a tornado in 2000.After the demise of the company, the building was developed into a mixed-use condominium project and retail center known as Montgomery Plaza.

The Portland center at NW 27th and Vaughn, also known now as Montgomery Park, ceased operation as a warehouse in 1976. It was purchased by a developer in 1984 and is now the second largest office building in Portland.

The Kansas City distribution center at St. John St. and North Belmont Blvd. still stands, but remains undeveloped.

The St. Paul center was the fourth of the distribution centers to be built and employed up to twenty-five hundred employees in the 1920s. It also had over a million square feet, or twenty-seven acres, under roof, making it the largest building in St. Paul at the time. The last remaining section of the original building was demolished in 1996, and the site at 1400 University Ave W is now a shopping center called Midway Marketplace.

The Oakland, California facility, originally constructed in 1923, was an eight-story 950,000-square-foot (88,000 m2) structure of reinforced concrete frame that was the largest industrial building in Oakland.After years of community organizing that urged city leaders to either demolish or re-purpose the site, despite opposition by preservation groups the building at 2875 International Blvd. was demolished in 2003 and has been replaced by the Cesar Chavez Education Center, an elementary school.

History

Ward had conceived of the revolutionary idea of a dry goods mail-order business in Chicago, Illinois, after several years of working as a traveling salesman among rural customers. He observed that rural customers often wanted "city" goods but were often victimized by monopolists who offered no guarantee of quality. Ward also believed that by eliminating intermediaries, he could cut costs and make a wide variety of goods available to rural customers, who could purchase goods by mail and pick them up at the nearest train station.

After several false starts, including the destruction of his first inventory by the Great Chicago Fire, Ward started his business at his first offices at the corner of North Clark and Kedzie streets, with two partners and using $1,600 they had raised in capital. The first catalog in August 1872 consisted of an 8 by 12 in. single-sheet price list, showing 163 articles for sale with ordering instructions. Ward himself wrote the first catalog copy. His two partners left the following year, but he continued the struggling business and was joined by his future brother-in-law Richard Thorne.

In the first few years, the business was not well received by rural retailers, who considered Ward a threat and sometimes publicly burned his catalog. Despite the opposition, however, the business grew at a fast pace over the next several decades, fueled by demand primarily from rural customers who were attracted by the wide selection of items unavailable to them locally. Customers were also attracted by the innovative and unprecedented company policy of "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back", which Ward began using in 1875. Although Ward turned the copy writing over to department heads, he continued poring over every detail in the catalog for accuracy. Ward himself became widely popular among residents of Chicago, championing the causes of the common folk over the wealthy, most notably in his successful fight to establish parkland along Lake Michigan.