When I was growing up, my family, like many others, got the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog delivered to our apartment. We never actually ordered anything from it, but I liked to daydream about belonging to a family who did. Whereas my real parents’ mail-order shopping was limited to the occasional windbreaker from Lands’ End, my imaginary Hammacher mom and dad purchased hovercraft, personal submarines, and giant floating trampolines with abandon. They knew how to party.
Between 1983 and 2005, there was a Hammacher Schlemmer store at the foot of Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue. I remember gawking outside, thinking that the stones and bricks embedded in the building’s façade—Colonel McCormick’s prized samples from the Great Pyramid, Notre Dame Cathedral, and beyond—were just part of the store’s inventory. After all, if anyone were going to sell a section of the Parthenon, it would be Hammacher Schlemmer.
The store shuttered its doors, but the company is still around, headquartered in the northwest suburbs. And it continues to publish its signature catalog, as it has for the past 137 years. Hammacher Schlemmer mails out 50 million of them a year, in fact. It’s the longest-running catalog in American history.
These mail-order catalogs of bizarre gadgets, esoteric tchotchkes, and peculiar wellness treatments adhere to the same format and style as the ones delivered to my family’s apartment more than 20 years ago. With few exceptions, the four items per page are laid out in a quadrant, each with a photo, a dense block of explanatory text, and, most famously, a descriptive title. Open the 2018 spring catalog supplement and you’ll find the Genuine Handmade Irish Shillelagh, the 911 Instant Speakerphone, the Clarity Enhancing Sunglasses, and the Closet Organizing Trouser Rack all on one page.
In the age of Amazon, few things represent an ethos more diametrically opposed to the “everything store” than the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Typing “socks” into Amazon’s search bar yields a seemingly infinite number of options. But the Hammacher Schlemmer spring catalog supplement offers only the Best Circulation Enhancing Travel Socks and the Plantar Fasciitis Foot Sleeves, 45 pages apart. There are no algorithmically predicted product placements or targeted suggestions.
The mere existence of Hammacher Schlemmer these days invites some fair, yet pointed, questions. Who’s buying this stuff? immediately pops to mind. As does: How has the company lasted this long? And: What kind of person sees the Wearable Mosquito Net and thinks, I must have this?
For much of its history, Hammacher Schlemmer was a distinctly New York brand. It still maintains its only physical store on East 57th Street in Manhattan, but the headquarters have been in the Chicago area since merchandiser and collectible-plate magnate J. Roderick MacArthur (of the MacArthur “genius” grant family) bought the company and relocated it in 1981. As the home of catalog pioneers Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck, Chicago was a natural fit for the nation’s most august purveyor of the mail-order medium.
You can find Hammacher Schlemmer’s offices on a broad stretch of Milwaukee Avenue in Niles. The first thing you see when you walk through the double glass doors of the former car dealership is a sunken indoor park, where ferns surround a gurgling stream. A series of displays in the carpeted lobby off the atrium documents the company’s history. One is dedicated to Hammacher Schlemmer’s “notable patrons,” including Steve Jobs, Marilyn Monroe, and Queen Elizabeth II.
Past those displays you’ll come to the Wall of Firsts, a long row of framed posters depicting various objects that debuted in the pages of the catalog. It begins with the First Pop Up Toaster (1931) and proceeds to such advents as the First Electric Food Blender (1934) and the First Microwave Oven (1968). It loses a little steam in the 2010s, thanks to items like the First Fashionista Christmas Tree (2012), yet finishes strong with the First Wellness Monitor Wristband (2015)—a Fitbit, though Hammacher Schlemmer won’t tell you that.
Hammacher Schlemmer’s policy has long been to remove product logos and brand names from its catalog. In the 1980s and ’90s, this was just another example of the retailer’s quirks, a vague gesture toward the privilege of ignorance: Just give me the best vacuum, I don’t care who makes it or how much it costs.
But these days there’s a more practical reason. Stephen Farrell, Hammacher Schlemmer’s director of merchandising, leads the team of buyers responsible for filling out the company’s eclectic inventory. He says the no-brand-name strategy is “particularly relevant today,” as Hammacher Schlemmer hopes to prevent people from simply searching for the products on Amazon and buying them there. (About 45 percent of the catalog inventory is exclusive to Hammacher Schlemmer. “We would prefer nothing is on Amazon,” Farrell tells me, though he says it’s not a deal breaker.)
For example, Hammacher Schlemmer features an item it calls the Barber Eliminator. Per the catalog: “The unit is moved through your hair while accommodating the contours of your pate.” It took me 20 minutes to find the electric razor on Amazon under its official name: the Conair Even Cut Rotary Hair Cut Cutting System. It’s $20 cheaper on Amazon, though it doesn’t come with the lifetime guarantee Hammacher includes with all its products. This is a feature that seemingly everyone I encounter in Niles is eager to tell me about, usually along with the question of whether or not I have heard the story about the poop Roomba.
The folks at Hammacher Schlemmer love the poop Roomba story. It goes like this: In 2016, a man in Little Rock, Arkansas, purchased a robotic vacuum from Hammacher Schlemmer. One evening, while on its automatic timer, the Roomba encountered a pile of puppy excrement and proceeded to spread and spray dog feces all over the house as it traveled along its algorithmically determined route. The man’s Facebook post about the ordeal went viral (359,709 shares, as of this writing), and in it he gives “mad props to Hammacher Schlemmer” for making good on its lifetime guarantee and issuing a full $400 refund.
I can’t imagine the Barber Eliminator getting into any similar kind of trouble, but it carries the same guarantee nonetheless. Were I in the market for an at-home haircutting device, I’m not sure page 32 of Hammacher Schlemmer’s spring catalog supplement would be the first place I’d look for it, but that’s not the point. The catalog tries to sell the item’s purpose (the elimination of my barber) before the product itself. The goal is to persuade page flippers to enter the DIY haircut market right then and there, when they’re least expecting it.
Between 1983 and 2005, there was a Hammacher Schlemmer store at the foot of Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue. I remember gawking outside, thinking that the stones and bricks embedded in the building’s façade—Colonel McCormick’s prized samples from the Great Pyramid, Notre Dame Cathedral, and beyond—were just part of the store’s inventory. After all, if anyone were going to sell a section of the Parthenon, it would be Hammacher Schlemmer.
The store shuttered its doors, but the company is still around, headquartered in the northwest suburbs. And it continues to publish its signature catalog, as it has for the past 137 years. Hammacher Schlemmer mails out 50 million of them a year, in fact. It’s the longest-running catalog in American history.These mail-order catalogs of bizarre gadgets, esoteric tchotchkes, and peculiar wellness treatments adhere to the same format and style as the ones delivered to my family’s apartment more than 20 years ago. With few exceptions, the four items per page are laid out in a quadrant, each with a photo, a dense block of explanatory text, and, most famously, a descriptive title. Open the 2018 spring catalog supplement and you’ll find the Genuine Handmade Irish Shillelagh, the 911 Instant Speakerphone, the Clarity Enhancing Sunglasses, and the Closet Organizing Trouser Rack all on one page.
In the age of Amazon, few things represent an ethos more diametrically opposed to the “everything store” than the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Typing “socks” into Amazon’s search bar yields a seemingly infinite number of options. But the Hammacher Schlemmer spring catalog supplement offers only the Best Circulation Enhancing Travel Socks and the Plantar Fasciitis Foot Sleeves, 45 pages apart. There are no algorithmically predicted product placements or targeted suggestions.
The mere existence of Hammacher Schlemmer these days invites some fair, yet pointed, questions. Who’s buying this stuff? immediately pops to mind. As does: How has the company lasted this long? And: What kind of person sees the Wearable Mosquito Net and thinks, I must have this?
For much of its history, Hammacher Schlemmer was a distinctly New York brand. It still maintains its only physical store on East 57th Street in Manhattan, but the headquarters have been in the Chicago area since merchandiser and collectible-plate magnate J. Roderick MacArthur (of the MacArthur “genius” grant family) bought the company and relocated it in 1981. As the home of catalog pioneers Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck, Chicago was a natural fit for the nation’s most august purveyor of the mail-order medium.
You can find Hammacher Schlemmer’s offices on a broad stretch of Milwaukee Avenue in Niles. The first thing you see when you walk through the double glass doors of the former car dealership is a sunken indoor park, where ferns surround a gurgling stream. A series of displays in the carpeted lobby off the atrium documents the company’s history. One is dedicated to Hammacher Schlemmer’s “notable patrons,” including Steve Jobs, Marilyn Monroe, and Queen Elizabeth II.
Past those displays you’ll come to the Wall of Firsts, a long row of framed posters depicting various objects that debuted in the pages of the catalog. It begins with the First Pop Up Toaster (1931) and proceeds to such advents as the First Electric Food Blender (1934) and the First Microwave Oven (1968). It loses a little steam in the 2010s, thanks to items like the First Fashionista Christmas Tree (2012), yet finishes strong with the First Wellness Monitor Wristband (2015)—a Fitbit, though Hammacher Schlemmer won’t tell you that.
Hammacher Schlemmer’s policy has long been to remove product logos and brand names from its catalog. In the 1980s and ’90s, this was just another example of the retailer’s quirks, a vague gesture toward the privilege of ignorance: Just give me the best vacuum, I don’t care who makes it or how much it costs.
But these days there’s a more practical reason. Stephen Farrell, Hammacher Schlemmer’s director of merchandising, leads the team of buyers responsible for filling out the company’s eclectic inventory. He says the no-brand-name strategy is “particularly relevant today,” as Hammacher Schlemmer hopes to prevent people from simply searching for the products on Amazon and buying them there. (About 45 percent of the catalog inventory is exclusive to Hammacher Schlemmer. “We would prefer nothing is on Amazon,” Farrell tells me, though he says it’s not a deal breaker.)
For example, Hammacher Schlemmer features an item it calls the Barber Eliminator. Per the catalog: “The unit is moved through your hair while accommodating the contours of your pate.” It took me 20 minutes to find the electric razor on Amazon under its official name: the Conair Even Cut Rotary Hair Cut Cutting System. It’s $20 cheaper on Amazon, though it doesn’t come with the lifetime guarantee Hammacher includes with all its products. This is a feature that seemingly everyone I encounter in Niles is eager to tell me about, usually along with the question of whether or not I have heard the story about the poop Roomba.
The folks at Hammacher Schlemmer love the poop Roomba story. It goes like this: In 2016, a man in Little Rock, Arkansas, purchased a robotic vacuum from Hammacher Schlemmer. One evening, while on its automatic timer, the Roomba encountered a pile of puppy excrement and proceeded to spread and spray dog feces all over the house as it traveled along its algorithmically determined route. The man’s Facebook post about the ordeal went viral (359,709 shares, as of this writing), and in it he gives “mad props to Hammacher Schlemmer” for making good on its lifetime guarantee and issuing a full $400 refund.
I can’t imagine the Barber Eliminator getting into any similar kind of trouble, but it carries the same guarantee nonetheless. Were I in the market for an at-home haircutting device, I’m not sure page 32 of Hammacher Schlemmer’s spring catalog supplement would be the first place I’d look for it, but that’s not the point. The catalog tries to sell the item’s purpose (the elimination of my barber) before the product itself. The goal is to persuade page flippers to enter the DIY haircut market right then and there, when they’re least expecting it.
by Nick Greene, Chicago Magazine | Read more:
Image: Ryan Segedi
