Thread by @faizansiddiqi

Sears vs Amazon. Boring Vs New. Staying-Power vs Building-Power.

Some History:

In 1886 Richard W. Sears founded the R.W. Sears Watch Company in Minneapolis, to sell watches by mail order. He relocated his business to Chicago in 1887, hired Alvah C. Roebuck to repair watches.

They established a mail-order business for watches and jewellery. Their first catalog was offered the same year. In 1889 Sears sold his business but a few years later founded, with Roebuck, another mail-order operation, which in 1893 came to be known as Sears, Roebuck and Company

In 1895 Julius Rosenwald, a wealthy clothing manufacturer, bought out Roebuck’s interest, and he reorganized the mail-order business. Sears meanwhile wrote the company’s soon-to-be-famous catalogs.

The company grew phenomenally by selling a range of merchandise at low prices to farms and villages that had no other convenient access to retail outlets. The initiation of rural free delivery (1896) and of parcel post (1913) by the U.S. Postal Service

That enabled Sears to send its merchandise to even the most isolated customers. Rosenwald succeeded Sears as president of the company in 1909.
Between 1920 and 1943 Sears owned Encyclopaedia Britannica, which it sold through the catalog.

In 1924 Gen. Robert E. Wood joined the company and became its guiding genius for the next 30 years. Wood noted that the automobile was making retail outlets in urban centres more accessible to consumers in outlying suburbs and rural areas.

To exploit this opportunity, he opened the first Sears retail store (in Chicago) in 1925, and the number of stores increased so rapidly that by 1931 retail sales had topped mail-order sales. The company flourished in the economic boom

after World War II and was not seriously challenged as America’s largest retailer until the 1980s, when the Kmart Corporation surpassed it in total sales. Wal-Mart eventually surpassed both and became, before the end of the 20th century, the largest retailer in the world.

In the 1980s Sears diversified into such businesses as real estate and financial services, but by 1992 Sears began selling off some subsidiaries in order to concentrate on its lagging core retail operations.

It discontinued its general catalog in 1993, ( For over 100 years, they had sold everything from hubcaps to houses via mail order and shipped them all over the country. Amazon was founded in 1994)

In 1995 it spun off its largest subsidiary, the Allstate Corporation, an insurance company founded by Sears in 1931. In addition to selling household goods, hardware, and clothing, Sears provided repair services for automobiles and for household items

such as appliances, electronic equipment, and home heating and cooling systems. In 2002 Sears purchased the retailer Lands’ End for nearly $2 billion. Three years later Sears was acquired by Kmart for some $12 billion.

Clearly all this info is out there, what is interesting is when you see how it ended for Sears. They had it all,On paper, Sears had everything to be the e-commerce retailer that dominated the globe. Having the conviction and doing are 2 separate things.

Many people have all the piece on the chess board too, but they make the wrong moves, they under estimate their assets and over estimate their ability. By 1985, they had their own credit card, Discover, to rival MasterCard and Visa.

They had their own insurance co in Allstate. They partnered with IBM to create 'Prodigy,' one of the first proto-ISPs in 1984, that offered all sorts of online services (except buying stuff from Sears) years before the World Wide Web existed. It could have been a sales channel

In theory, they were posed to make e-commerce a thing back in the late '80s and sweep the world in the '90s with no chance for outsiders like Amazon, who had to build their stuff from the ground up, to catch on.Yet they fumbled in the offline to online transition and the

consolidation of every thing they had in their fold. In October 2018 Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In February 2019 a federal judge approved the sale of the holding company to Lampert’s hedge fund, ESL Investments, for $5.2 billion. 100 years of COD

But they didn't invent COD(More on COD if you want to read here in my blog blog.chinookstrategy.com/cod/)For Sears it was all manual, end of an era, letting others take it space. It could be a mix of things, but most of all it was a series of bad calls. Fast forward to the present day

Amazon is actually about to get in to retail storefronts. Aka, Amazon is opening up a Walmart (More on that here in my newsletters

https://twitter.com/faizansiddiqi/status/1428668258996084743

) So Amazon came in, built a reverse Sears (in less time than it took Sears)

Used the power of the internet to drive them out of business whilst building a tech/delivery/customer services moat, only to get back-into retail. It took Amazon 27 Years to dominate the retail business and it took 134 years for Sears to go from hero to bust.

There is an entire generation that has not heard and wont know about Sears. Build with conviction but challenge all assumptions. @rebootdude @owaisz @jehan_ara @Huk06 @TalhaIzhar @ShahidM99 @AliSika80624812 @raza_matin @Ash_Kalim @alinawab
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears