Richard Warren Sears (1863-1914)

He was born in Stewartville in rural Minnesota and began his career as a railway station agent in North Redwood. In 1886, he acquired a shipment of unwanted watches and successfully sold them by mail to other station agents. This method led him to establish the R.W. Sears Watch Co., first in Minneapolis, then Chicago. In 1893, he partnered with Alvah Curtis Roebuck, a watch repairman, establishing Sears, Roebuck & Co. Sears proved to be a marketing genius, revolutionizing retail through innovative catalog sales and advertising techniques that appealed to rural Americans who had limited access to quality goods. Under his leadership, the company expanded beyond watches to become a comprehensive mail-order retailer offering everything from clothing to farm equipment, all coupled with generous return policies and competitive pricing. In 1895, after the departure of Roebuck and to inject the required capital, Sears sold half of the company for $75,000 to Aaron Nusbaum and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenwald.

He retired from business in 1909 when Rosenwald took over as the company president. He moved to his farm at Lake Bluff north of Chicago and died of alcoholism at the age of fifty worth some $25-million, having transformed American retail and established one of the country's most enduring commercial enterprises. In 1895, he married Anna Mechstroth of Minneapolis, the daughter of German immigrants, and they had four children (listed).