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Jordan McGregor Football Player. The number of people ordering by mail or phone increased by 70 percent between and By the mids, Vernon urgently needed money for investments.
Meanwhile, the company was mailing out eighty million catalogs per year. He was then widely expected to succeed his mother as official head of Lillian Vernon in the not-too-distant future, especially since Hochberg obviously had had a large part in major strategic decisions like the technological modernization and the stock market launch of Lillian Vernon in the s.
In the early s, external circumstances also turned less comfortable for Lillian Vernon. The boom of the catalog business had stimulated competition, and it became increasingly difficult to stand out. When Vernon had started her business, there had only been about fifty catalogs nationwide; four decades later, more than ten thousand vied for U.
The rise of successful discount chains like Kmart and Walmart had brought further competition, as had home shopping channels on television.
Last but not least, sixteen thousand shopping malls had been built in the United States between and The financial newspapers reported an increasing number of bankruptcies, which they attributed not just to the current economic crisis and escalating mailing costs, but also to a structural crisis within the trade. The company reacted to the changing market structures by further expanding and diversifying the classic catalog business, and by constantly embracing new technologies and sales channels.
By the mids, the company was mailing out million catalogs per year to eighteen million people, and handling nearly five million orders. In , Vernon additionally acquired the Rue de France catalog for French-inspired home accessories like lace curtains. It employed up to 1, people all year, and more than four thousand during the holiday shopping season. Meanwhile, the Virginia Beach distribution center had been extended several times and equipped with a computer center.
The company had established two seasonal call centers and opened eighteen outlet stores in several states. One year later, the first online catalog was launched on the website. But although sales were still growing in the second half of the s, the company began to struggle. With a new catalog to be printed and mailed every few weeks, Lillian Vernon had become extremely vulnerable to rises in postal rates and paper costs.
Profits were halved in after paper costs had increased by 50 percent, and dropped further in the following years. American consumers were beginning to move away from catalogs altogether and browse the Internet instead—shopping on websites like Amazon or Ebay, where not only thousands of smaller individual vendors, but also retail giants like Target began to offer their goods. Along with American society as a whole, the consumer market was becoming increasingly diverse around the turn of the century.
The first suburban generation of white, middle-class women whose needs Lillian Vernon had understood so well, whose tastes she had catered to, and whose brand loyalty she had been able to count on for more than forty years, had aged with her—and, more importantly, had ceased to dominate the mainstream of American consumers.
Once before, in , she had almost sold her company for that reason; [74] now, at the age of seventy-five, she was ready to let go. Zelnick Media did not succeed in turning Lillian Vernon around. Less than three years later, in May , the company was sold again—this time to the Florida-based investment firm Sun Capital Partners.
Facing a tightened credit market after a particularly bad holiday season, Lillian Vernon filed for bankruptcy protection in February Apart from its website, the company currently publishes three catalog titles with more than seven hundred products per edition; it claims to have mailed eighty million catalogs in Lillian Vernon was a petite woman, but she would make sure that she was not going to be overlooked. She would wear high heels to the office even when she had broken her ankle a few weeks earlier, and the doctor had only just removed the cast.
She never had shown much ambition while working for others, he told a reporter many years after their divorce. Like many self-made entrepreneurs, she officially scoffed at theory, and referred to herself as a practical-minded person.
They just talked about it. But you know what? I went out and did it. This image, of course, would also serve her business purposes. Once having established her own business, Vernon tried to help and encourage others to do the same. Politically, Vernon and her family have long been affiliated with the Democratic Party. Her financial contributions to the party and their presidential campaigns earned her an overnight stay at the White House; [] her son Fred served as a major fundraiser for the Democrats before being appointed chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States by President Obama in In her busy social life, too, business and private life were always closely connected.
Especially after she had married Paolo Martino who is reported to be a dedicated chef , she often entertained at her home even while she was still CEO.
Apart from their apartment in New York City, the couple owned a spacious house in Greenwich, Connecticut, where they hosted dinners or theme parties. No guest would ever leave without a monogrammed napkin ring or another personalized gift from the Lillian Vernon catalog. After retiring from the top executive position, Vernon kept up her self-discipline and, to a certain degree, her competitiveness.
She would never appear anywhere but impeccably coiffed and dressed. When she was interviewed, she never forgot to mention that she worked out daily to stay in shape.
She insisted that money is important, but it is not everything. But I think lots of people know who I am, which is very gratifying.
She attended the Hannover trade fair, established business relations with German suppliers and, from then on, regularly went to German trade fairs. The family went to Leipzig and even visited the apartment Vernon had lived in as a child. After they had arrived in New York, the Menasche family concentrated on how to make a living—which was anything but easy at that time. The U. They lived with a relative on the Upper West side for a short time, and then moved into a hotel until they found their own apartment.
He was too proud and independent, and he was determined to make it on his own. Clearly, Vernon saw her immediate family, and not an ethnic network, as the most important source from which she drew to build her new life, and later her entrepreneurial career. Even less convincing would be any attempts to generalize causes and effects from such an individual case. What a historian can try, however, is to reconstruct what typical formats individual persons use to make sense of their new environment and give direction to their own lives.
Outsiders see with a special clarity. At least part of this set was doubtlessly derived from the mentality of a German bourgeois family business. Vernon relied heavily on the founding legend, complemented and broadened by other stories related to her business.
He was a stranger to American business methods and did not realize that he needed to hire a receptionist, a model, a secretary, a pattern maker, and a cutter. Those were costs his start-up company could not support. Once again, I saw him pick himself up. It has long been established that family businesses with their specific sets of values, traditions, idiosyncrasies, and rather long-term orientation usually lean towards a high degree of autonomy and flexibility.
Throughout history, entrepreneurs who run family businesses have tended to maintain a sustainable, organic type of growth; they are often wary of burdening their companies with too much debt and put a high priority on their independence. These values are a core element of the heritage that the founder of a family business will strive to retain and hand down to the next generation. In this value transmission process, as a German study has recently shown, stories serve as a major vehicle. That way, we confine our stories to carry a certain message, or to transport a certain value, without explicitly saying so.
What medium could be more suitable for a self-made entrepreneur who, apart from founding and shaping a company, would also strive to shape and control the narration of her own life, so that, at the end of the day, all the puzzle pieces should fit?
Lillian Vernon became an entrepreneur almost by chance. Vernon leaves no doubt whatsoever, though, that the country she owes her success to is not her country of birth. The exemplary story that she tells follows the classic outline of the Horatio-Alger-type narrative about hardworking, persistent immigrants succeeding in the land of limitless opportunities, regardless of class and origin.
Mine is truly an American story. Tina Grant,Vol. James Press, , , here Newspaper and magazine articles usually refer to her autobiography An Eye For Winners. She did not consent to a personal interview for this essay. I would have retired 25 years ago, if I could have afforded it. Openly gay himself, Hochberg has been involved in several gay-rights organizations like the Human Rights Campaign.
He lives in Manhattan with his partner, the writer Tom Healey. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal , November 24, In that year, the U. Postal Service had made it up to 40 percent more expensive to mail catalogs, and the courier UPS, which delivered nine out of ten items ordered from catalogs, had raised their shipping rates for home deliveries by more than 16 percent.
International Directory of Company Histories , In the mids, two thirds of the adult population, or million Americans, had still ordered from catalogs.
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