A Manchester mail order business was once mong Britain's biggest names, serving as a pre-internet Amazon-style home shopping giant.
Starting out in Manchester at the start of the 20th century, Great Universal Stores – or GUS for short – went on to become Europe's biggest mail order group. But in 2006, after 106-years, the company once synonymous with Manchester's mighty home shopping industry disappeared forever.
GUS was founded by Abraham and George Rose in 1900, beginning life as a Manchester based mail order business trading as Universal Stores. Over the next three decades, Abraham and George built the business up into a successful mail order company before it joined the London Stock Exchange in 1931.
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By 1933, it was the leading mail order business in the UK with a single catalogue, Great Universal. A year earlier, a young man called Isaac Wolfson had joined the group as merchandise controller.
Isaac, who later became Lord Wolfson and a well-known philanthropist, quickly rose through the ranks and is credited with spearheading a period of great expansion at the group. By the mid-1950s it had become an empire of mail order businesses, retail chains and manufacturing companies, with interests around the globe.
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Isaac, who became managing director of the company two years after joining, was an accomplished deal-maker with a penchant for big acquisitions. It is reputed that if someone offered him £50m for a site, they would be steered towards a side room with Isaac saying "my office is only for big deals".
By 1955, he had added South African chain Lewis Group and fashion house Burberry to the GUS stable, which housed more than 80 companies. But it was the mail order side of the business that remained constant throughout its history, bringing many other major mail order companies under its umbrella, including Kays (Kays Catalogue) in 1937 and Argos in 1988.
In the 1960s, the company expanded its influence in Europe purchasing several mail order businesses in Holland, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany. With thousands of people working in its mail order warehouses across the UK, its pre-internet operation could be compared to that of an Amazon of its day.
As part of the Daily Mirror's 'Boom Cities' features in 1967, a photographer was sent to the company's large warehouse on Devonshire Street in Ardwick to take snaps of life on the warehouse floor. GUS was Britain's biggest mail order group at the time, and the northern part of its operation had six main warehouses in and around the Manchester area alone.
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GUS also owned 2,000 shops and dealt with about a third of Britain's booming mail order trade, making record profits. Day-to-day operations saw more than 10,000 people work in them, collecting orders, stocking shelves and feeding the conveyor belts.
The set of photos taken for the Boom City feature show the massive Ardwick warehouse operation with staff busily collecting goods and organising packages for shipping to its customers. From the images of just one of its six warehouses based around Manchester, its easy to see just how massive an employer it was in the region.
During the late 1980s, the face of home shopping began to change. Credit, which had always been the big draw for consumers to home shopping, had become widely available and the emergence of a new breed of discount stores began to impact hard on GUS.
Click the below to see fantastic photos of staff working at the Manchester GUS warehouse
By the time David Wolfson took over in 1996, the business was facing challenging times. In the same year though, the group bought Experian, which was the largest information service company in North America.
The company was combined with CNN and together with further acquisitions became a global force in the financial information industry. In 1998, the group acquired Argos and three years later dropped the Great Universal Stores name and became known as GUS.
In October 2006, the company was split into two separate companies. Experian which is now one of the world's leading global information services, and Home Retail Group which was bought by Sainsbury's in 2016.
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