Richard Warren Sears

Sears was born in Stewartville, Minnesota. His father was James Warren Sears, born circa 1828 in New York, a blacksmith and wagon-maker; his mother was Eliza Burton, born in Ohio circa 1843. The family was living in Spring Valley, Minnesota, by June 1870, where his father served as a city councilman and eventually sold his wagon shop in 1875. Both of his parents were of English descent. During his boyhood in Spring Valley, he befriended Almanzo Wilder, the future husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder. In 1880, he started working as a telegraph operator in the town of North Branch, Minnesota, for the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway, and was later transferred to North Redwood Falls, Minnesota, to be station agent there.

In 1886, when Sears was 23, his station received a shipment of gold watches from a Chicago manufacturer, but the local consignee, jeweller Edward Stegerson, refused the unsolicited shipment.

A common scam existing at the time involved wholesalers who would ship their products to retailers who had not ordered them. Upon refusal, the wholesaler would offer the already price-hiked items to the retailer at a lower consignment cost in the guise of alleviating the cost to ship the items back. The unsuspecting retailer would then agree to take this new-found bargain off the wholesaler's hands, mark up the items and sell them to the public, making a small profit in the transaction.But Stegerson, a retailer savvy to the scam, flatly refused the watches. Young Sears jumped at the opportunity, and made an agreement with the wholesaler to keep any profit he reaped above $12, and then he set about offering his wares to other station agents along the railroad line for $14. The watches were considered an item of urban sophistication. Also because of the growth of railways, and the recent application of time zones, farmers and railroads needed to keep time accurately which had not been necessary until then. For those two reasons the station agents had no trouble selling the watches to passers-by.

Within six months, Sears had netted $5,000 and felt so confident in this venture that he moved to Minneapolis and founded the R. W. Sears Watch Company. He began placing advertisements in farm publications and mailing flyers to potential clients. From the beginning, it was clear that Sears had a talent for writing promotional copy. He took the personal approach in his ads, speaking directly to rural and small-town communities, persuading them to purchase by mail-order.