Aaron Montgomery Ward

Merchant, born in Chatham, New Jersey, USA. His parents moved to Niles, MI, where he did odd jobs until 1865, when he moved to Chicago and became a clerk for Field, Palmer, & Leiter. Working as a travelling salesman for a dry-goods wholsealer (c.1870), he noted the disparity between the cash prices farmers received and the high cost of retail products. In 1872, with partner George Thorne, he put out a single-sheet catalogue of dry goods at reasonable prices and guaranteed customer satisfaction. Success was immediate - by 1876 the catalogue had grown to 150 illustrated pages, and sales reached $1 million by 1888. With the completion of the Ward Tower in Chicago (1900), Montgomery Ward's attracted national attention, with sales of $40 million by his death. The company passed to Thorne's five sons, since Ward had none. Ward's wife later bequeathed more than $8 million to Northwestern University for a medical and dental school. His foresight is credited with securing Chicago's Grant Park as a public lakefront area.

Aaron Montgomery Ward
Aaron Montgomery Ward
Born	February 17, 1844 Chatham, New Jersey
Died	December 7, 1913 Chicago, Illinois

Aaron Montgomery Ward (February 17, 1844 - December 7, 1913) was an American businessman notable for the invention of mail order.

The mail-order industry started about a hundred years ago with Aaron Montgomery Ward, who tried out an idea and launched an industry that has influenced the lifestyles of millions of American families. Ward, a young traveling salesman of dry goods, was concerned over the plight of many rural midwest Americans who he thought were overcharged and underserved by many of the smalltown retailers on whom they had to rely for their general merchandise.

Aaron Montgomery Ward was born on February 17, 1844 in Chatham, New Jersey. When he was about nine years old, his father, Sylvester Ward, moved the family to Niles, Michigan, where Aaron attended public schools. Being a fair salesman, within nine months he was engaged as a salesman in a general country store at six dollars per month plus board, a considerable salary at the time. In this period, Ward learned retailing.

In 1865, Ward located in Chicago, and worked for Case and Sobin, a lamp house. Chicago was the center of the wholesale dry-goods trade, and in the 1860s Ward joined the leading dry-goods house, Field Palmer & He worked for Field for two years and then joined the wholesale dry-goods business of Wills, Greg & In tedious rounds of train trips to southern communities, hiring rigs at the local stables, driving out to the crossroads stores and listening to the complaints of the back-country proprietors and their rural customers, he conceived a new merchandising technique: direct mail sales to country people. Ward shaped a plan to buy goods at low cost for cash.

None of Ward's friends or business acquaintances joined in his enthusiasm for his revolutionary idea. Although his idea was generally considered to border on lunacy and his first inventory was destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire, Ward persevered. In August of 1872, with two fellow employees and a total capital of $1,600, he formed Montgomery Ward & It is said that in 1880, Aaron Montgomery Ward himself initially wrote all catalog copy.

The following year, both of Ward's partners left him, but he hung on.

Ward's catalog soon was copied by other enterprising merchants, most notably Richard W. Although today the Sears Tower in Chicago is the United States's tallest building, there was a time when Montgomery Ward's headquarters was similarly distinguished. The Montgomery Ward Tower, on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Madison Street in Chicago, reigned as a major tourist attraction in the early-1900s.

Ward fought for the poor people's access to Chicago's lakefront.

Montgomery Ward died in 1913, at the age of 69. Today, more than a century later, Montgomery Ward & adheres to the philosophy of "satisfaction guaranteed",an unheard-of policy when Ward announced it in 1875.

The Montgomery Ward catalog's place in history was assured when the Grolier Club, a society of bibliophiles in New York, exhibited it in 1946 alongside Webster's dictionary as one of the hundred books with the most influence on life and culture of the American people.