FREEMANS has stopped printing its famous catalogue after 118 years – the last of Britain’s mail order shopping giants to do so.
It marks the end of the big book that at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s ran to more than 1,000 pages and thudded on to the doormats of more than two million homes twice a year.
12
12
12
Ultimately, it has fallen victim to the era of internet shopping — and now Freemans itself is focusing on its website, which it says has grown customers by a third since last year.
The final issue features Strictly star Janette Manrara on the cover.
Company boss Ann Steer said: “The Freemans catalogue was a national institution. It was the UK’s biggest and best store catalogue and has served generations of families.
“However we need to move with the times, in response to how customers are shopping these days.
“The transition to digital means we can serve today’s families with even more choice of great-value items, all at the swipe of a phone screen.”
Launched in 1905, the first Freemans catalogue was a 200-page collection of black and white, hand-drawn pictures, mostly of clothing.
Time capsules
Colour came in the 1920s, along with bedding, furniture and other homeware, and the mail-order firm grew quickly as millions across the UK took advantage of the option to pay for goods in small monthly instalments.
Over the years the catalogue has seen trends come and go, as well as the evolution of household tech, as images from past editions show.
Most read in Money
An array of stars, from Twiggy, Lulu, Yasmin Le Bon and Levi’s hunk Nick Kamen, to footballing legend George Best, 80s singer Kim Wilde and even sports presenter Des Lynam, have all modelled clothes on Freemans’s pages.
Retail expert Lisa Hooker said: “Old editions are a bit like time capsules — each provides a snapshot at the time of what people were wearing, what our homes looked like, what the newest technology was and what toys kids wanted for Christmas.”
For women, floral nylon dresses in 1955 — dubbed “the dress fabric of the season” — gave way to bell-bottomed trousers in the 1970s and low-cut halter dresses in 2005.
Bikinis and bras also got more revealing over the decades.
For men, there were sleeveless knitted cardigans in 1955, wide ties — often paired with yellow or brown shirts — through the 1970s, and Del Boy-style sheepskin jackets in the 1980s.
In the 1990s, models who looked like they were forming a boy band modelled cut-off denim shirts.
Over the years the catalogue also showed the evolution of how we listened to music — from vinyl, tapes, then CDs, to MP3 players and on to smart speakers.
Home and kitchen appliances from the past seem prehistoric.
In 1955, rather than tumble dryers there were two pages of clothes wringers.
And forget air fryers — the fanciest kitchen gadget was a hand-powered whisk.
Meanwhile many children will remember the catalogues as a way to pick their Christmas presents, said Lisa Hooker.
She added: “Kids circled the toys they wanted and parents would go and pick from that.”
Toys first appeared in Freemans in the 1970s, with Action Man prominent in 1979-80, and they were given more and more pages over the years.
Among more than 50 pages of toys and games in the 1984-85 edition were £25.95
Cabbage Patch Kids, one of the biggest toy crazes of the decade.
Past editions also show how marketing has changed over the years.
In the 1970 catalogue, garish carpets were advertised with tiny babies crawling on them.
12
12
12
Male models were snapped smoking in their pyjamas, with one seen puffing on a pipe in the 1979-80 edition.
Past catalogues can also pinpoint the mainstream arrival of products that go on to change the world.
In the 1984-85 edition, there was still a page of typewriters, but the thing that would kill them off — and ultimately kill the Freemans catalogue too — appeared for the first time on Page 992: a computer.
The Commodore 64 cost £379.95 (£1,115 today), and had a fraction of the power of a modern iPhone.
But catalogues were still in their heyday then, and were popular with those buying big-ticket items such as TVs and sofas on credit.
They show how prices for technology such as TVs have come down over the years in real terms. In the late 1970s, £269 — £1,255 in today’s money — got you a low-quality 14in colour TV that was as deep as it was wide.
By 1994, the biggest TV was a 28in Hitachi for £799.99, or £1,600 in today’s money.
Jackie Barrie, who worked at Freemans from 1983 to 2000, said: “Freemans was popular with families who couldn’t buy a big-ticket item like this outright. They could spread the cost.”
The Hitachi TV was £18 for 44 weeks, then a final payment of £7.99.
Offering credit to the masses like this was key to the booming growth of Freemans and the four other big catalogue firms, Littlewoods, Empire, Kays and Grattan, after World War Two.
The Freemans warehouse in Peterborough, Cambs was the biggest in Europe when it opened in 1968, and floor space grew to 1.2million square feet — equal to 12 Wembleys.
Lisa Hooker said: “They were bigger than any department stores at the time, bigger than John Lewis or Debenhams.”
Grattan merged with Freemans in 2000, while Littlewoods, which bought Empire and Kays, axed its catalogue in 2015 and went online-only.
Two other well-known print catalogues, albeit from stores with physical shops, met their end in 2020 — Argos, after 47 years, and Ikea, after 70.
Long before buy now, pay later services such as Klarna, and even credit cards, the likes of Freemans and Littlewoods were letting customers pay for goods in weekly or monthly instalments.
Money was collected by “agents” who vouched for friends and family members buying items on credit.
By the 1930s Freemans had become the biggest of the mail order companies, with 30,000 agents, most of whom were men, since at the time women were not allowed to negotiate credit agreements.
That changed in the 1960s, when the agent roles were mostly filled by women.
It was then that the affectionate term “catalogue lady” arose — ie. someone who came to your house, collected your orders and who you paid for the goods in instalments.
By the 1980s there were more than 800,000 agents, and with their credit deals the big catalogues had a collective monopoly among lower earners.
Jackie Barrie recalled: “The Eighties was the peak for the Big Five. Freemans was a huge company and things were quite glamorous, with the photoshoots and the buying department jetting off around the world.
“It was like The Devil Wears Prada. But things started fading while I was there for two key reasons — the internet became popular and banks started to offer credit more widely.
“The latter meant the big catalogues were no longer the only place lower earners could get credit.
12
12
12
“I do think Freemans were good in how they offered credit.
“They knew their customers, via the agents, and they stopped them getting into any sort of debt.
“If they didn’t pay they would be doing it to a friend and there’d be embarrassment in that group of pals, family or workplace.”
Freemans bosses say the redesigned website, which goes live today, can offer 55,000 items, rather than the few thousand in catalogues.
The firm plans TV advertising too from September 25 with its new Made You Look strapline.
Over the last century, the Freemans catalogue has been among the UK’s best-read printed materials.
But axing it has one positive result — it will save 650 tonnes of paper a year, the equivalent of 11,000 trees.
12
12
12
