Christmas: The mail order pioneer who started a billion-pound industry

Christmas: The mail order pioneer who started a billion-pound industry

By Peter ShuttleworthBBC News

Publishedduration4 hours ago

image captionThe Pryce Jones catalogue was thought to be the world's first mail order catalogue when it started in 1861

Lots of things about Christmas are different this year, including how and where the gifts you're unwrapping today were probably bought.

It's that mail order shopping industry, now worth billions, which was inspired by a little known 19th Century Welsh draper who lived "in the middle of nowhere" and left school at 12.

Pryce Jones could only dream of the impact his entrepreneurial vision would have on the world when he was selling Welsh flannel to Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale in the late 1800s.

He is said to have "effectively set up a company similar to today's Amazon", not in California's Silicon Valley or one of the world's trading epicentres - but in rural mid Wales.

Jones is credited as being the pioneer of a global mail order industry now worth about £75bn - which has seen unprecedented growth in the past few weeks as people prepare for a Covid Christmas.

A third of all Christmas shopping is forecast to have been done online this year as coronavirus lockdowns across the UK - and across the globe - made many