Allstate: A Sears Tire Contest, Good Hands, Mayhem and Colossus Software

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Allstate began as a name for Sears car tires. A 1925 contest drew over 2.2 million entries from nearly a million people, and Hans Simonsen of Bismarck, North Dakota won $5,000 for suggesting Allstate, which appeared on tires in 1927. In 1931 insurance broker Carl L. Odell pitched his neighbor, Sears executive Robert E. Wood, on selling auto insurance by mail, and Allstate Insurance Company opened that year. In 1941 only about a quarter of US drivers carried liability insurance, but after New York passed a financial responsibility law, nearly every state had one by the mid-1950s. In 1950 sales manager Davis W. Ellis reassured his anxious wife about their sick child with words that became the slogan You're in good hands with Allstate.

Allstate went public in 1993 in what was then the largest IPO in history, and Sears spun off the rest in 1995. It bought CNA's personal lines, renamed Encompass, Esurance, SquareTrade and National General. Trailing GEICO, State Farm and Progressive in ad spending, it added Dennis Haysbert in 2003 and Leo Burnett's Mayhem, played by Dean Winters, in 2010. In 2008 the American Association for Justice ranked Allstate the worst insurer, citing a McKinsey-era boxing gloves strategy, which Allstate called recycled, meritless allegations. In 2010 it agreed to a $10 million multistate settlement over its Colossus claims software, and New York's superintendent said regulators found no systemic underpayment.

• In the early 1950s Sears sold a rebranded Kaiser Henry J compact car through the catalog, pulling it by 1953.
• Theodore Conterio won $50 in an employee contest for designing the cupped hands logo.
• A 2000 Northwestern University study ranked the good hands slogan the most recognizable in America.
• After a run of hurricanes in 2006, Allstate moved to not renew 120,000 Florida policies.
• In 2025 its chief information officer said generative AI wrote more empathetic claims emails than staff, and the PR team asked Futurism to remove its post.