Martha Stewart:

You can't fake it till you make it. You make it by hard work, dedication, a lot of personal grit, and vigor actually.

Kristen Scholer:

Martha.

Martha Stewart:

Hi.

Kristen Scholer:

Thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.

Martha Stewart:

It's kind of fun to be here back at the New York Stock Exchange.

Kristen Scholer:

It's great to see you here at the New York-

Martha Stewart:

Thank you.

Kristen Scholer:

... Stock Exchange. I know you've got a big day ahead of you here, of course, with Scotts Miracle-Gro.

Martha Stewart:

It's their 30th anniversary of going public.

Kristen Scholer:

That's amazing.

Martha Stewart:

Which is fabulous.

Kristen Scholer:

It is fabulous indeed. And you're the chief gardening officer.

Martha Stewart:

I am. I'm very proud of my new title.

Kristen Scholer:

Yes. What does this entail?

Martha Stewart:

Well, Scotts and I have been working together for a few years now, and I am persistent. I'm a persistent organic gardener. And Scotts has some fabulous organic products. And I've been a user, a customer of Scotts for a very long time. And we got together because of our love of gardening, of course. And they appointed me chief gardening officer. I love it. My real title is dirt nerd. So I wish it were the CGO, but it's really dirt nerd.

Kristen Scholer:

Dirt nerd. I like that. Well, we're honored to be in the presence of the dirt nerd as well as the chief gardening officer at Scotts. There's been a growing importance of organic practices. I want to get your input on that, and the role that scientifically grounded organizations are playing in shaping the future of gardening. Why do you believe that organics must play a big role? And how do companies like Scotts help adapt those practices?

Martha Stewart:

Well, it's extremely important for the soil of the Earth to be maintained and healthy, and to be able to grow all the food that we need to grow for the huge population that inhabits the Earth. And we can ruin the Earth very quickly with poisons, with garbage, with whatever else is thrown into the Earth, and we have to be careful about it. And I'm an environmentalist. I really care about the ecology of the Earth. It's a fragile ecology, and we have to be careful. And Scotts recognizes that, as do so many other companies. And I hope that all the world's governments will also acknowledge that there is a danger in destroying the Earth.

Kristen Scholer:

You're no stranger to the New York Stock Exchange.

Martha Stewart:

No.

Kristen Scholer:

You're here today with Scotts. Does it feel good to be back?

Martha Stewart:

Well, yeah. I've come back a couple times since I went public myself in 1999, which was a momentous day for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. We went public to great fanfare. I remember coming early, early in the morning and serving croissant to all the brokers on the floor. It was very fun and they all liked it. They loved being served food. That's a boisterous bunch of guys down there on the floor, some girls, but mostly guys. And we had a very great day.

Kristen Scholer:

Yeah. Well, I know they're excited to see you on the floor again here soon. Let's talk Martha Up Close and Personal, your blog.

Martha Stewart:

Oh, yes.

Kristen Scholer:

You recently published on there about potting succulents, natural fit here with Scotts Miracle-Gro. Writing about their beauty, their resilience, and their low maintenance nature. How does this speak to how you are trying to help gardening grow?

Martha Stewart:

Well, gardening, I think, if my information is correct, is the fastest growing outdoor activity in the world. And everybody wants to be a gardener. Every one of my friends, even the ones who are the nerdiest, they sit in the office all day long, the nerdiest people, they like to garden. And I think just watching something grow, nurturing something, taking care of something that is so unargumentative as a plant is a very good thing. And when I see that, I know that we're in the right business. Scotts is right there in the forefront of helping people grow beautiful things.

And I have thousands of plants. I live on a big farm. I live on a 156 acre farm, less than an hour from New York City. And I grow a lot of things. I've planted thousands of trees on my farm. I've planted all kinds of shrubs and flowers. I grow animals on my farm. And I am an organic gardener. And we just need help. We all need help learning about gardening, about growing. And we're here to help people do that.

Kristen Scholer:

How do you hope that your working relationship with Scotts grows as the chief gardening officer or dirt nerd, in your words?

Martha Stewart:

Well, it is growing. It becomes more and more important as we expand our audience. Right now, I've just started a new venture with Scotts called The Martha Collective. And we are going to be posting online, on Instagram, and on TikTok, small snippets, film snippets of me talking about certain things. And asking our audience to participate by, like say I talk about growing snapdragons, for example. Please send me pictures of your snapdragons, and what varieties do you like the best?

So I'm asking a lot of questions of the gardeners, trying to involve them in a personal way with Scotts, of course, and the whole Martha Collective. It's a lot of fun to do that. And we'll see how big that audience gets. I bet it'll get to be quite huge because people love to take pictures of their successes and their failures too. So I hope we get a lot of everything, and we'll be posting stuff starting very shortly.

Kristen Scholer:

Martha, it's wonderful to welcome you here with Scotts today. You yourself have a history with the New York Stock Exchange. Talk to me more about that.

Martha Stewart:

Well, I was one of the first women to be asked to sit on the board of the New York Stock Exchange by Mr. Grasso, the CEO. And it was quite an interesting board. We had lots and lots and lots of questions asked of us. We had so much going on. It was just, this is all in the early... Well, I went public in 1999, and so it was right around 2003, I think. And I loved it. It was so much fun with the titans of industry. This is an historic place. And a lot of business is done here, right here on Wall Street. So it was fun.

Kristen Scholer:

Very true. I want to talk about another business venture of yours, one that I'm excited about here. Late last year, you launched your first skincare brand, Elm Biosciences. Feels like an evolution, you might say, from personal practice into purposeful innovation. When did you decide that you really wanted to get behind this and innovate this line?

Martha Stewart:

Well, I'm very interested in longevity, human longevity. I am very interested in the maintenance of the human body in an efficacious way. And I care about graceful aging. And I think so many people nowadays with the life expectancy just extending, extending, extending, we don't know how long we're going to live anymore because so many good things are happening that are keeping us alive longer. We also want to stay healthy while we're getting older.

So keeping healthy skin, our largest organ, healthy, is extremely important to me. And I worked with Dr. Dhaval Bhanusali, an Indian doctor. He's a dermatologist, educated here in the United States. Very smart, very good chemist, very good mixologist, if you want to call him that. And we have developed two skincare products at present under the name Elm Biosciences. And Elm after the street I grew up on in Nutley, New Jersey, Elm Place.

And it is really, really a fantastic serum and also a fantastic night cream. And we have about three more products coming out in short order. And people are responding extremely favorably to it. I think one of the nicest and most interesting things about our company is that we have a board of dermatologists, more than 350 dermatologists testing our products for us, reporting on their efficacy. And we are, I think, probably the only skincare company doing that. And it is working. The response from the customers has been superior, and the results, when skin is studied by the dermatologist, is really good. So it's working.

Kristen Scholer:

Yeah. It sounds like attention to detail might be the key differentiator there.

Martha Stewart:

Well, I've always been that way. And Dr. Bhanusali is also extremely detail oriented. And we're ingredient oriented. We care about the ingredients and that there is nothing harmful, only helpful, in what we are creating.

Kristen Scholer:

People know you as an icon, a businesswoman, the chief gardening officer of Scotts Miracle-Gro. It's impressive, Martha, the decades of success that you've had building your brain.

Martha Stewart:

I've been working for a long time, and I think I started working when I was about 10 as a party planner for the neighborhood kids. I used to hold all the birthday parties for the parents who didn't really want to do that stuff. I blew up the balloons and made the cakes and the cupcakes. But I've been working a long time. And I've had several really fascinating careers. And my life has been extremely busy and extremely full, and it continues to be.

Kristen Scholer:

Well, we're thankful for all the innovation and passion that you put into this. I want to talk about Entertaining. Of course, the re-release of this coming in late 2025, 43 years after its original release. What do you think endures about this original piece of work of yours?

Martha Stewart:

Well, when I wrote it in 1980, I guess I started writing it around 1980. I was a caterer. So I had gone from my Wall Street career when I was a stockbroker for a small firm of go go fabulous brokers and researchers to a caterer. I retired in the early '80s, and decided, well, I'd really love to entertain. I really love to cook. I think I'll just start a catering business. And at that time, there were very few really high-powered catering businesses.

And I built mine into quite a successful enterprise doing parties for Sotheby's, for the Metropolitan Museum, for the New York Antique Show. For the New York Antique Show, I brought live chickens in wooden cages and bales of hay. And we had a whole country buffet set up, the likes of which they had never seen before. Nobody had ever brought live livestock to the floor of the New York Antique Show, but we had so much fun.

But that gave me the idea that I really wanted to preserve the knowledge I was gaining as a caterer, as a creator of really unusually good food. So I wrote that first book, Entertaining, and it struck a chord. I knew it would because it was a book that I needed and wanted, and I've based most of my business since then on need and want. Do you need it and do you want it? And that way you can really determine whether... And why me? Because I'm the typical American homemaker. And I have been that ever since I got married. I got married when I was 19, and I started to develop a style that was unique sort of to me.

So developing that style, I figured I better start a media business. I better start writing a book. So I wrote first the Entertaining book. And the publisher, "Oh, if we sell 10,000 copies, it'll be great." And I persuaded them to do a first printing of 25,000 copies, which was kind of unheard of in those days. And they did it, and it sold out immediately as I predicted. And they went on, and it sold millions of copies by now.

And the reason that we republished it 43 years later is that so many young people, well, it gets complicated, watched my documentary that was released two years ago. And that documentary showed the possibility of taking a simple childhood, a nice college education, and turning it into a huge business. And young people really responded. And they didn't know my story. They didn't know all the trials and tribulations that attended my growing up in New York. But there were plenty. And they liked it. They liked learning about it. So the book, then they saw Entertaining in the documentary, and they said, "Oh, we want that book." And they tried to get it from their mothers. And luckily, their mothers would not part with their copy because they have favorite recipes in that book.

Kristen Scholer:

That's loyalty.

Martha Stewart:

Yeah. So that's why we did a facsimile edition, which is the exact copy of the original for the new audience. And it's done very well. Young people love it.

Kristen Scholer:

Yeah. What are the best ways that you find to connect with your audience and your followers these days?

Martha Stewart:

Well, I think the best way for anybody to connect is to be authentic. And I put a lot of credibility and a lot of importance on authenticity. And I think anybody in business has to do that. You can't fake it till you make it. You make it by hard work, you make it with dedication, you make it with a lot of personal grit, and vigor, actually. I hate the word vigor. I hate the word rigor. I shouldn't have even said that. But that's how you make it.

Kristen Scholer:

Speaking to authenticity, of course, people know you over the decades as being authentic, hardworking. We've talked about the successes that you've had. And you have this incredible working relationship and friendship, of course, I want to hear about it in your words, with Snoop Dogg, right?

Martha Stewart:

Oh yes. Oh, my friend. I'm going over to the Olympics this Saturday.

Kristen Scholer:

Wow.

Martha Stewart:

Two weeks into the Olympics. Snoop's been doing a fantastic job, and he's been reporting pretty much every day from Milan and from Cortina. He even put on skis. I don't know if we're going to put on figure skates. Maybe we will. But we're doing the women's short program next week together. We're doing a lot of lifestyle reporting for Channel 4 for NBC. And I'm looking forward to it. I have my trunks of clothes. You need a lot of clothes because you have to keep changing. Snoop must have taken over a box car full of clothing. He has not worn the same thing twice.

Kristen Scholer:

Maybe he did some shopping in Milan.

Martha Stewart:

Oh, probably. We're looking forward to doing that too. And we're going to eat. Oh, we're certainly going to eat.

Kristen Scholer:

What's on the menu in Milan?

Martha Stewart:

Oh, well, the athletes love it there, did you know, because of the carbs. They have spaghetti and lasagna and all kinds of noodle dishes. They're very happy over there, the athletes, I hear. And they say the food is the best here that it's been anywhere. I've been to, let me see, I went to, of course, the Paris Olympics. The food was good. But I think the athletes really like this. I went to the Nagano Olympics, the Winter Olympics, and of course that was all Japanese food, a lot of rice. I think they must have liked that too. I loved it. But we'll see what happens next week. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Kristen Scholer:

I'm excited to see the action indeed. Let's talk about a natural segue into a new restaurant that you're planning to open. Of course, your first restaurant opening in 2022, The Bedford at Paris Las Vegas. And now a second location coming at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut.

Martha Stewart:

Oh yeah. Oh, well, now finally, my friends who have not been able to get out to Las Vegas to eat can eat at Foxwoods in Northeastern Connecticut. And it's a large restaurant. It has about 250 seats. It's by reservation, of course. It's in the casino at Foxwoods. And we're looking forward to a very busy, busy spring season and hopefully, well, summer too. It's like a resort. Foxwoods is not only a gambling casino, but it's also a family resort. And they are very enthusiastic about my restaurant, which makes me happy. We're right next door to Gordon Ramsay's huge restaurant there. So that's a nice contrast. And I hope you come sometime and taste the delicious food.

Kristen Scholer:

Yeah, I would love to come indeed. What are the lessons that you've learned from entering the restaurant business?

Martha Stewart:

Well, first of all, it's fun. Second of all, it is the response of the public when you have good food and a beautiful ambiance is really uplifting. We have had such a nice time in Las Vegas. The people who go there, I mean, I get calls all the time that someone says, "Oh, we just had the best roast chicken," or, "We just had your mother's pierogi with brown butter and caviar. And we love the bread basket." I mean, they really remember what they've ordered, what they've eaten, and what they've sampled. It's a very rewarding thing. And now I know why Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges, they each have about 50 restaurants now because their response is great when it's good.

Kristen Scholer:

How do you decide on these two locations?

Martha Stewart:

Well, Caesars is my partner in Las Vegas, and they've been a very, very receptive and very excellent partner. I love that company. And they do a lot of hospitality. And then Foxwoods came to me and wanted us... I sort of grew up in my early married life in Connecticut, so it was the perfect place to go for the second.

Kristen Scholer:

Okay. I have to try it indeed. The chicken sounds amazing.

Martha Stewart:

Oh, it is. It's so good.

Kristen Scholer:

It's been incredible. You've watched multiple generations of entrepreneurs rise, I'm sure, from lifestyle pioneers to now today's digital first creators. You have the experience to show. What is in the pipeline for Martha Stewart?

Martha Stewart:

Oh, I have so many things. I've just finished my 103rd book. 103 books. That's a lot of books-

Kristen Scholer:

Congrats.

Martha Stewart:

... in a lifetime. Yes. And they're all really good books. I'm very proud of the library of books that we've created. And they're all on subjects of how to and recipes and gardening. And there's lots. And I have a lot more to write. I have so many more subjects I'd like to cover. But I'm working on my opus, my autobiography. They call those things memoirs now. But it is so interesting to write a memoir.

Kristen Scholer:

Wow.

Martha Stewart:

It's so interesting. So that'll be coming out probably in maybe a year and a half. But it takes a lot of concentration and it's very interesting. And the title, you want to hear the title?

Kristen Scholer:

Please.

Martha Stewart:

Let Me Entertain You.

Kristen Scholer:

Oh, Martha. Always entertaining. You've been so entertaining here up close and personal too.

Martha Stewart:

Yeah. Well, that's what it is. So that's the next big thing for me is an autobiography. But I'm working on all my products. We have new, beautiful bedding and bath products emerging for the retail market. We have a big store on Amazon now that's so popular. I'm still appearing on a regular basis on QVC with fashion. We're busy. Oh, we have the best new line of small kitchen electronics. So like a countertop oven that is so good. And a new blender and a new toaster. And they're all beautifully color coordinated. Everybody's going to want these for their home. They'll be available only on Amazon.

Kristen Scholer:

Martha, it sounds like you're not slowing down anytime soon. Maybe only picking up.

Martha Stewart:

No, only. Only picking up.

Kristen Scholer:

We're going to leave it there. Martha Stewart.

Martha Stewart:

Thank you.

Kristen Scholer:

Icon, businesswoman, chief gardening officer at Scotts Miracle-Gro.

Martha Stewart:

Thank you.

Kristen Scholer:

A pleasure. Thank you for joining us Inside the ICE House.

Martha Stewart:

Thank you for having me.