Littlewoods

Founded in Liverpool on 1 February 1923 as a football pools company, Littlewoods grew into one of Britain's largest mail-order catalog houses and high-street store chains, and it survives today as Littlewoods.com, an online department store run by The Very Group. It never made lingerie in the way a corsetry house does. Its importance to the history of underwear is as a channel: a catalog house that sold clothing on weekly credit through neighborhood agents, and then a retailer that later moved the same business onto the web.

A football pool named after a man called Littlewood

The founder was John Moores, born in 1896 in Barton-upon-Irwell, Lancashire, who had trained as a telegraph operator with the Commercial Cable Company and been posted to Liverpool. In 1923 he started a football pool with two partners, Colin Askham and Bill Hughes. They named it after Askham, who had been born Colin Henry Littlewood, and the business opened as the Littlewood Football Pool. After early losses Moores kept going, and Littlewoods Pools became the largest pools business in the world, at one point sponsoring the FA Cup.

The 1932 catalog and the women's clubs

In January 1932 Moores, by then a millionaire, launched the Littlewoods Mail Order Store. The first catalog went to existing pools subscribers, and the people who took it up were mostly women. They formed "clubs," and in effect became retail agents, collecting money from friends and family for goods ordered from the catalog and handing out the parcels when they arrived.

That agency system is the part that matters for intimate apparel. It changed the setting of the purchase: goods were chosen at home from printed pages, paid for in installments and ordered through a neighbor rather than across a shop counter, with no sales assistant and no fitting room. The catalog house competed with other northern mail-order firms, among them Manchester's JD Williams, on exactly that combination of credit and convenience, much as 3 Suisses did in France.

Stores, Index and the largest private company in Europe

On 6 July 1937 Littlewoods opened its first department store, in Blackpool. The chain grew across British town centers and, later, into shopping centers such as Merry Hill in the West Midlands, which opened in November 1989. At its peak the company employed about 25,000 people, and in 1982 it was described as the largest private company in Europe. It also ran the Index catalog-shop chain, which was a long-running drain: when Index closed in early 2005, it had made a profit in only two of its 20 years and was losing about 100 million pounds.

Moores himself stepped back from the pools chairmanship in 1960 to become chairman of Everton Football Club. He died in September 1993, aged 97.

The Barclay sale and the end of the stores

The family began selling. The pools went in 2000 to Rodime for 160 million pounds. In 2002 the Moores family sold the shopping and catalog business to the brothers David and Frederick Barclay for 750 million pounds. From 1996 the store estate had already been shrinking as phone and internet ordering replaced the old agency model, and in 2004 the Barclays merged Littlewoods with the Kays catalog business to create Littlewoods Shop Direct Group. In 2005 the original store business was wound down: 119 stores closed, and about 40 were sold to Primark.

Littlewoods.com under The Very Group

The Littlewoods name now belongs to The Very Group, as Shop Direct renamed itself in 2019. The group is based at Skyways House, a converted aircraft hangar in Speke, south Liverpool, where it moved from Manchester in 2005. Its own fashion label is V by Very. In February 2024 the Barclay family took a 125 million pound loan from The Carlyle Group and the UAE-based International Media Investments, and on 10 November 2025 Carlyle completed its purchase of The Very Group.

This museum's archive holds 68 Littlewoods product records from a 2010 collection, from the years when the business had already become a catalog-and-website operation inside Shop Direct. The catalog that once arrived through a neighbor is now a website, and the name of Colin Askham's birth family, chosen for a football pool in 1923, is still on it more than a century later.

Last updated October 7, 2026