The first customer list was not harvested from clicks. It came from a telephone book. In 1934, Miles and Alberta Kimball borrowed $500 and sent 500 personalized Christmas cards to families named Johnson in Minneapolis. The clever bit was not the card. It was the tiny shock of recognition when a mass-mailed object arrived bearing a family's own name. Long before ecommerce discovered personalization, the Kimballs had made anonymous distribution feel individual.
That modest test became Miles Kimball Company, an Oshkosh mail-order institution. The business added gifts and household gadgets, printed catalogs, built customer files and learned which peculiar little objects could earn their square inches on a page. After Miles died in 1949, Alberta became president. The company remained private and kept mailing. Its descendants still do.
The product is the portfolio
Today the parent company is Silver Star Brands, a name adopted in 2013 when “Miles Kimball Company” no longer described the whole enterprise. The flagship catalog is still there, full of table covers, kitchen tools, organizers, seasonal decorations and personalized gifts. Around it sit focused storefronts: Walter Drake for value-priced household products; Easy Comforts for daily-living aids and personal care; Native Remedies and PetAlive for herbal and homeopathic products; Dream Products and Starcrest for affordable everyday merchandise; and Fox Valley Traders as an online meeting place for much of the assortment.
The portfolio has recently widened. Silver Star acquired the assets of Paula Young in 2025, bringing salon-style wigs, hair extensions and accessories into the group. It then bought the core catalog and ecommerce assets of Winston Brands, including Collections Etc. and Better Senior Living. By early 2026, local reporting said those brands had completed their move into the Oshkosh operation.
“The addition of the Paula Young Brand complements our existing direct-to-consumer portfolio and contributes to our growth trajectory.”Gena Judkins, vice president of health and wellness brands
At first glance, wigs, herbal drops, Christmas cards and a whisk have little to discuss. They make more sense when viewed through the customer rather than the shelf. Silver Star has long concentrated on practical shoppers, particularly older women, who value a broad selection, plain explanations and ordering methods that do not assume a life lived entirely inside a phone. Paula Young adds a confidence-and-personal-care need. Better Senior Living adds products for independence. Collections Etc. adds value-priced home and seasonal goods. The catalog titles stay distinct; the operating rails beneath them can be shared.
One engine, many shop windows
The business model is a retail version of shared plumbing. Individual brands attract demand through printed catalogs, websites, email, social media and marketplaces. Central teams handle brand management, merchandising, creative work, data, personalization, customer service, supplier coordination and fulfillment. A new brand does not have to invent all of those functions again. It can plug into a system built over decades of small-parcel commerce.
The shared-commerce loop
That infrastructure explains the acquisition strategy more cleanly than a grand theory of lifestyle. When Paula Young joined, Silver Star described its approach with unusual directness: pursue attractively priced acquisitions that can use existing expertise and infrastructure. In other words, buy a brand with customers and recognizable demand, then spread fixed capabilities across more orders. The acquired identity keeps doing the selling; Oshkosh does more of the heavy lifting.
Catalog circulation provides another piece of the economics. In 2013, when the corporate rename was announced, the company said it mailed more than 120 million catalogs a year. A 2025 acquisition announcement used a more conservative and broader measure - more than 35 million catalogs and mail pieces annually. The figures describe different periods and definitions, but both underline the scale of a channel that can look invisible to younger city shoppers. Mail is not a museum exhibit here. It is paid distribution, product photography, merchandising and a portable storefront bundled into one object.
The website then does what paper cannot. It holds a deeper assortment, updates availability, captures an order immediately and gives a shopper room to compare styles or sizes. That creates a hybrid journey: the catalog earns attention on a kitchen table; the browser supplies search, detail and checkout. Social posts, email and marketplace listings add more entry points, but the underlying discipline remains direct response. Every page, subject line and product position has to persuade a customer to do something observable.
The company's large distribution facility opened around 2000. Its current supplier manual reads like the unromantic half of ecommerce that glossy storefronts hide: purchase-order accuracy, SKU labels, testing, packaging, shipping windows and chargebacks for late deliveries. “On time” is marked as a critical performance measure because a missed inbound shipment creates backorders, cancellations and real cost. Silver Star's expertise is not simply knowing what to put in a catalog. It is making thousands of unrelated items behave inside one operating system.
A customer hiding in plain sight
Silver Star's primary competition is not another company with the same collection of brands. It is the infinite shelf: Amazon, Walmart and every specialist retailer one search away. Broad marketplaces win on speed, price comparison and convenience. Silver Star's counter is curation. A catalog page narrows the universe. A brand such as Easy Comforts groups products around independent living rather than forcing a shopper to translate a medical or household problem into the perfect search phrase.
The distinction matters most for mundane problems. How do I make a bathtub safer? Find trousers that are easier to wear? Cover an oddly sized table? Send a card that looks personal without hand-addressing 80 envelopes? Keep a pet comfortable? These are not glamorous prompts, but they are specific, recurring and attached to buyers with intent. Silver Star makes a market from the long tail of ordinary friction.
The bars above are a strategic map, not measured scores. They show how the pieces reinforce one another. A known audience makes catalog circulation more purposeful. A catalog creates discovery beyond a search box. Shared operations reduce the cost of running specialized storefronts. Useful products give shoppers a reason to return when the next seasonal or household problem appears.
Paper, pixels and a real footprint
Catalog retail carries an obvious environmental tension: paper and parcels are physical. Silver Star says it manages that footprint through list hygiene, lighter paper, recycled packaging, building upgrades and supplier standards. Its environmental program reports corrugated containers with more than 60 percent post-consumer content, recycling of hundreds of tons of cardboard, and a $150,000 lighting project expected to save 1.1 million kilowatt-hours a year. Those are company-reported figures, but they are concrete enough to reveal where a direct marketer can act - circulation quality, materials, energy and inbound standards.
The supplier code also covers labor, workplace safety, discrimination and environmental compliance. That does not resolve every supply-chain question. It does show the operational boundary of the company: Silver Star may not manufacture every gadget, but it sets the conditions under which goods enter its system. The same manual that warns about a missing packing slip asks suppliers to prevent forced labor and maintain safe facilities. Retail's smallest details and largest obligations arrive in the same carton.
The Oshkosh constant
For all the channel changes, Silver Star remains unusually rooted. Its headquarters and distribution center sit on South Oakwood Road in Oshkosh. The company describes a casual workplace with internal promotion, flexible schedules, wellness programs and a coffee-bar rhythm. Its H.E.A.R.T. values - Honesty, Equality, Accountability, Respect and Trust - have the compact practicality of something meant to fit on a break-room wall.
The community story runs deeper than a corporate volunteer day. A foundation begun at Miles Kimball in 1951 has supported schools, arts organizations, health causes and youth groups around Oshkosh. Employees are encouraged to donate time as well as money. The company's mission, “Adding years to your life and life to your years,” can read like ad copy until it is placed beside products for mobility, wellness and comfort, then beside an employee health program and local giving. The phrase is broad; the operating choices make it legible.
Silver Star Brands occupies a curious corner of modern retail. It is not a pure marketplace, not a manufacturer and not merely a holding company. It is a direct-commerce operator whose assets include old-fashioned customer attention, brand-specific merchandising and a centralized physical system. The catalog is no longer the whole business, but it remains a useful interface - tactile, paced and finite - that sends customers toward a website rather than competing with it.
The lesson from the first 500 Johnsons still holds. A mass system works better when the person receiving it can recognize herself inside. Ninety years later, the names on the cards have become a portfolio of narrowly framed promises: a safer home, a useful tool, a more comfortable day, the right wig, a gift that feels chosen. Silver Star's job is to keep those promises distinct at the front and make them travel together at the back.