Martha Stewart, America’s do-it-yourself darling, has set her sights on a huge new market: China.

Speaking at New York Social Media Week this week, Stewart said that she is seeking international expansion for her eponymous lifestyle media and merchandising business, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

She said she plans to focus on middle-class consumers in China on the suggestion of Alibaba founder Jack Ma, whom Stewart met last year and whom she called a “brilliant, brilliant person”.

He pointed to her success at tapping into the middle-class market with Kmart in the 1990s and 2000s, and told her: “‘Martha, what you did there’ - at Kmart in the early days - ‘is absolutely appropriate for what’s going on in China now. We have a middle class of 100 million.’”

Among China’s population of 1.37 billion, the middle class has been booming. In 2000, just 4% of urban Chinese households earned between $9,000 to $34,000 a year, found McKinsey & Company. By 2012, 68% were earning as much. By 2022, McKinsey predicts that number will grow to 75%.

“It’s growing so rapidly,” she said. “But he said within five years, there will be 300 to 400 million middle-class [people] coming from the country to the urban centers, moving into apartments from the farm houses and they need stuff. And they need to be able to afford this stuff.”

Stewart began her business as a small catering company back in the 1970s. In 1987, Kmart hired her as a consultant, and 10 years later, she launched the Martha Stewart Living Everyday line, which sold $1.6bn of products at Kmart stores at its peak in 2002. In 2008, right before Stewart and Kmart failed to renew their two-decade-long partnership, sales from Martha Stewart Everyday products sold at Kmart accounted for 10% of the company’s total revenue, according to The New York Times.

“I was the first kind-of-upscale brand that went mass,” she said. “And we went mass because I really did believe that the masses – the middle class and the lower middle class – had every right to have well-designed, beautifully engineered and well-made and affordable bedding, housewares and glassware for your table and dishes and all of that stuff.”

But now the Martha Stewart brand has grown bigger than its business, and the business needs to catch up, she said.



Approximately 30% of her brand’s Facebook followers live outside the US, she said. Many of her 3 million Twitter followers also live overseas.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma (front centre) and at the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in the New York Stock Exchange on 19 September 2014. Photograph: Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Here are five other things we learned about Stewart from her talk:

She likes drones

I love my drones. I don’t know if all my neighbors love my drones. One of my drones got stuck up in a neighbor’s tree and that was kind of embarrassing to go and retrieve it.”

Stewart has a collection of drones. She received her first one two years ago as a gift for her birthday, and uses her drones to photograph her 150-acre farm.

While a drone can be a “very useful tool”, she said, she mostly considers them toys. At the end of her talk, Stewart participated in a drone jousting competition, which she won.

She was an early investor in Google ... and also Home Grocer

“I was one of the first investors in Google, through Kleiner Perkins,” she told the audience. “That was the big success ... I invested even more money in Home Grocer and that was a total flop.”

She also invested in Amazon early on.

Her investments previously came under spotlight when she was convicted of telling lies related to a stock sale in 2004 and spent five months in prison.

MakerBot is heading to DIY stores in the hope of mainstream adoption of its 3D printers. Photograph: FABRIZIO BENSCH/ FABRIZIO BENSCH/Reuters/Corbis

She wants to use tech to save time, but it doesn’t always

I started dreaming a long time ago about what computers could do for us, and I must say I have been very disappointed in what they can do for us.”

When personal computers first hit the market, she said, “My first thing was: ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to save me so much time, to make time to go do other things.’ And guess what? How many hours do each of us spend sitting in front of our goddamn computer every single day?”

Stewart pointed at an audience member. “Look at him looking at his handheld thing there. It’s just horrifying that we really are not using them to [our] best advantage yet. It will happen.”

That said, one of the new technologies that can save businesses time and money are 3D printers, Stewart said. After being charged hundreds of dollars by companies that printed her products’ prototypes, she decided to get her own 3D printer.

“We can now do it for pennies,” she said. “So it does save money. And it’s a good business investment to get some sort of 3D printer.”

“My mom always told me I could do whatever I wanted to do, and I took her really seriously,” says Jenny Lawton, CEO of 3D printer company MakerBot. Guardian

Last year, Stewart announced a partnership with 3D printing startup MakerBot, which was bought by professional-grade 3D printing firm Stratasys in 2013. She introduced her own line of 3D printed housewares and MakerBot filament in her favorite colors: jadeite, robin’s egg and lemon drop.

She spellchecks on Twitter

Asked for etiquette tips on how to stay classy online, Stewart advised the audience to try not to misspell on social media.

“You’ve to be really careful not to misspell, because then they think you are drunk,” she said. “For some reason, they always say, ‘How much wine did you have, Martha?’ or ‘How many martinis did you have?’”

Then the other thing about staying classy online is don’t read a lot of what’s being written to you, because it’s not all very nice. And never look at the pictures. You don’t know what I’ve gotten. Oh. ... I can just imagine what Kim Kardashian gets.”

‘You can do just about everything’