Kays Catalogues

~ the obituary ~

William Kilbourne Kay founded the business in Worcester in 1889 as Kay's of Worcester. Great Universal Stores bought Kay & Company Ltd in 1937 and ran Kays as a catalog title of its own. That is how the name survived the next sixty years, not as a company taking decisions but as a word on a book that GUS printed, one title among several inside a group that held a large part of British mail order.

It is also the arrangement that eventually killed it, slowly and with no drama attached. A catalog title inside a group is a marketing asset, and marketing assets get rationalized whenever the group changes shape. GUS sold its home shopping division in 2004 and the buyer merged it with Littlewoods under the name Shop Direct. GUS itself split into Experian and Home Retail Group on 10 October 2006.

The physical business was dismantled before the name was. The Leeds warehouse, opened in 1981, closed in August 2004, and the original Worcester depot went on 23 February 2007, 118 years after the first shop. The Wikipedia infobox gives 2004 as the year the company became defunct, a date no sentence on the page explains and the later closures contradict.

~ the press release ~

On 12 January 2011 Shop Direct put out a release announcing K&Co, described as "a new online shopping and catalogue brand" aimed at a particular kind of customer. The release does not say what K&Co replaced. Kays is not mentioned in it anywhere, and read on its own the document presents K&Co as something invented that month.

Three weeks later the trade press supplied the missing sentence. On 1 February 2011 Home of Direct Commerce described "the newly merged K&CO, a rebranded offering that brings together the Kays, Empire Stores and Great Universal fascias." That clause, in a story about a different brand's launch, is the only published sentence naming what K&Co replaced.

~ what a fascia is ~

Fascia is the retail word for the name over the door, and it exists to admit that the shop behind two different fascias can be one shop. By 2011 all three of the titles folded into K&Co belonged to the same owner and sold out of the same operation, so the merge was a naming exercise. Only the word was actually retired, and that word had been working since Victoria was on the throne.

The web is not really the villain here either. The same owner ran the sites that replaced the paper, and the books kept printing for years after the shopping moved. Kays ended on a portfolio decision about how many names one business needs.

~ july 2015 ~

K&Co lasted four and a half years. In July 2015 Shop Direct merged K&CO.com into Littlewoods.com, and the replacement brand went the way of the three it had replaced. Shop Direct renamed itself The Very Group in 2020, and lists both K&Co and Kays among its defunct brands with no dates attached to either.

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