Henry Ellis Harris was born in 1902 and became a stamp dealer at the age of 14. Stamp collecting was a very popular hobby in the early twentieth century, and Harris combined his love for the hobby with modern merchandising techniques to greatly popularize the hobby of stamp collecting. In the process of creating a very successful and profitable business, Harris forever changed the way people collected stamps. 1880-1930 was the era of catalog sales and mail order. Companies like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward modeled their businesses to use the US Post Office to deliver their products to every home in America. With increasing mobility and automobile ownership after WWII, the mail order model fell off as shopping centers and malls proliferated. But today, companies like Amazon have benefited from higher fuel prices, congested highways, and longer working hours to revive the model of having your purchases delivered to your door.
Harris’s great idea was the concept of approvals. In hundreds of advertisements spanning the sixty years he was in business, Harris offered low priced stamps at a premium. The concept was simple and appealing. For a small sum (starting in 1916 at a dime and never more than a dollar or two), a collector would receive several hundred or more stamps. Harris used this as a loss leader as the collector agreed to look at a series of “approval
s”—stamps sent with the original offer and available for sale at an additional price. This model of selling stamps—mail order with approvals—became the primary way that Americans were introduced to philately, and it allowed the hobby to penetrate every city, town, and farm in the United States.
Harris was a foresightful merchandiser. In the early 1930s, he partnered with the consumer products firm Procter and Gamble to produce a radio show using “Captain Tim” to sell stamps. For a small price (and a couple of box tops from some Ivory Snow detergent), a person could be a stamp collector. Another Harris insight was that collectors not only needed stamps, but they needed a low priced series of albums to put them in. The radio show that Harris produced, hosted by “Captain Tim” Healy (whose real name was Reginald Healy and who used his son’s name on the air), offered not only stamps but a small album to put them in. Captain Tim’s albums were produced in the millions. Harris never sold philately as an investment. To him it was always a hobby. And with producing millions of albums and finding philatelic agencies to issue stamps to his liking and vast sources of philatelic supply, he had no illusions as to the future value of the stamps he was selling, nor did his customers—the millions of mostly young collectors whom he encourage
d to enter the hobby. He allowed American collectors to have a stamp collection of thousands of stamps for a few dollars outlay. These collectors never thought they were investing. They were enjoying a hobby where they learned geography and history and thought the small sums of money spent on their hobby well worth it.
After 1940, Harris continued with his approval model which was imitated by many successful stamps businesses, one of which—Mystic Stamp Company—is still successful today. His advertisements and marketing increasingly targeted younger people entering the hobby, advertising heavily in the magazine Boys’ Life. There are few men of the baby boomer generation who didn’t have some acquaintance with stamps and stamp collecting from their youth, and this was largely the result of Harris’s marketing efforts. By 1950, the majority of the profits at H. E. Harris were from the publishing division and stamp mounts (Harris was an originator of the Chrystal Mount—which for many years dominated the non-hinge stamp mount market). Harris p
ublished an extensive line of worldwide albums, starting with the Ambassador album at the lower end and going on to the Citation at the higher end (with the Statesman Deluxe in the middle). Harris sold millions of United States specialized albums and a nice Canada and British North America album as well. After 1960, Harris produced a specialized album for the stamps of the United Nations. Harris maintained stocks of US and Canada and sold stamps directly through mail order and price lists to collectors. Harris also had a prominent US pricelist and catalog that vied with Scott as the industry standard for many years.
In 1975, Harris was older and ready to retire, and he sold his business to General Mills, the large cereal company. Philatelists were ecstatic as we saw General Mills using its marketing prowess to boost the visibility and vitality of our hobby. Visions of stamp collecting offers on Cheerios boxes swam through all of our heads. But General Mills was a corporate raider with no interest in building Harris’s name or its brand. General Mills quickly sold off the Harris inventory and pumped up the profits for a few years hoping to sell what remained of the company. By 1985, Harris was a sputtering shell of its former self. And now, the company exists mainly in the memory of baby boomers, for whom Harris was their first introduction to philately, and to heirs and successors who find old H. E. Harris stamp albums in their possession.