Lillian Vernon's kitchen-table idea of selling monogrammed handbags and belts spawned one of America's best-known mail-order businesses. Peddling items like door knockers, welcome mats, personalised bookmarks, pewter place-card holders and crocheted Christmas ornaments, Vernon created a brand embraced by consumers, especially women.
Among her customers were Nancy Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gregory Peck and Hillary Clinton, who once said that as first lady of Arkansas during the 1980s, she would look through the catalogue hoping “that if I just ordered one more thing, my life would finally be in order.” The company went public in 1987 and was sold in 2003 for $60.5m; Vernon, who along with her son, David, owned 40 per cent of the company, received about $24m from the sale. She became non-executive chairman.
She was born in Leipzig; an early memory was anti-Semitic slurs as she and her brother as they walked to school. Her family was ordered from their home by Nazi officials, who turned it into a headquarters. The family moved in 1933 to Amsterdam, then in 1937 to New York .
Inspiration struck in 1951 in her apartment in Mount Vernon, New York, when she was pregnant with her first child; leafing through women's magazines, she came up with her big idea. Her start-up funds were $2,000 in wedding-gift money, her supplier her father, who ran a leather-goods business. “I wouldn't sell anything I wouldn't use myself,” she once said.
Lilly Menasche (Lillian Vernon), businesswoman: born Leipzig 18 March 1927; married three times (two sons); died New York 15 December 2015.
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