Lillian Vernon (businesswoman)

Pregnant and working from her kitchen table in Mount Vernon, New York, Vernon placed a 495-dollar advertisement in Seventeen magazine in 1951 offering personalised handbags and belts, using money she had received as wedding gifts. Monogramming became the business's hook, the catalogue grew into one of America's best-known mail-order firms, and in 1987 Lillian Vernon became the first company founded by a woman to list on the American Stock Exchange.