History
The privately held company was sold in July 2003 to investment firm Direct Holdings Worldwide, which in turn sold the company to Sun Capital Partners in May 2006.
On February 15, 2008, following a particularly bad holiday season and faced with worsening credit market conditions, the company gave notice to half the employees in its headquarters and distribution facilities that they were being laid off. The following Wednesday, February 20, the company announced that it was filing for bankruptcy and that it would either be sold, or wind down the business. Following the bankruptcy filing, the company was sold to Current USA, the highest bidder, in April 2008.
In November and December 2008 the company held special online coupon promotions for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
In March 2011, Current USA closed the Virginia Beach warehouse location to reduce costs. Warehouse and call center operations were moved to a Colorado location operated by the parent company Taylor Corporation.
Lillian Vernon has re-established itself post-bankruptcy, expanding its internet presence through Facebook and Apple's iTunes marketplace. In September 2010, Lillian Vernon released a free storybook for iOS devices including the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch called "Dusty D. Dawg has feelings too".
Lillian Vernon was given the lowest score (55 out of 100) of any rated apparel company (there were 11 total) in the Human Rights Campaign's 2008 Corporate Equality Index, a measure of gay and lesbian workplace equality.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)