Pryce Pryce-Jones

• 1. Introduction

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  Pryce Pryce-Jones was born on the 16th of October 1834 in Llanllwchaiarn, just outside Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales. He left school at 12. He died in 1920 having built, from nothing, what the BBC later called "The mail order pioneer who started a billion-pound industry." Before the internet, before department store catalogues became household staples, this Welsh draper figured out how to sell goods to people who had never set foot in his shop. Florence Nightingale was a customer. So was Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria knighted him in 1887. How did a boy who left school at 12 pull all that off? And what was he doing selling 60,000 sleeping bags to the Russian Army?

• 2. A Shop Off Broad Street

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  John Davies, a local draper in Newtown, Montgomeryshire, took on a young apprentice in the mid-nineteenth century. Pryce-Jones worked under Davies and by 1856 had taken over the business entirely. That same year he married Eleanor Rowley Morris of Newtown. He opened his own small drapery shop just off Broad Street shortly after.

  In 1859, the year the railway arrived in Newtown, he gave the shop a new name: the Royal Welsh Warehouse. Newtown had always had a woollen industry, and Welsh flannel formed the core of what he sold. The railway's arrival was not incidental to that naming moment. It was the key that unlocked everything he would build next.

• 3. The Catalogue and the Post

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  The Uniform Penny Post, introduced in 1840, made postal communication affordable for ordinary commerce for the first time. Pryce-Jones paired that reform with the railway network that reached Newtown in 1859. He built a warehouse beside the railway line, with its own post office inside, and in 1861 published what is now credited as the world's first mail-order catalogue.

  The contents were woollen goods. The customers were people in isolated rural areas who were either too busy or unable to travel into Newtown to shop. For the first time, they could place an order by post and receive their goods by train. Pryce-Jones was the first to execute this model on a large scale. As the rail network expanded through the following years, he took orders from further and further away, and the business grew rapidly.

• 4. Royal Customers and Global Reach

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  Florence Nightingale placed orders. So did the Princess of Wales, and royal households across Europe. Welsh flannel from Newtown began shipping to America and then to Australia. During the 1870s Pryce-Jones exhibited at trade fairs around the world, winning several awards and building an international reputation. He eventually amassed over 200,000 customers in total.

  Within England he could promise next-day delivery, a commitment that required his warehouse operation to move goods, as he put it, "as fast as possible." Several times the volume of orders forced him to relocate to larger premises. In 1879 he erected the Royal Welsh Warehouse, a tall red brick building in the centre of Newtown. That building still stands.

• 5. The Euklisia Rug

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  In 1876, Pryce-Jones patented an invention he called the Euklisia Rug. It was, in practical terms, a sleeping bag. He exported it around the world. At one point he secured a contract with the Russian Army for 60,000 rugs, a single order that had nothing to do with Welsh flannel and everything to do with the mail-order logistics he had spent fifteen years building.

  The patent sits at an unexpected angle to the rest of his career. Pryce-Jones is remembered as the architect of mail order, but the Euklisia Rug shows a man who saw new applications for the distribution infrastructure he had built, and who was trusted as a supplier by a major European military power.

• 6. Parliament, Honours, and Legacy

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  By 1880 his UK customer base exceeded 100,000. Queen Victoria knighted him in 1887, making him Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones. He entered politics as a Conservative, serving as Member of Parliament for Montgomery from 1885 to 1886, and again from 1892 to 1895. In 1891 he became High Sheriff of Montgomeryshire.

  His two sons, William Pryce-Jones and Albert Pryce-Jones, both became international footballers for Wales. Pryce-Jones died on the 11th of January 1920 at the age of 85. The economic depressions of the 1920s and 1930s hit the business hard. In 1938 it was taken over by Lewis's of Liverpool. Yet the red brick Royal Welsh Warehouse he built in 1879 remained home to a mail-order company until 2011, more than 130 years after its construction.