Direct Mail is an amazing medium.  Montgomery Ward proved it and
Amazon.com is the new behometh

Aaron Mont­gomery Ward (1843 – 1913) is regard­ed as the founder of both direct mail and direct mar­ket­ing. Ward, a trav­el­ling sale­man, recog­nised that rur­al cus­tomers often want­ed “city” goods, but their only access to them was through rur­al retail­ers who had lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion and did not offer any guar­an­tee of qual­i­ty. He believed that direct mail and mail-order could be prof­itable and he formed a com­pa­ny and issued his first mail-order “cat­a­logue” – a sin­gle sheet of paper list­ing 163 items with order­ing instruc­tions. This small busi­ness was earn­ing over $1m by 1888. (Read more in A His­to­ry of Direct Mar­ket­ing – up to the 1970s)

Richard War­ren Sears (1863–1914), used fly­ers and cat­a­logues sell­ing watch­es ini­tial­ly to rur­al cus­tomers and peo­ple liv­ing in small towns. By 1896, the Sears cat­a­logue fea­tured 500+ prod­ucts and was dis­trib­uted to 300,000+ address­es in the US.

Jeff Bezos found­ed Ama­zon in Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton, in July 1994 to sell books on line. With­in a few years it was sell­ing music, con­sumer elec­tron­ics, home improve­ment items, and even toys. Today it is the world’s largest online mar­ket­place a source of just about every con­sumer good that a man, woman or child could want.

“Merely to have this Catalogue in your home is to see and know all that modern merchandising can produce.”

The cat­a­logue dis­played above in this 1927 adver­tise­ment, cat­a­logue Num­ber 105 for the Fall-Win­ter 1926–27, car­ried just about every­thing for the home, the fam­i­ly and farm, “almost every­thing a Man , Woman or Child wears or uses.” It boasts on the cov­er that “In 1872 Mr. Mont­gomery Ward found a new way to low­er prices through sell­ing direct by mail at one small prof­it. For fifty-four years his pol­i­cy of low­er prices with­out a sac­ri­fice for qual­i­ty has been con­sci­en­tious­ly fol­lowed by Mont­gomery Ward and Co.

Con­sumers could get their free copy of the cat­a­logue on request. “You may as well share in the sav­ings it offers,” reads the adver­tise­ment. “You may as well share in the mil­lions of dol­lars this book will save in mil­lions of Amer­i­can homes.”

Ama­zon was found­ed by Jeff Bezos in Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton, in July 1994 to sell books on line. With­in a few years it was sell­ing music, con­sumer elec­tron­ics, home improve­ment items, and even toys. Today it is the world’s largest online mar­ket­place, a source of just about every con­sumer good that a man, woman or child could want.

The his­to­ry of Jeff Bezos and amazon.com is still being writ­ten. A Google search at the time this was writ­ten gen­er­at­ed 2,480,000,000 results.