Word: stewart
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...complex, horizontally integrated empire of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia is based on an almost insipid ethos: make life nicer and prettier. But implementation is not that simple. She says, "It took 100 years for someone to tell ordinary people in a doable manner not how to make an Escoffier or 100 amazing recipes that you will never do on a daily basis." Instead Stewart focuses on simple perfection. "I knew that the how-to would be my niche," she says. Adds her friend, dealmaker Ronald Perelman, the Revlon mogul: "I put her right up there as one of the most...
Make that Thomas Jefferson. Two Pennsylvania State University lecturers, at work on a book about Stewart, liken her influence to that of Jefferson, the Founding Father of the home-and-garden set, also a dabbler in politics. Stewart, while pleased, begs to differ. "I'm reaching more people than he," she explains...
...Stewart has collected a set of sobriquets just as she has Depression glass and vintage linens: nabob of nesting, for example, and doyenne of domesticity. And she has earned a reputation for being too perfect, a control freak and an overachiever, who while still in grammar school organized all the neighborhood kids' birthday parties. With her image and life so open, she has become ripe for parody and criticism. She is the subject of a recent scathing, unauthorized biography, Just Desserts. Stewart says she finds the criticism boring: "It's sexist, jealous and stupid, and it all comes from...
...paint and makes everything so pretty. I had a subscription for two months, but she made me feel so deficient, so I canceled. Reading it made me feel bad about myself." Even high-powered friends pale in comparison. While buddy Charlotte Beers, chairman emeritus of Ogilvy & Mather, calls Stewart a "really elegant teacher," she also says, "It's true she can make a pie in four minutes, and I'm a great piemaker myself. It's maddening...
Maybe so, but Martha and her growing World are indisputably a recipe for success. Her company will probably head for an initial public offering on Wall Street. With her newly launched products and media outlets, Stewart's influence reaches more than 30 million people a week, in addition to the 70 million American households that already shop K Mart yearly. At the discount chain, her matelasse covers, an item usually found at the toniest boutiques, are starting to sell like garden hoses, which is just what K Mart needs to bring in the sales. "We have a million ideas that...