Company origins Aaron Montgomery Ward started his business in Chicago; conflicting reports place his first office either in a single room at 825 North
Clark Street or in a loft above a livery stable on Kinzie Street, between Rush and State Streets. In 1883, the company's catalog had grown to 240 pages and 10,000 items. In 1896, Ward encountered its first serious competition in the mail order business, when
Richard Warren Sears introduced his first general catalog. In 1900, Ward had total sales of $8.7 million, compared to $10 million for
Sears, and both companies vied for dominance during much of the 20th century. By 1904, Ward had expanded such that it mailed three million catalogs, weighing each, to customers. In 1908, the company opened a building stretching along nearly one-quarter mile of the
Chicago River, north of downtown Chicago. The building, known as the
Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalog House, served as the company 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 historic landmark in May 2000. In the decades before 1930, Montgomery Ward built a network of large distribution centers across the country in
Baltimore,
Fort Worth,
Kansas City,
Oakland,
Portland, and
St. Paul. In most cases, these reinforced concrete structures were the largest industrial structures in their respective locations. The Baltimore
Montgomery Ward Warehouse and Retail Store was added to the
National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
Expansion into retail outlets 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 declined a merger offer from rival chain Sears. Losing money during the
Great Depression, Ward alarmed its major investors, including
J. P. Morgan, Jr. In 1931, Morgan hired a new president,
Sewell Avery, who cut staff levels and stores, changed lines, hired store rather than catalog managers, and refurbished stores. These actions allowed the company to become profitable before the end of the 1930s. Ward was very successful in its retail business. "Green awning" stores dotted hundreds of small towns across the country. Larger stores were built in the major cities. By the end of the 1930s, Montgomery Ward had become the country's largest retailer, and Sewell Avery became the company's chief executive officer. Avery had 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 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, President
Harry S. Truman ended the seizure and the
Supreme Court dismissed the pending appeal as moot.
Post War , appeared as a
medallion at many Ward stores. This one is in
Brattleboro, Vermont. After World War II, Sewell Avery believed the country would fall back into a recession or even a depression. He decided to not open any new stores, and did not even permit expenditure for paint to freshen the existing stores. His plan was to bank profits to preserve liquidity when the recession or depression he anticipated hit, and then buy up his retail competition. Without new stores or any investment back into the business, Montgomery Ward declined in sales volume compared to Sears. Many have blamed the conservative decisions of Avery, who seemed not to understand the postwar years' changing economy. As new shopping centers were built after the war, Sears was perceived to have better locations than Ward. Nonetheless, for many years Ward was still the nation's third-largest department store chain. In 1955, investor
Louis Wolfson waged a high-profile
proxy fight to obtain control of the board of Montgomery Ward. The new board forced the resignation of Avery. This fight led to a state court decision that
Illinois corporations were not entitled to stagger elections of board members. In 1961, company president John Barr hired
Robert Elton Brooker to lead Montgomery Ward as president in its turnaround. Brooker brought with him a number of key new management people, including Edward Donnell, former manager of Sears' Los Angeles stores. The new management team achieved the turnaround, reducing the number of suppliers from 15,000 to 7,000 and the number of brands being carried dropped from 168 to 16. Ward's private brands were given 95 percent of the volume compared with 40 percent in 1960. The results of these changes were lower handling costs and higher quality standards. Buying was centralized but store operations were decentralized, under a new territory system modeled after Sears. In 1966, Ed Donnell was named company president. Brooker continued as chairman and chief executive officer until 1976. In 1968, Brooker helped engineer a friendly merger with
Container Corporation of America, the new parent company being named MARCOR. Despite the merger, the company continued to struggle into the 1970s. In 1973, its 102nd year in business, it purchased a small
discount store chain, the
Miami-based Jefferson Stores, renaming these locations Jefferson Ward.
Mobil, flush with cash from the recent
rise in oil prices and looking to diversify, bought a controlling share of MARCOR in 1974, only to acquire the company outright in 1976. The company was an early entrant in the
home computer market with the
CyberVision 2001 in 1978, developed by the Authorship Resource, Inc., of
Franklin, Ohio, and primarily manufactured by United Chem-Con. However, mounting competition from other computer companies as well as manufacturing problems compelled the three companies to pull the plug on the CyberVision product by the early 1980s. By 1980, Mobil realized that the Montgomery Ward stores were doing poorly in comparison to the Jefferson stores, and decided that high quality discount units, along the lines of Dayton Hudson Company's
Target stores, would be the retailer's future. Within 18 months, management quintupled the size of the operation, now called Jefferson Ward, to more than 40 units in the
Delaware Valley and
Richmond metropolitan areas, and planned to convert one-third of Montgomery Ward's existing stores to the Jefferson Ward model. The burden of servicing the new stores fell to the tiny Jefferson staff, who were overwhelmed by the increased store count, had no experience in dealing with some of the product lines they now carried, and were unfamiliar with buying for northern markets. Almost immediately, Jefferson had turned from a small moneymaker into a large drain on profits. The company sold the chain's 18-store northern division to
Bradlees, a division of
Stop & Shop, in 1985. The remaining stores closed. In 1985, the company closed its catalog business after 113 years and began an aggressive policy of renovating its remaining stores. It restructured many of the store layouts in the downtown areas of larger cities and affluent neighborhoods into
boutique-like specialty stores, as these were drawing business from traditional department stores. In 1986, fellow MARCOR firm, Container Corporation of America, was divested by Mobil. This effectively dissolved the MARCOR division and left Montgomery Ward as a direct subsidiary of Mobil. Analysts saw the CCA sale as an effort to go back on their diversification efforts, as the debts incurred since MARCOR's acquisition began to weigh the oil giant down, and many predicted Montgomery Ward was next to be sold. These theories were confirmed in January 1987, when Mobil stated they would be looking into spinning off the company in the near future. In March 1988, the company management undertook a successful $3.8 billion (~$ in )
leveraged buyout, making Montgomery Ward a privately held company. File:Montgomery Ward Bluefield, WV.jpg|A Montgomery Ward Building in
Bluefield, West Virginia File:Abandoned Montgomery Ward.jpg|A vacant Montgomery Ward store,
Regency Mall,
Augusta, Georgia File:Vacant Montgomery Ward Huntington Beach.JPG|A former Montgomery Ward store,
Huntington Center,
Huntington Beach, California, demolished in 2010 File:Electric Ave Logo - Montgomery Wards.JPG|An "Electric Avenue" logo on a closed store in
Panorama City, California, 2010
Bankruptcy, restructuring, and liquidation By the 1990s even its rivals began to lose ground to low-price competition from the likes of
Target and
Walmart, which eroded even more of Montgomery Ward's traditional customer base. In 1997, it filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy, emerging from protection by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois in August 1999 as a wholly owned subsidiary of
GE Capital, which was by then its largest shareholder. As part of a last-ditch effort to remain competitive, the company closed over 100 retail locations in 30 U.S. states, abandoned the specialty store strategy, rebranded the chain as simply
Wards, and spent millions of dollars to renovate its remaining outlets to be flashier and more consumer-friendly. GE Capital reneged on promises of further financial support of Montgomery Ward's restructuring plans. On December 28, 2000, after lower-than-expected sales during the Christmas season, the company announced it would cease operating, close its remaining 250 retail outlets, and lay off its 37,000 employees. ==As online retailer==