Lillian Vernon has definitely not faded away with the sale of her company to Zelnick Media. The company’s founder and longtime catalog marketer is writing a weekly column covering topics related to owning a business.
“The ABCs of Starting Your Own Business” was the first installment. It ran Friday in newspapers nationwide. The column is being syndicated by Scripps Howard News Service and will be available to 350 newspapers that subscribe to the service, said spokesman David Hochberg, who also is Vernon’s son.
The column will run every Friday for the next year.
“This is a great opportunity to get the name out there to a national audience and it’s a desirable audience since it will run in the newspapers’ business sections,” Hochberg said. “We had two goals — to do a syndicated business column, which she is doing now. The second goal is a syndicated lifestyle column, similar to what Martha Stewart is doing. A lot of the same people we discussed the business one with are the ones we are in discussions with on the lifestyle column, but no deal has been struck.”
Vernon writes the business column and it is edited and vetted by the Lillian Vernon public affairs department. Future ones will cover how to manage your vendors, how to maximize your customer relationships and the challenge for visionary leaders.
Lillian Vernon Corp. was sold in July. At that time, Vernon stepped down as its CEO. She is now the company’s founding chairman functioning in an advisory capacity regarding merchandising and is its primary spokeswoman.
