This Palm Beach based “Queen of Prep” was the daughter of a Standard Oil heiress who began her career selling orange juice on Worth Avenue. Customers loved Pulitzer’s bright dresses and seizing on this, she began to sell them. Soon, her creations became the favourites of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Caroline Kennedy and members of the Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Whitney families. Sales reached $15 million a year in the 1960s and 1970s and net sales in 2010, by which time the company was owned by Oxford Industries, were $122.6 million. Lily Pulitzer’s designs remain as “must-have” items in the wardrobes of wealthy socialites and jetsetters and “The Lilly” is a household name. When told a specific print could not be used for an exhibition of her works because it was expensive, she answered simply: “A budget… How embarrassing”.
Two stories to keep beside you
Annie Börjesson (1975 – 2005, AKA ‘The Girl on the Beach’)
Mystery surrounds both the life and death of “kind-hearted” but sometimes “naïve” Annie Börjesson and, according to the Scottish Review, “the story of the last weeks of [her] life is disturbing in its emotional complexity and profound sense of incompleteness.” Born in Sweden, but resident in Edinburgh at the time of her death, Börjesson’s body […]
Rosemary Conley
“Slimming guru” Rosemary Conley’s luck changed in 2014 when her empire went into administration. Though her low-fat “Hip & Thigh Diet” regime was all the rage in the 1990s, newer “blockbuster” alternatives stole her mantle and her business, Quorn House Publishing – worth an estimated £13 million in 2006 – went down with losses of […]
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Disconnected ramblings of an old advertising man
It’s not where you start, but where you wind up that matters
Joseph Pulitzer – the Yellow Press Mogul and founder and funder of the Pulitzer Prize – pioneered hookers’ small ads in his Chicago newspapers….. ads that might read ‘ Lady with large chest for sale ‘………….
Plus ca change, plus la meme chose!
And, behind every great fortune you will find a great crime……….but, who amongst you will cast the first stone?………..
Lilian Pulitzer certainly wound up well, Martin. She was a marketing maven.