To showcase its Lilly’s Kids catalog, Rye, NY-based Lillian Vernon Corp. has created an online destination devoted to the brand.
“The Lilly’s Kids catalog is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our business,” says Brad Sockloff, vice president of e-commerce for Lillian Vernon. “We’ve owned the Lilly’s Kids domain for a long time, but there has been some confusion. We found more and more people typing in LillysKids.com. Now we’re able to make the Lilly’s Kids home page entirely devoted to kid-related products.” In the past, the home page of LillianVernon.com featured some children’s merchandise along with household and décor items from the core catalog.
The company started discussing a separate online destination for Lilly’s Kids about six months ago. “Hopefully we can make Lilly’s Kids a destination site,” Sockloff says. “It hasn’t truly started a lot of traffic, but during our holiday season, online half of our sales were kids-related products. It’s a bigger focus for us now.”
LillysKids.com is technically part of LillianVernon.com. “It’s not truly it’s own Website, but it certainly has its own look and feel. It makes you feel like you’re on a different site,” Sockloff says. “You can toggle back and forth between Lillian Vernon and Lilly’s Kids. We didn’t want to build and maintain a new site. We’re managing both Lillian Vernon and Lillys’ Kids off the same platform. It’s been a growing business for us online, particularly during the peak season. We wanted to get this going during the off season and, hopefully, have it optimal by the back-to-school season in late summer.”
The 55-year-old Lillian Vernon Corp. launched the Lilly’s Kids catalogs in 1990. Its four other titles specialize in personalized gifts, housewares, and home accessories. The company started selling online in 1995.