Her Catalogue Has the Right Stuff : Shopping: With her thousands of useful products, Lillian Vernon has helped revolutionize the mail-order business.

Lillian Vernon makes no bones about what she sells: It’s not haute stuff, but that’s not her niche, anyway.

Rather, Vernon has made her mark with well-made, useful stuff--stuff you may not have thought you needed until you saw it in her catalogue.

Like a bedside caddy for your TV Guide, a shamrock train for St. Patrick’s Day, a personalized solid brass door knocker, a monogrammed eyeglass holder, a clothespin basket (with 50 clothespins) or shelf dividers.

How about some bed linens, the same kind Barbara Bush ordered in April, 1991, when she had $161 worth sent to the White House?

“I am the consummate consumer,” says Vernon, 65, who legally changed her surname from Katz to Vernon last year. “I wouldn’t sell anything I wouldn’t use myself.”

She’s also the consummate businesswoman. Since 1951, when she started her business from her dinner table with a mere $2,000, Vernon has turned her catalogue sales into a multimillion-dollar business.

Vernon has helped revolutionize the catalogue business, now an important means of shopping for millions of people who are either pressed for time or don’t like the crowds and other hassles of shopping in stores.

A petite woman, ever conscious of her appearance, she runs a tight ship at her Mount Vernon headquarters and at her distribution center and outlet stores.

Vernon guarantees every one of her thousands of products, even if it’s no longer made, and has made personal attention to detail her trademark.

“My name is on the catalogue,” she says firmly.

She means it when she says the final word is always the customers’. She says she reads every letter and responds: When people complained about fur and ivory products, she stopped selling them.

Nothing gets into the catalogue without her consent and she spends at least 16 weeks a year traveling the world looking for new products.

Inventors and vendors are constantly sending her items, and her “samples” room is filled with rocking horses, reindeer ornaments, glasses and jugs, as well as breakable objects Vernon will never offer for just that reason.

As a homeowner, mother, grandmother and one who enjoys entertaining, Vernon’s eye is on the unusual, decorative and useful.

And affordable. The company slogan is “living well for less.”

Even celebrities flip through the Lillian Vernon catalogue. Marilyn Quayle called in an order for Christmas, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor bought Easter items, says David Hochberg, Vernon’s son and a company executive. Frank and Barbara Sinatra, Steven Spielberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger have also shopped.

Vernon was born in Leipzig, Germany, the daughter of what she terms “lower upper-class” Jewish parents. Her family fled Germany in 1933, first to the Netherlands and on to New York City in 1937.

She married Sam Hochberg in 1949 and had two sons. Raising her family in a small apartment in this New York City suburb, she wanted extra income.

So she used a $2,000 wedding gift to merge her love of monogrammed goods with her father’s leather goods business: Vernon started selling monogrammed handbags and belts through an ad in Seventeen magazine.

After she sold $32,000 worth of goods, Vernon Specialties was born (the name was taken from the town of Mount Vernon). She added more and more products to her inventory and the business became Lillian Vernon Corp. in 1965.

The company was grossing $1 million a year by 1969, when she and her husband divorced. Then she turned her full attention to the company.

The business took off in the 1970s, when mail order boomed because of the growing number of working women who had less time to shop.

Today her national distribution center is in Virginia Beach, Va., while the company runs three outlet stores in Virginia and another in New Rochelle, N.Y. Up to 1,500 people are employed during the peak Christmas season.

Vernon is the chief executive officer, and both of her sons are company executives.

She figures her business will survive competition from other catalogues because of her quality and service. There are toll-free numbers for customers’ orders and the company ships within 24 hours.