Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc.
Homemaker, teacher, entrepreneur, icon – Martha Stewart has influenced the American home more than any other woman in living memory. Martha Stewart’s passion for creative and useful ideas, and her constant encouragement to take pride in everyday living, have made her America’s guide to living with style.
“Martha” as she is known across the country, has combined her business instincts and her love of teaching to build an information-based company that creates original ideas for the home as well as high-quality home products that reflect her own lifestyle. When America wants to roast a perfect turkey, plant a colorful flower garden, create an elegant table setting, or make a beautiful bed, America turns to Martha and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
Inspiration surrounded Martha at an early age. Raised in Nutley, New Jersey in a family with six children, Martha developed her passion for cooking, gardening and homekeeping in her childhood home on Elm Place. Her mother, a schoolteacher and homemaker, taught her the basics of cooking, baking, canning, and sewing, and her father, a pharmaceutical salesman and avid gardener, introduced her to gardening at the age of three in the family’s small but orderly backyard garden.
While earning a bachelor’s degree in history and architectural history at Barnard College, Martha worked as a model to pay her tuition. After moving to Westport, Connecticut, with her husband and daughter Alexis, in 1972, she developed a catering business that showcased her remarkable talent and originality. Her unique visual presentation of food and the elegant recipes she created for her catered events were the basis for her first book, Entertaining, published in 1982. Once of the most beautiful and influential lifestyle books ever published, Entertaining has become an American classic.
Following the success of Entertaining and her subsequent cooking and entertaining books, Martha created Martha Stewart Living, a monthly lifestyle magazine that launched in 1991, providing readers with inspiration and how-to information. In 1997, after purchasing her magazine from Time Inc., Martha created a multi-media content platform by expanding her magazine business with quarterly magazines, Martha Stewart Weddings and Martha Stewart Baby/Kids, as well as with a variety of special publications, and by developing merchandise, television, and internet/direct commerce businesses. In October 1999, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. went public on the New York Stock Exchange and is currently traded under the ticker symbol MSO. Since the company went public, it has expanded its international presence beyond the U.S. to include Canada and Japan. The company is based in New York City.