Martha Stewart - INBOUND 2014 Keynote

So I assume you're wondering about this. It's my pleasure to bring up our keynote of the day, one of the biggest brand builders of all time, Please welcome Martha Stewart. So.

Dan.

So, Martha, tell me, what are we making today?

Well, I thought, I can't start the day without my green juice.

Okay.

It's something everybody should have if they can. I think it's real healthy and really delicious and energizing and all those things. And you get a sort of a surge.

Okay.

Energy. So I thought I'd teach you how. Have you ever made your own?

No.

Okay. Do you have a garden?

I don't.

Oh, okay.

We're a bit behind here.

Okay. So it'll be more. It might be more expensive for you to make your green juice every day than it is for me because I have a big garden and I grow my vegetables. But. And do you have one of these?

No.

Okay. So you're gonna have a little investment also. These are not so expensive. My favorite juicer. And I don't have a deal with Breville. I should, but I don't. But this is really the best juicer because it's really easy to clean. And generally those old acmes that were in the health food stores, you know, they're really hard to clean. And big tapes inside and stuff. So you take this out.

Okay.

And we've actually gotten a lot of the stuff ready for you, so. And on the side is a little button. And you turn that on.

This one right here.

There's a refuse back here. Yeah, that one. Turn it on.

All right.

And then just start adding your stuff. I mean, celery is really good.

Okay.

And you can just push it down with. And make sure your vegetables are clean and the leaves are good. See how the juice is coming out the front?

Oh, yeah.

I got a leaf stuck here. Dan, I need your brute strength. I'll hold the. You pull this out.

All right. All right, let's try it.

Pull out. Up and out.

Hold on.

Thank you.

There we go.

Good. And now a piece of pineapple. How about some pineapple?

Oh, yeah.

I don't know what's wrong with this one now.

So how long have you been juicing for?

Pineapple is good. Cucumber is really good.

Okay.

Spinach is really good. Look at all that nice spinach.

I'm still on cucumber.

Here again, make sure it's washed. You know, so many people buy salad these days in a bag, and they take it home and they don't even wash it, they just take it out of the bag. That is a. No, no.

Okay. So wash it first.

Wash your spina. And we're gonna have a lot of juice here. I hope everybody in the audience is getting juice. Are they? I think. I think the chefs have been busy. And then a pear is good, too.

Just with the stem, everything. All right.

Okay. And then a couple other things. Some orange peel.

Okay.

You don't have to. You don't have to put the whole orange in, but the peel is really good.

Okay.

Okay. Now I'm going to turn mine back on again. It was making a funny noise. Mine sounds like an airplane.

Let's try this again.

There.

There we go.

And mint is really good. I like mint.

All right.

But you could use parsley and. Or mint every day. The recipe is different. You could add apple. But apple has much less food value than a pear. Do you know that? No. Yep. And it's too sugary. I don't like so much sugar in the morning. And parsley.

All right.

So far, so good.

It's working.

And the last thing, especially for this winter, is ginger. A nice big piece of ginger root there.

Now, how big of a piece of ginger should I cut?

As big as you want.

All right, let's just. We'll save some for later. Whoops.

And so there. Always put a glass underneath the spout. And look at that gorgeous juice.

Oh, that's great. That's great.

Oh.

Now, everyone in the audience is having some of this right now as well, so let me pour some of myself.

Well, tell me what yours tastes like.

Oh, I can.

You can turn your machine off.

Oh, jeez.

Yeah. And put the glass underneath a drip spout.

Yeah, you got.

Whoa.

That's the wrong way. There we go.

Cheers. Are you afraid to drink it?

No, no, I'm afraid to operate that again. I'm afraid to do.

So good, right?

It's fantastic.

Yeah.

Thank you.

It's very nice. And. And you get to know what your favorite is. I don't put kale in mine. I rather eat the kale. I don't put cabbage or garlic or wheatgrass. Those are not tasty like that. You know, the wheatgrass shot. Leave it to the cows.

Okay.

Yeah. No, this is better for you.

This is fantastic.

Yeah, it's good. So now do I go and do my.

That's it. I believe you.

Yeah.

I'm going to leave you with the audience and give your remarks. Everyone enjoy.

Oh, hi, Sarah.

Hi, Martha. Thank you so much for taking some extra time with us this morning.

Oh, thank you.

So I wanted to Just start by. I have so many questions I could ask you. I'm just going to dive right in.

Okay.

Okay. You talked a little bit in your talk about just the enormous growth your brand has seen, both in terms of the topics you cover and in terms of your partnerships. Is there a way that you think about choices of what you will do and what you won't do that allows that growth without letting your brand get diluted or overextended?

Well, in the United States, there are several or actually many now strong brands, brands that have expanded in many, many, many areas. And we are one of those brands. We really center on the home. So if we're doing pet coats for dogs and dishes for your pets and pet beds at petsmart, and we're doing kitchens for the Home Depot and we're doing Christmas decorations for Macy's and kitchen wares for Macy's, I don't think we're really overreaching in any way. Crafts for Michaels. I think we're really focusing on the home and what goes into that home, what's necessary for that home. So I don't think we've really overextended. I think that.

How did you stop? I mean, so many other brands have sort of extended too far. How did you make sure that did not happen?

Well, we just do things we love, basically. And all the things that we love. We have, I think, the best craft tools anywhere. And they are. They're beautiful, beautiful tools. Everybody should have craft tools in their drawer. Do you?

They might be a little bit dusty.

But if you want to cut a ribbon, you need a sharp pair of scissors. And you don't have to buy more than one pair of scissors. You just can have that pair of scissors. You have to put on a fabric only so you don't cut tin foil. But it's. No, I don't think. I think that we have an enthusiasm for variety and an enthusiasm for extending the brand and all things that have to do with the home.

Yeah. Now, okay, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about another thing you mentioned in your speech, the digital social media component, because I think so many content brands have struggled to get that right. Personally, I loved the Reddit chat that you did a while back. How do you guys approach your digital content in a way that does work so well when so many other marketing brands and also content brands have really struggled?

Well, we have a content library that is vast. 25 years of amazing, finely researched, well designed, beautiful imagery, not only. And recipes. Thousands and thousands of great recipes and Decorating techniques on. I mean, we really do have a vast library and that library is being combed daily, rearranged into interesting stories for the Internet user. The Internet user is a different, actually a different user than our daily readers. So we tailor our information in slightly different ways and it's working. We have millions of uniques on our website. At MarthaStewart.com we have the 11 to 13 million readers monthly of our magazine. We have daily readers of the Martha blog. We have 3 million Twitter followers who are pretty active and some rather outspoken. We have radio listeners who love to ask questions on a live basis. So we have really worked very hard to tailor that information and keep it beautiful and succinct and useful and practical.

So it's interesting. I'm hearing lots of great stuff here about the practicality of the content, the amount of content, the quality of the content and the products. As the leader of this organization as it has grown, how have you made sure that the culture of the company supports all of those values?

Well, the people who come to work for us are like minded people. We're in the midst of designing a campaign to tell the public who we are actually, we meaning everybody. And it's very interesting. It's very diverse group of people, but all with a similar desire to teach and to teach. They love to learn, just like I do. I'm a daily learner. One of my mottos is learn something new every day. It's very, very important. If I'm going to a destination, I try not to go down the same street every single day to go to that destination.

Don't do that in Boston, you'll get lost.

No, no, you don't get lost. Guess what you do. You learn. You see something new, you say, oh my gosh, I had no idea that store was there or that museum was there or that little place place was there. I learned something every single day that I then can explore. Monday morning, I spent a beautiful morning going to a garden I didn't even know existed in Yonkers, right on the Hudson River. A 150 acre garden which was one of the greatest gardens in America when it was built in 1925, the Untermyer Garden. I learned all about Samuel Unterm. I learned all about a whole new thing. So we have not only a fabulous location for weddings, we also have a fabulous location for a photo shoot for our magazine. I have a great blog and who knows what else will come out of it.

Okay, I'll definitely check that out because I love big gardens. Like that. So you mentioned the importance of teaching as well as learning. And I was wondering if there was a particular teacher or mentor, you know, from previously that you now, you know, use their lessons, their approach to teachers teaching in your own life.

Well, Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, had just sort of retired from Columbia University when I was at Barnard, but I read all her books. She was kind of a mentor for me because. And her students were my professors in anthropology, and they went on to. And she was at the Museum of Natural History when I was at Barnard. And I just read a poem by Margaret Meadow for my sister's memorial service on Saturday. So it comes around, you know, it's all. So she was a mentor in thinking about the human race and what kind of qualities humans really should develop. Amazing, amazing woman. Nobu Matsuhisa, my friend for a long, long time and Japanese chef and amazingly successful restaurateur. He taught me a lot about Japanese cuisine. I've traveled in Japan with him, visited his restaurants. I even got a sushi coat from him with my name on it because I made an appropriate piece of sushi. And I have my knives with my names in Japanese on them. So those are the kinds of people I go to experts, I go to artisans, I go to basket makers of note to learn how to do things.

Now, when you were. When people were filing in, they may have seen that there were on the screen some facts about your previous career. And they might have been surprised to see that you were a stockbroker before you got into your current gig.

And one of my most memorable memorable meetings while I was a stockbroker with a firm called Moniz Williams and Seidel, they still exist. It's now Moniz Crespi. They made me an institutional salesman woman. And my first big trip was right here to Boston from New York. And I sat. I had to take the client. He was. He was the head of a new company called EDS Electronic Data Systems. And I don't know how many of you know who Ross Perot was. Remember, he sort of ran for president. Ross Perot was my. That. He was the head of the company and ex marine, you know, tough guy with a brilliant idea for leasing computers and doing all what Electronic Data Systems did. And I took him to. Right here to Fidelity, and I had to sell him to Fidelity. They bought the stock immediately. And I remember going home that night and my husband said, what did you do today? I said, I took this really unusual guy, this little scrappy guy to talk to Fidelity and now the founder of Fidelity is a close friend of mine up in Maine. They live in the same town I do in Maine in the summertime. So it's interesting. But I learned about, as a stockbroker, I learned about how a company should be built and how a company should be running and I learned a lot about business and that was a very good seven years.

Yeah, well, so one of the lessons I think from that for you seems to be don't build your business on debt. Instead bootstrap it. Is that fair to say?

Yeah. We've always had money in the bank. That's not necessarily the only thing that's important financial. There are all ways to build a good business. But when you're starting out as a young entrepreneur, going deep into debt is a real big problem. And you don't have to. I think many times there are ways to build a business where you can not go broke before you start making your first dollar.

When you're looking ahead at the opportunities now you see for your brand, where are the sort of chief areas that you're looking for growth?

Well, internationally is the big area. Now I had the great pleasure of going to Guangzhou about four months ago. Guangzhou is the home of Alibaba and I mentioned Jack Ma, but he's in the news, he's on the front page of every single business section for the last couple weeks because he is now going public with Alibaba in the United States. And what an interesting man and what a visionary 50 year old guy who, who has, is going to have probably the largest IPO in history any day now. So. But he really encouraged me to come with our product to the emerging middle class in China which is three times it's going to be 300 million people in the middle class in the total population of America in the next three or four years. So that's, you have to hear and learn from people like that who are the next generation of really big, big time thinkers and doers.

So if there's one thing I think that's becoming clear to me, it's that all of us complain about being busy. You are actually busy, legitimately busy. And I'm wondering, and you've said previously that your work and your life aren't separate. They're pretty fused.

They are.

Are there rules of thumb that you use to kind of manage your priorities, decide what to pursue, what not to pursue, how to spend time?

Well, right now my business is my big business. Right now I am paying very close attention to what Martha Stewart Living can do to grow and to succeed for the future. And I now have two grandchildren, which I didn't have three years ago. And I want them to have a legacy. It's just like when I started writing my first book, Martha Stewart Living. I said, excuse me, entertaining. In 1982, I said, I better write a book. I'm doing all this fabulous cooking and beautiful setting tables and entertaining people every single night. And if I don't take pictures and write a book about it, my grandchildren won't have an idea about what grandma did.

Did.

And then it took. Well, it's 30 something years later I finally have the grandchildren and I do have a company. But I want them to be able to. Little Jude is like little Martha. She's the greatest. And she could come in and run the company in 20 years, I hope. But it's a lot of fun to see.

That raises an interesting point because actually family businesses are a much bigger sector, I believe. I believe they're actually the biggest sector of business.

And they are. And I really admire families that are able to continually evolve and grow with family members taking part. That said, a lot of companies who bring in their family don't thrive as much as they should. And then they make and they could, and they then can do some alterations, bring in somebody else like the Estee Lauder Company. And the company grew exponentially after that. But the family members are still involved very nicely. But it's again, it's business, business, business and you have to pay attention to it.

Yes, well, and as you look ahead, I mean, are there, when you kind of think about what happens to this empire that you have built, do you see family members sort of taking it on or do you have a different.

Well, both family and evolving into new ways. Business is being done in many, many different ways now. And we have to take advantage of what's available to us. And it's very exciting. Good.

Okay, I want to switch gears slightly here and just ask you, if you are Talking to your 30 year old self, what advice would you give that person?

Well, a lot of entrepreneurs come to me and ask me questions. The American made people, all of those young entrepreneurs who are making product in America using American materials are involved with this big initiative. I really encourage them, if they have a great idea to run with it, find ways to finance, find ways to build, find ways to market. I'm working with my trainer, her picture was on the screen, Mary Tedesco. And she has a business partner, a good friend of hers who's a nutritionist. They've just come up with a fabulous Coffee. It is called U Live Java, U L I V Java. It's just gone into Whole Foods. It's getting into. It's in Safeway, it's getting into a whole lot of other markets. But it's bottled iced coffees with herbs in it and green tea, and it tastes delicious. And the dry and the ground coffees are excellent. So I'm helping them with that. I like that kind of thing. To see how the market will accept and. And if they will succeed. Yeah.

So that raises, I think, an interesting point because for me, it's hard to imagine this maker movement, this artisanal movement without your influence. Are you someone who is trying to set trends or are you scanning the horizon for glimmers of new trends and then kind of jumping on them?

Oh, it's both. It's both. We have set many, many trends. We have actually elevated homemaking to an art form rather than a drudgery. I'm very proud of that. Steven Spielberg even told me I did that, which made me feel good since he's one of my mentors in terms of creativity. But how nice to know that now you can think if you say, oh, I'm a homemaker, that you will not be maligned or pooh poohed, or the man won't turn and talk to his other dinner partner. Because homemaking is important. But I think that. Thank you. I think that it's just a question of being enthusiastic about what you're doing, building carefully, having passion for your ideas. Facebook wouldn't be Facebook without that passion that went along with it. And brains, of course, a tremendous amount of brains and ingenuity. So it's all of those things. It's a complicated thing to come up with a new, vital idea. Not everybody's going to come up with a Microsoft idea, but many of us can come up with other ideas that will make life better and also be successful.

I want to shift slightly back to the leadership side of the question because I think obviously you've had enormous successes, but there have been setbacks on the way. When a leader makes a mistake or there is a setback, what do you think is the best way to respond?

Well, the best way is just to be very frank and open and honest about whatever, to change course as quickly as possible if there is a real problem in your business. My setback, my biggest legal problem, was only mine, it was not anybody else's. So it didn't really affect the company. Advertisers did take a wait and see attitude for a while, but it was my problem. But a problem like we had with Macy's and JCPenney. We all thought we were right and able to do what we were trying to do. And, you know, you have to listen to, finally, the legal solutions, but all businesses have that. And you have to just be, as I said, as calm and as honest and as forthright and being able to explain what's going on to the people.

Who work with you is there. You know, it seems like that is actually very rare. I'm sad to say. I've followed the careers of a lot of business people and sort of staying calm and being frank, and it seems like that's actually a pretty rare response.

It is.

Well, I'm sort of wondering, what do you think it is in terms of your makeup or your upbringing that makes that something that Martha Stewart can do when other people seem to struggle with it?

Well, I was always brought up to sort of believe in myself. I was encouraged by my dad to always do what I thought was right and good and productive. And he said, you can do anything you want if you work hard enough. So that work ethic is a very important work ethic to instill in your children, and that encouragement in every one of the jobs that's around you is very important.

So as we've been talking, talking about a lot today, this is a category that you did work hard. You did create this category. You now have a number of competitors who sort of followed your path into this field. How do you stay distinctive and differentiated and one step ahead of them?

Like who?

I thought I'd better not name names.

I just want to hear. I just have to hear this. I have been pitted against some beautiful, talented, amazing girls. I consider them girls because they're about half my age. And it's so silly. There's room for a lot of good stuff going on in this country and elsewhere in the world. And to make up these stories and pit Martha against other people is so silly.

No, I agree with that. I think it's. I'm glad to see a healthy, thriving sector here.

The world has become an extremely crowded and competitive landscape, not only because America has developed so rapidly with technology in the last few years, but elsewhere. I mean, there are women who are doing the kind of lifestyle business that I have created in China, in Thailand, in Dubai. I'm going to Dubai to talk. They're all interested in developing lifestyle businesses, and good. If I can be a mentor and a helper, that is great, because I think the world needs more lifestyle. It needs more information. About good living. As we become more and more affixed on our little handheld devices, we better look outside and help our children learn and thrive and exercise and do other things. So I don't want to be part of a deaf blind world.

Yes, I agree. Well, here's maybe another better way to think about the question. If it's a Saturday morning, we're in the middle of renovating our old, very 1860 house. So we spend a lot of Saturdays in Home Depot. So I'm walking down the Home Depot aisle and I can see, you know, 500 yards or whatever ahead what is clearly a Martha Stewart, you know, bag of bulbs. How do I, how, how have you made this brand so cohesive that I know from the length of a football field that those are your bulbs?

It might be the color of the label. We have a very distinctive blue color at Home Depot. But, but, but also, we're the only, only kind of named brand at, at the Home Depot with a person attached to it. Martha. And the person and Martha the brand are inextricably entwined. And as we, as we emerge as a, as a different, you know, bigger company, we are encouraging other brands. We own every Emeril, the chef Emeril now, and he's doing some amazing stuff. And we have other brands emerging in our company. Sarah Carey with Everyday Food. We have Thomas Joseph with Kitchen Conundrums that's becoming very popular on the Internet. We have Shira Bokar who's doing Clean Slate, really healthy, clean, organic cooking. So we're developing other people within the company. Erin Furey with Crafts. She's charming and very crafty. These are the kinds of things that a company must and has to do.

Yes, of course. Well, I know we're just about out of time, so I will keep it brief and just say, what do you hope your legacy is?

Well, if I do have a legacy, it would be as a really good teacher and, and also as a successful entrepreneur who did things that made living every day better for everybody.

Thank you. Thank you. And thank all of you.

Thank you, everybody.

Sam.