The catalogue that changed retail – and the giants it left behind

There was a time when a catalogue arriving in the post was an event. The great mail-order books of the 1970s and 1980s were household fixtures, thick enough to leave their mark on the coffee table and packed with the things that people wanted but could not necessarily afford to buy outright. Clothes, furniture, televisions, toys, electrical goods, carpets and kitchen appliances were all there, page after page, waiting to be circled in biro.

They were department stores delivered to the front door, with the added attraction of being able to spread the cost. Freemans, Grattan, Littlewoods, Kays, Great Universal, Marshall Ward and Empire Stores became part of the fabric of everyday British life.

There was an intimacy to it which online shopping has never quite replicated. The catalogue sat in the house. People browsed it at the kitchen table, folded over pages, marked product numbers and discussed purchases. For those who could not easily access the high street or did not have the cash to buy a big-ticket item outright, the catalogue offered something else: aspiration with a payment plan attached.

It was also a formidable business model. Behind the glossy pages sat sophisticated systems for customer data, credit, stock management, distribution and fulfilment. The companies knew what their customers bought, how often they bought it and, crucially, how much they could afford to repay.

In hindsight, the catalogue industry looks like a primitive version of ecommerce. In reality, it was doing many of the things that today’s online retailers still do, only without the smartphone, the algorithm or the one-click checkout.

That is why the fate of the catalogue giants is more complicated than simply saying that the internet killed them. Some disappeared. Some were swallowed by larger groups. Some reinvented themselves and became highly successful digital retailers.

And then there are Freemans and Grattan. The latest twist in their story emerged this week, with accounts revealing that a prospective purchaser has been identified for the two Bradford-based businesses as their owner of three decades, Germany’s Otto Group, carries out a confidential strategic review.

The accounts show just how far the fortunes of the two brands have travelled from the days when their catalogues were household staples. Freemans generated revenue of £178.5m in the year to February 2026 but recorded a pre-tax loss of £8.8m. Grattan generated £60m of revenue and made a pre-tax loss of £14m, leaving the two businesses with combined losses of almost £23m.

The prospective buyer has not been named and there is no completed or binding deal. But the accounts say a purchaser has been identified and that the potential buyer has indicated there would be no restructuring and that additional working capital could be provided if required.

The companies’ financial position is therefore being examined against the backdrop of a possible change of ownership, rather than an imminent collapse. Freemans Grattan Holdings (FGH), which owns the two brands, is keen to stress the positives.

Asked about the current position, a spokesperson said: “Under the leadership of Ann Steer CEO, the Freemans business is now twice the size it was when the current management team took over.”

“It’s very much business as usual,” the spokesperson added, saying Freemans continues to perform strongly with a rising customer base and that the focus is on AW26.

But when asked directly about the potential sale, FGH would not be drawn. The company said that, “As part of a regular review of its business portfolio, Otto Group is exploring several strategic options for some of its subsidiary businesses” and that “strategic options for FGH are under review. No decision has yet been made.”

Nor would it offer a substantive response on the funding position.

The accounts are rather more forthcoming. They state that directors believe the going-concern basis remains appropriate, but that the businesses require continued access to unsecured working-capital funding under both the base case and downside scenario. The £100m HSBC facility expires in February 2027 and the accounts warn there is no certainty that it will be renewed or replaced on equivalent terms.

That does not make Freemans and Grattan the latest casualties of the catalogue era. It does, however, make their predicament an interesting test of whether heritage, customer loyalty and a successful digital transition are enough to sustain an old retail brand in a brutally competitive market.

Because Freemans did not simply sit back and wait for the internet to kill it. It tried to get ahead of it. The company printed its first catalogue in 1905 and went on to produce more than a billion copies over 118 years. But in 2023 it finally stopped printing them altogether.

The decision was presented not as the end of Freemans but as the end of one particular way of reaching its customers. Ann Steer described the catalogue as “a national institution and one of the most successful retail sales tools the UK has ever seen”, but recognised that customers had moved on. Freemans wanted to become a digital department store, with its website offering tens of thousands of products rather than the comparatively restricted range that could be squeezed into a printed book.

The smartphone was, in effect, to become the new catalogue. At the time, the strategy looked compelling. Freemans said its website was attracting more than 30 million unique visitors a year and that the digital transformation was opening up far greater choice.

It was a logical move. Indeed, it was the move that many of the old catalogue companies needed to make. The interesting question is why some managed it better than others. Look at Very.

The business that grew out of the old Littlewoods and Shop Direct empire is one of the clearest examples of catalogue retail successfully being stripped back to its underlying principles and rebuilt online.

Very launched in 2009 as a digital-first brand and the wider group subsequently moved decisively away from its paper-based past. The old catalogue brands — including Great Universal, Kays and Marshall Ward — gradually disappeared or were absorbed, while Very became the principal consumer proposition.

The result is a business with annual revenue of around £2.1bn, millions of active customers and adjusted EBITDA of £307.1m. In its 2025 financial year, adjusted EBITDA rose 15.9 per cent and the margin reached 14.7 per cent, its highest level in the group’s history.

The paper catalogue has vanished. The business model has not. The browsing remains. So does the breadth of choice, the convenience and, importantly, the ability to spread payments.

Very effectively took the most valuable elements of the catalogue proposition and put them on a screen.

Next followed a similar, if rather more understated, path. Its Next Directory was launched in 1988, giving the business decades of experience in remote selling before ecommerce became mainstream. By the time consumers moved online, Next had already spent years learning how to market products to people who were not standing in a shop, how to fulfil orders and how to deliver them to customers’ homes.

Its catalogue became digital rather than simply disappearing. That early investment in remote retailing helped Next become one of Britain’s strongest multichannel retailers and, increasingly, an online platform in its own right.

The lesson from both businesses is important. The catalogue itself was not necessarily the problem. The problem was whether the business behind it could evolve. Some did not.

Kays, Great Universal, Marshall Ward and Empire Stores were once familiar names, but most consumers under a certain age would struggle to recognise them now. Many became part of increasingly complicated ownership structures before being absorbed, rebranded or closed.

Littlewoods itself survived, but in a radically different form. Its catalogue business was folded into the Shop Direct empire and the printed catalogue was eventually abandoned. The name remains online, but the sprawling physical and catalogue operation that once made Littlewoods one of Britain’s biggest retailers is gone.

The same fate befell many of the names that had once appeared alongside it on the pages of Britain’s homes. And then there is Argos, which sits somewhere between the two camps.

Argos was arguably the most ingenious British interpretation of catalogue retail. Rather than delivering goods from a catalogue to customers’ homes, it combined browsing by catalogue with a network of stores where products could be collected. It brought the warehouse into the high street.

At its peak, the Argos catalogue was one of the most recognisable publications in Britain. But the printed catalogue disappeared in 2020 and the business has subsequently struggled to deliver the returns its former owner expected. In July, Sainsbury’s agreed to sell Argos for at least £120m, having paid around £1.4bn for it in 2016.

The figures explain why the deal has attracted so much attention. Argos remains a huge business, with sales of about £4.1bn, but recorded a pre-tax loss of £223.2m in its most recent financial year.

Bernstein analyst William Woods described the transaction as the end of the “long and ultimately failed saga” of Sainsbury’s acquisition of Argos. It is a useful warning against confusing survival with success.

Argos survived the death of the catalogue. Whether it thrived afterwards is another question. There is a broader point here about the British retail landscape. The catalogue companies were early adopters of something that is now regarded as standard practice: personalised selling, customer databases, flexible credit, remote fulfilment and selling without requiring customers to visit a shop.

They understood the customer extraordinarily well. But understanding the customer does not guarantee that a retailer can continue to make money from them.

That is where the current Freemans and Grattan story becomes more revealing. The paper catalogue has gone. Freemans has a digital platform, a substantial online range and a customer base that the company says is growing. The business is emphatically not presenting itself as a relic.

Yet the latest accounts show a business that remains loss-making and reliant on continued access to funding, while its owner is considering strategic options and a prospective buyer has emerged.

That is a very different proposition from the catalogue era. Back then, the great mail-order companies were confident enough to send millions of copies of their catalogues into people’s homes, secure in the knowledge that customers would spend hours leafing through them.

Today, the competition is not another catalogue arriving through the letterbox. It is Amazon, fast-fashion platforms, marketplaces, social commerce, discount retailers and a consumer who can compare almost anything with a few taps.

The catalogue once controlled the customer’s attention. The smartphone controls almost everything else.

That is why the businesses that have survived are not necessarily the ones that preserved their old identities. They are the ones that understood what their old identities were actually built upon.

The brands that disappeared often failed to find an equally compelling reason for customers to stay with them once the physical catalogue lost its power.

Freemans is now trying to prove that its own heritage can still be converted into something commercially useful. There is no shortage of affection for the brand. The challenge is turning affection into profitable sales.

That is a much harder proposition. For all the nostalgia surrounding the great catalogues of the past, they were never really about paper. They were about access — to products, to credit, to choice and to a version of the department store that could exist inside an ordinary home.

The paper was simply the technology that made it possible. The internet replaced it. The smartphone improved upon it. What Freemans and Grattan are now having to demonstrate is whether the business behind the catalogue can survive the disappearance of the catalogue itself.