When was lands end founded

Our main location is in the middle of a acre cornfield in rural Wisconsin. Lands' End, Inc. The company's emphasis on quality merchandise and customer service has made it a leader in the mail-order marketing field. Based in rural Wisconsin, Lands' End has grown steadily since its inception as a seller of sailing equipment for racing boats.

By the late s, the company was marketing clothing for children and products for the home, in addition to its tailored clothing for men and women, as well as overseeing a popular Website, where customers could view merchandise and place orders. The company set up shop in a storefront at North Elston Avenue, along the Chicago River in the city's old tannery district.

In , Comer produced a catalog offering Lands' End's goods through the mail. The first booklet, entitled "The Racing Sailors' Equipment Guide," was printed in black-and-white, had 84 pages, and featured a variety of technical-looking sailing implements on its cover. A printer's error, however, resulted in the company's name being rendered "Lands' End," with the apostrophe in the wrong place. Since Comer couldn't afford to have the piece reprinted, he decided to simply change the name of the business to correspond with the brochure.

Lands' End began filling orders from its basement. The company shipped out orders the day they were received, and unconditionally guaranteed all that it sold. In a subsequent catalog, Comer put his copywriting skills to work in an innovative, customer-friendly format.

The text in the Lands' End publications, rather than being dry, technical, and brief, had a casual, engaging, informative, and sympathetic air. Customers were put at ease reading it and came to feel that they had developed a personal relationship with the company that had produced the catalog and the items that filled it.

Comer is credited with originating the concept of the "magalogue," in which pictured items for sale are surrounded and cushioned by appealing text and illustrations. Lands' End's customers began to look to the company for more than just technical sailing gear, and many felt comfortable writing to the company to ask about purchasing foul weather gear and duffel bags.

In response, Lands' End added a small clothing section to the catalog, featuring rainsuits, canvas luggage, shoes, sweaters, and some other clothing. The catalog's name was accordingly altered to simply the "Lands' End Catalogue.

Throughout the s, Lands' End continued to sell sailing equipment and related items through its catalog. In , Lands' End's mail order business had grown large enough to merit computerization of its inventory and sales operations. Lands' End made its first foray into the world of manufacturing something other than sailing equipment in , when the company began to make its own duffle bags.

The next year, Lands' End also began to market its own brand of rainsuit, a two-piece outfit worn by sailors in foul weather. In , the company came out with its first all-color catalog, which featured 30 pages of sailing equipment and two full pages of clothing. By the following year, the company had decided to shift its emphasis to the sale of clothing and canvas luggage, and the quotient of non-nautical equipment had risen to include eight pages displaying duffel bags, and three pages of clothing, including a men's chamois-cloth shirt.

In the spring of , Lands' End issued its first catalog that paid serious attention to clothing, with 13 out of 40 pages dedicated to dry goods. In addition, the company introduced its own line of soft luggage, called Square Rigger. After , Lands' End phased out the sailing equipment aspect of its operation altogether, retaining the rugged, reliable, and traditional nature that sailing implied, and applying it to a broader variety of clothing.

In , the company introduced its first button-down Oxford-cloth shirt, heralding the move to offerings of solid, conservative, basic clothing upon which it would build its future. Lands' End also began to shift its operations from its Chicago base to a small town in rural Wisconsin called Dodgeville. Comer chose this location for his growing enterprise because, as he noted in a piece of promotional literature, "I fell in love with the gently rolling hills and woods and cornfields and being able to see the changing seasons.

The company began this shift when it moved its Chicago warehouse to an empty garage in Dodgeville in Lands' End's operations were also shifting in another significant way during this time, as the company moved from filling orders by mail to filling orders by phone. The company had brought its first toll-free number on line, and operators were standing by to take customer calls by the middle of With this shift, the company had incorporated another point of contact with the customer into its operation, and it stressed politeness and customer service in its operators, a continuation of the message it strove to portray in its catalog.

Calls were answered within a ring and a half, and operators were permitted to chat with customers for as long as it took to make a sale. Lands' End continued the process of transferring operations to Dodgeville in , when it opened an office in a pre-existing strip mall, while it broke ground for an office building and an accompanying 33,square-foot warehouse in a Dodgeville industrial park.

The following year, the company moved into its new space on "Lands' End Lane. Interested in gaining more control over the quality of the clothes it sold, the company began to recruit employees who were knowledgeable about fabric and the manufacture of clothing. In addition to its new facilities in Dodgeville, Lands' End also opened an outlet store in Chicago, just one block from its original location, to sell the goods that made up excess inventory if catalog sales of a particular item were not as brisk as expected.

Further physical expansion took place the following year, in , when Lands' End began work on a 40,square-foot addition to its warehouse in Wisconsin. The company also broke ground on a plant to manufacture its own line of soft luggage in West Union, Iowa.

To further support its burgeoning sales and reputation, Lands' End embarked on a national advertising campaign in The purpose of this effort was to make customers aware of the Lands' End business philosophy, and associate its name with service, value, and quality. The company used the expression "direct merchant" to describe its relationship, as a manufacturer and distributor, with the customer. In the next year, Lands' End followed up this effort with a significant investment in computerization, as the company introduced on-line customer sales and ordering to speed up processes.

Efficient use of computers was a keystone of Lands' End's program for success, and soon computer systems enabled operators to provide customers with a wealth of information at the touch of a finger. In addition, Lands' End continued to expand its warehouse facilities as it started construction on an additional ,square-foot warehouse across the street from its original Dodgeville facilities.

Moving into this facility in required the unloading of 8, boxes of goods so that the company's new automated sorting system could be made operational. By this time, a nationwide boom in mail-order shopping was beginning to take off, and Lands' End saw its sales and earnings start to grow. In an effort to exploit Americans' increasing willingness to shop by phone using their credit cards, Lands' End introduced a line of fancier clothing for men and women in , under the name Charter Club.

We sincerely apologize for any offense. In , Lands' End announced it would close the remaining store-within-a-store branches in Sears stores, after its parent company, Sears Holdings, announced that Lands' End would strike out individually from now on. Wiki Content. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Lands' End. Edit source History Talk 0. History [ ] Lands' End began as a mail-order yachting supply company in in Chicago.

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