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Stationery that never stands still |
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It's hard to imagine as you look at the brightly coloured ranges of stationery in a modern Woolworths store that the company sent our great grandparents back to school before World War One. |
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| Our founder, Frank Woolworth, included Writing Books in the range on sale in his first store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA - bought for five dollars a gross (equivalent of 3.4 cents each) and sold for five cents each (roughly one penny in today's currency). We've stocked a great range of stationery ever since. | ||||
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Very soon after we opened our first British store in Liverpool in 1909, people started talking about our great ranges. They were really surprised that of all the ranges sold in the stores the stationery was the best quality of all, and at much cheaper prices than in rival stores. The secret at the time was that the Buyers ordered huge quantities to be delivered directly from the Paper Mills to the stores. |
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Back in the 1910s and 20s the runaway best sellers were writing paper and envelopes, closely followed by fountain pens and pencils. Back then most people didn't have access to telephones and television hadn't been invented. The main way of keeping in touch was by writing a letter or postcard. |
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| One of the key sources for the exhibits in our Virtual Museum, particularly the store front views, was the range of postcards that Woolworths stores stocked, which were great sellers. Salesmen from the main suppliers, Valentines, found that Woolies Managers particularly liked local view cards that included a picture of their own store and bought extra quantities! |  |
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Alongside pens and pads for serious letter writing, before long Woolies introduced a fun range, including Miracle Painting Pencils, Watercolour Paints and lots of Colouring and Craft Books. When a new colouring book came out, and at the start of the holidays stores often featured big window displays of these items and held colouring contests to find budding young artists in the town. Even in the darkest days of World War II Woolies were able to offer a good range of plane spotter and colouring books, war stories and pens for long nights in the air raid shelter. |
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| The range also included an ever-changing range of sixpenny romances - two or three hundred page books where ultimately the girl always got her guy and lived happily ever after. Our favourite out of all of these is The Girl from Woolworths by Karen Brown, which was published by Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. Like many of the books in the range it was linked to a film. There's a feature about the film and book in our 1920s Gallery. |  |
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| Another popular range that captured the imagination of generations of children before the war, was the pictorial history series from Sank Hudson Ltd of Manchester. With almost a dozen titles in the series these books were frequently updated to include pictures and very short stories about people recently in the news. For example in 1939 "Our Empire's Story" and "Britain's Story" were both updated to include pictures of Neville Chamberlain with his piece of paper from the Munich Crisis of 1938. Before long he was alongside an engraving of Winston Spencer Churchill. | ||||
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This tablecloth had a swastika pattern border in 1932, before taking new meaning as the symbol of Germany's National Socialist Party |  |
At Sixpence the 1500 recipes worked out at only 0.00166p each ! |  |
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| After the war, Woolies expanded and improved the range of stationery, among the first to introduce plastics into the range with ballpoint pens, plastic coated photo frames and albums, pencil sharpeners and novelties all in the range in the late 1940s, many of them sourced from occupied Japan and Hong Kong. | ||||
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| By the mid 1950s Stationery, Books and Cards had a whole island counter in each store, with extra space at Christmas, Easter and Back to School. A luxury writing paper pad was one shilling (5p), while an own brand economy pack was still only sixpence (2½p). | ||||
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| The key feature of the 1960s and 70s was the introduction of a common own brand label, Winfield, instead of the variety of private brand names from previous years. There were occasional flashes of inspired design, most notably The Beatles pads, which were a Woolworth exclusive and are very collectable to this day. But overall the designs were bland, and by the late 1970s very dated. One of the early observations of the new owners in 1983 was that all of the pads and exercise books still had conversion tables from chains to furlongs (no-one could remember why) at a time when rivals had moved to imperial/metric conversion tables or (in an age of electronic calculators) dropped this quaint feature altogether. The range was due for a makeover, which came in the form of Operation Focus in the mid 1980s. | ||||
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The
range was given bright new signage and the design of many products were
given a makeover. Customers liked the changes, but overall
initially the improvement in the stationery range was not as marked as
in Toys or Ladybird Clothing.
A year or two later the Buying team developed the formula further, adding Colourplay and a wider range Children's Stationery to replace the original pic'n'mix ranges. This was a big hit. |
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development has continued at pace ever since. Today's range is
bright and contemporary, fantastic value for money and thanks to really
innovative buying simply beautifully designed.
Frank Woolworth would be proud to see the displays in the latest generation stores. He included writing books in his very first store - the first of a many millions of pieces of stationery that Woolworths have sold in the last 125 years. He'd be amazed to see the latest designs in the stores and the speed at which they're selling - but then our stationery never stands still! |
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