What Happened to the Sears Catalog?

The Sears catalog ran for 105 years. When it was discontinued in January 1993, it was the longest-running general merchandise catalog in American retail history. At its peak in the mid-twentieth century, the Sears "Big Book" was the largest circulation periodical in the United States — not a magazine, not a newspaper, but a retail catalog that functioned as a general store for rural and suburban households that did not have access to a full-scale department store.

Understanding why it ended, what replaced it, and what remained reveals something about how the catalog format evolved and which segments survived when the big general catalogs did not.

1888 to 1993: What the Catalog Was

Richard Warren Sears started selling watches by mail in 1886. The first general merchandise catalog appeared in 1888. By the turn of the century the catalog carried farm equipment, clothing, furniture, musical instruments, sewing machines, and eventually automobiles and prefabricated house kits. The catalog was a mechanism for extending retail reach to customers who lived too far from a city to shop in person — and in 1900 that described most of the American population.

The Christmas "Wish Book" was a separate, smaller catalog introduced in 1933 and aimed at children. It became a cultural touchstone. Families kept the Wish Book for months. Children circled items. The catalog functioned as both a shopping tool and an aspirational object in households that had limited access to the kind of consumer goods it depicted.

The Big Book at its peak ran to more than 1,500 pages. It carried appliances, tools, clothing, jewelry, sporting goods, auto parts, and hundreds of other categories. Sears maintained its own brands — Kenmore for appliances, Craftsman for tools, DieHard for batteries — and built those into high-recognition national brands primarily through the catalog and its stores.

The logistics operation behind the catalog was substantial. Sears operated regional catalog centers across the country that handled order intake, warehousing, and fulfillment. The infrastructure was built for a pre-telephone, pre-internet era when mail was the primary non-face-to-face channel for commerce.

Why It Was Discontinued

The January 1993 announcement that Sears would discontinue the Big Book catalog pointed to several converging pressures.

Catalog costs had become structurally uncompetitive. Printing and mailing a 1,500-page catalog to tens of millions of households was expensive at 1993 economics. Paper, printing, postage, and returns handling had become a significant cost center against which the catalog needed to justify its revenue contribution. As specialty retailers and discounters grew, the catalog's broad generalist approach became harder to position.

Specialty retail and big-box stores had taken category after category. Home Depot and Lowe's had absorbed the hardware and home improvement customer. Circuit City and Best Buy had taken consumer electronics. The Gap and its peers had taken fashion apparel. Each specialized competitor offered deeper selection within its category than Sears could maintain across all categories in a single book. The general merchandise catalog that worked when customers had limited retail access made less sense when those customers could drive to a strip mall with ten specialist retailers.

The Sears store network had expanded enough that the catalog's geographic reach argument weakened. Sears had built a substantial mall-anchor store presence by the 1970s and 1980s. The original rationale for the catalog — reaching customers who could not get to a Sears store — had eroded as the store footprint grew.

The catalog operation was losing money. Sears announced the closure of the catalog division, which resulted in approximately 50,000 job losses across the catalog centers and related operations — one of the larger single retail layoffs of that era.

The Wish Book continued for several years as a toy-focused holiday catalog before it too was eventually discontinued.

What the Sears Online Presence Became

Sears moved online in the late 1990s, initially through sears.com. The website retained the Kenmore and Craftsman brand pages and eventually attempted to build an online marketplace to compete with Amazon. Those attempts did not succeed at the scale needed.

Sears Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2018. The company that emerged from bankruptcy retains the Sears and Kmart brand names and operates a small number of physical stores and an online presence at sears.com. As of 2026 the online store is a vestigial operation — it carries appliances and some home goods but bears no resemblance in scale or ambition to the catalog operation it replaced.

The Kenmore brand was sold separately. Craftsman was sold to Stanley Black and Decker in 2017. DieHard was sold to Advance Auto Parts in 2019. The owned-brand portfolio that the catalog built over a century was dispersed across different owners.

Who Filled the Gaps

The Sears catalog covered so many categories that no single successor filled the space. What happened instead was a category-by-category replacement.

Home furnishings and decor: The Restoration Hardware catalog (now RH) and the Williams-Sonoma family of catalogs — including Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, and West Elm — moved into the premium home furnishings catalog segment. Crate and Barrel built a strong catalog-to-web business. These brands do not attempt the general merchandise breadth Sears offered, but they cover the home interior categories Sears once dominated at a higher price point.

Premium outdoor and home goods: Frontgate and its sibling brands under the Cornerstone Brands Group took a share of the upscale home and outdoor catalog market that Sears reached from the opposite price direction.

Appliances: No catalog-specific replacement emerged for white goods. Appliance buying shifted to big-box specialty retailers — Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowe's — and to manufacturer-direct online channels. The Kenmore brand itself, once synonymous with mail-order appliances, now licenses its name to products sold through third-party retailers without a dedicated catalog.

General hardgoods and tools: Grainger, Northern Tool, and similar industrial and consumer tool catalogs absorbed part of the tools and hardware catalog customer base. These serve a more professional and DIY-oriented buyer than the general Sears customer.

Value-priced clothing: Blair and Chadwick's, both of which have their own catalog histories, served the value-oriented clothing customer that Sears reached. Both still mail print catalogs to their customer lists as of 2026.

Children's and family apparel: The Wish Book's toy and children's category fragmented into specialty toy catalogs and the online presence of major toy retailers. No single catalog replicated the cultural weight of the Wish Book.

What the Discontinuation Tells Us

The Sears catalog ended not because the catalog format was dying in 1993 — specialty catalogs were healthy and growing at the same moment — but because the general merchandise approach was uncompetitive against specialists. The catalogs that survived and grew after 1993 were almost universally focused: one category or a tightly adjacent set of categories, served with depth rather than breadth.

The lesson the Sears closure taught the catalog industry was about focus, not about the medium itself. Specialty print catalogs continue to drive retail traffic for brands that use them well. The format that failed was the encyclopedic general catalog, not the catalog as a retail tool.

For a current directory of catalog brands across home, apparel, and outdoor categories, CatalogDB maintains an indexed list with availability status updated regularly.