Kitchen-table Seventeen ad for monogrammed accessories
In 1951, pregnant and working from her kitchen table in Mount Vernon, New York, Lillian Vernon used about $2,000 in wedding-gift money to place a roughly $495 ad in Seventeen offering a handbag and matching belt, sourced through her father's leather-goods business and monogrammed for free. The ad brought in about $32,000 in orders over roughly three months, and that first teenage-magazine ad became the start of what grew into her national catalogue company.