In addition to being the fourth largest clothing retailer in the United Kingdom and the fifth largest nonfood retailer, Littlewoods was also the second largest home shopping company in the country through its operation of such catalogs as Littlewoods, Janet Fraser, Burlington, Peter Craig, John Moores, and Littlewoods Extra.
The company was also involved in Internet retailing through e-commerce sites. The company participates in two joint ventures: in partnership with Granada Media Group, Littlewoods operates Shop!
By late , the concern was still wholly owned by members of the Moores family, though Sir John Moores had died in September at age In and after the s, with large corporations already starting to dominate the British economy, promising niches offering opportunities for rapid growth from ploughed-back profit were relatively rare for those lacking capital.
That John Moores hit upon football pools at the beginning of the —24 playing season was a most timely stroke of good fortune. The Cup Final, held at Wembley for the first time earlier that year, had drawn much attention to Association Football, which soon developed into a well-supported working-class spectator sport on Saturdays and a topic of conversation for the rest of the week.
Wage earners' disposable incomes, though still small, grew rapidly in those years, and a business that gave them an opportunity to place small bets did not have difficulty in attracting some of this surplus. John Moores was born at Eccles near Manchester in January , the eldest of four sons in a family eventually to number eight children. He left school at 14 to work as a messenger boy at the Manchester Post Office but was soon accepted in a course at the Post Office School of Telegraphy.
This enabled him, in , at 16 years of age, to join the Commercial Cable Company as a junior operator. After World War I, in which he served as a wireless operator in the Royal Navy, he rejoined Commercial Cable and in was transferred from Liverpool to Waterville, the company's base near the southwest tip of Ireland, where he started a private business on the side supplying goods to company colleagues and to the local golf club.
Transferred back to Liverpool, he tried again to start his own business, this time with two partners and the idea of a football pool. Having weathered unprofitable beginnings, Littlewoods Pools emerged as a clear market leader because of its organizational skill and attention to detail in the regular dispatch of coupons early each week, careful checking of the results after the Saturday matches, and the handling of an increasing number of small payments.
Growth needed to be at a pace to fund the all-important promotional expenditure required, but overhead was relatively cheap: no prestigious high-street premises were required for a postal business.
Football pools appealed mainly to men. Britain was soon to start climbing out of the deepest trough of depression—again the timing was right—and Moores offered an element of chance in a venture aimed mainly at working-class women who were prepared to invest a small cash sum each week to buy goods for themselves or their families.
This was a logical diversification of the existing business. Besides taking advantage of Littlewoods' already familiar household name, it also built upon the organization and experience gained in postal pools and on John Moores's earlier experience of direct selling in Ireland. Again, nothing was spent on retail outlets, for the business, like GUS, operated on the club principle whereby the many local organizers, working from their own homes, recruited others nearby who paid a small weekly installment in cash for goods shown in a catalog.
A weekly draw provided the element of luck, the first winner securing her purchases at once and the others in their turn. The first catalog ran to pages.
Moores's venture into chain-store retailing in the mids was well-timed, too, for the British economy was moving up to a prosperous peak in Real earnings were growing fast and unemployment was falling. The new stores, however, could depend not only upon the familiar Littlewoods name but also on providing basic and serviceable goods at fair prices without undue regard for passing fashion.
The first store was opened in Blackpool, Britain's most popular working-class holiday resort, in By , 24 stores had been opened in various parts of the country. Necessary cookies. These cookies are essential for the site to work and provide you with a better user experience. From the data that we collect via Google Analytics, we can see and analyse the use of the site over time, and produce aggregated and anonymised statistics in order to develop the site and to continue to offer you the best possible experience.
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