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About 11,000 companies make products for Sears. Some of the firms are well known. France's Michelin makes Sears RoadHandler steel-belted radial tires; Hamilton Beach supplies many of its tabletop kitchen appliances; Sunbeam provides irons; Singer makes Craftsman electric drills; Sanyo, Hitachi and Toshiba produce Sears television sets, stereos and videocassette recorders. Most of the suppliers, though, are unknown outside their industries, firms like Irwin B. Schwabe of Great Neck, N.Y., a shirt supplier and the largest maker of flannel shirts in the U.S.
Sears has 366 buyers and 302 assistant buyers, each assigned to a Sears product line, to watch over its purchases. Department 622, for example, is cooking-center appliances. Five buyers deal with three rangemakers, two dishwasher sources, one garbage-compactor company and one microwave-oven maker.
Sears is such a large and welcome customer to many U.S. companies that it can breed an unhealthy dependence. In recent years Sears has encouraged its suppliers to seek other markets. Sears takes 43% of Whirlpool's $2.7 billion annual sales of dishwashers, dryers and clotheswashers, which it sells under its own Kenmore name. Whirlpool has a Sales to Sears department that caters to the retailer's specifications. The relationship has gone on for 65 years, with no written contract. Says Donna McLean, a Whirlpool official: "Any customer who represents 43% of your business is going to carry a lot of weight." Sears owns no factories outright, but it does own large shares of some of its suppliers. It has 33% of Roper, its range-maker, 31% of De-Soto, which supplies paints, and 20% of Swift, its textiles provider.
The suppliers' products must meet the standards of the Sears product-testing labs, which are in the company's original headquarters on Chicago's West Side and in the Sears Tower. The labs were started in 1911 with a single chemist, but have evolved into a full-fledged testing organization that employs 138 engineers and technicians who run evaluations on 10,000 products annually. Mattresses are rolled over 100,000 times with a 225-lb. wooden cylinder. Leather boots spend hours dunked in pools of water or strapped to automatic walking machines. Toilets are flushed 100,000 times—once a minute, day and night—to assure dependability. Last year 2,239 products were field-tested.
The lab conducts exhaustive quality-value reviews, reacting sometimes to customer complaints about socks that fall apart or water-softening systems that turn on when they are not supposed to. Sometimes tests are run for no particular reason and turn up problems. The test lab has just completed a review of eight pieces of Sears luggage, plus 20 more from competitors, including Samsonite and American Tourister. The luggage was frozen to 20° below zero and then dropped two feet. Result: one of the Sears bags was rated "below grade."
Technicians in the labs come up with ideas of their own that find their way into Sears products. Engineer-Manager Jim Roach estimates that 1,000 patents have been granted to Sears since 1930. Few innovations have been startingly new or involved complex technology; they