Lillian Vernon

Lillian Vernon was born Lilli Menasche in Leipzig, Germany, in 1927 to a Jewish family that fled Nazi persecution when she was a small child, moving first to Amsterdam and then, in 1937, to the United States, where her family had to rebuild a comfortable former life from almost nothing in a new country and language.

She married young and, in 1951, pregnant with her first child and looking for income she could earn from home, used a wedding gift of two thousand dollars to place a small advertisement in a magazine offering a personalised handbag and belt by mail order. The response was strong enough that she kept going, working from her kitchen table to fill orders herself while raising her children, gradually adding more personalised gifts, household items and gadgets to a growing catalogue business run under the name Lillian Vernon.

She built the company almost entirely on her own instincts about which small, useful, moderately priced products ordinary American households would want, long before data-driven retail existed, and insisted on personally testing many products herself. By the 1970s and 1980s the Lillian Vernon catalogue was a fixture in American homes, and in 1987 the company became the first founded by a woman to be listed on the American Stock Exchange.

She remained active in the business for decades, one of relatively few women to build a major American retail company from scratch in the mid twentieth century, and spoke often about how being an outsider, a refugee and a young mother with no formal business training, forced her to trust her own judgement rather than any established playbook.