Standardization & Working within Existing Modularity of the American Construction Trade

By Wayne Congar

In 1908, Sears released their first Modern Homes catalog.

It was a beautifully-printed document that assumed, above all else, that its recipients were highly capable craftspeople. That assumption proved to be true for three decades.

Throughout their heyday, Sears sold home plans and delivered pre-cut, measured building materials to customers around the country. Over the next 32 years, before discontinuing the offering in 1940, 75,000 Sears homes were successfully built.

Since then, many start-up home companies have come and gone, often referencing the Sears Modern Homes program. But no matter how much investor money they raised (and lost) or the initial excitement they generated, most have failed to deliver homes with any consistency or scale.

These companies fundamentally misunderstood what made Sears Homes work.

It wasn’t the wealth of design choices.

It wasn’t the promise of a fixed build cost.

It was the delivery method.

Sears Homes excelled by identifying a common set of skills across the populace and mobilizing those people into an enthusiastic and capable workforce. They saw that people in 1908 could lay a foundation, frame a house, handle electrical work, and plumb a house with some guidance. These homeowners could also finish their projects over time without relying on outside vendors or being pressured by aggressive construction loan timelines.

Sears tailored its product to the skills of its customers, training them to be the second half of the home delivery system. The Sears Home model was as much about mobilizing a national assembly team as it was about the home designs themselves.

When did the program start to fail? When their product became too complex for the average customer to execute successfully, and their distribution method crumbled.

Sears shifted from delivering plans and materials to multi-talented generalists in pre-Wold War I 1908, to sending the same materials to time-constrained (and comparatively inexperienced) professionals—like dentists, lawyers, and accountants—in the depression-era 1930s. Realistically, these customers couldn’t build a home like their parents had, or simply didn’t have the time.

Nearly 100 years since the end of the Sears Home program, the need to accelerate housing production is as urgent today as it was then. But increased code restrictions, financing requirements, and the limited time and skills of the average American homeseeker make building one’s own home either impossible or inadvisable.

At HUTS, our design philosophy starts with a deep respect for existing American construction standards. Our homes utilize 16" on-center (OC) framing and are designed in 4' increments, allowing us to seamlessly work with standard 4x8' sheets of plywood and drywall, significantly reducing waste. HUTS designs fit naturally into the ecosystem of readily available materials and the construction methods used to assemble them.

Leveraging these standards allows us to engage and partner with a wide range of talented builders and contractors across the country. By designing with common construction techniques in mind, we tap into a universal skill set familiar to contractors from Maine to Texas. This approach means we can work with local builders, making it easy for them to join our team and contribute to HUTS projects without requiring specialized training or equipment. We often say that if you’ve framed a barn, you could be a great HUTS build partner.

Our approach also enables us to dodge the immense setup costs and challenges associated with full vertical integration. Unlike companies that have tried to control every aspect of production by building massive home-building factories or investing in complex assembly lines, we’ve intentionally chosen not to go down that path. Historically, the Ford assembly line or Tesla Gigafactory model hasn’t succeeded in housing, especially when a key goal is to respect the local context.

We saw no reason to pass setup or overhead costs onto our clients. Instead, by working within existing trade frameworks, we maintain a lean, agile business model that keeps overhead low and allows us to focus on what matters most: delivering high-quality homes that meet the needs of clients in rural and exurban settings.

This strategy also means we can scale effectively without the burden of upfront infrastructure costs. By avoiding the need to build massive factories, we aren’t tied to specific geographic locations or the logistical challenges that come with centralized production. We can operate nationwide, partnering with local builders in rural areas who already have the tools and expertise to build a HUTS home.

We love the precedent set by the Sears Home catalog, but we’re in tune with the skills required today to deliver high-quality, code-compliant homes. Our HUTS Standards—and the construction standards they adhere to—are central to our ability to tap into the skills of builders nationwide.