The keynote presentation at the 2001 International Housewares Show in Chicago (January 14 - 17) featured none other than the indefatigable home industrialist, Martha Stewart. To a packed McCormick Center Grand Ballroom crowd of over 2,000 industry buyers and show exhibitors, Madame Chairman & CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia presented what was supposedly her account of the "Aspirations of Today’s Consumer."

And who else is more in touch with today’s consumer than a woman who collects houses? Her address was replete with seemingly ad-hoc personal references, like to her eight Himalayan cats who dine before a daily buffet of eight different feline foods served in "delightful" Japanese ceramic dishes (apparently the spread is so enticing that the neighbor’s cat can’t help itself and often stays for days). Examples like this continually reinforced the real distance between her life and those of mass-consumers.

meow,meow,meow,meow!

Martha - feel the love

Madame Chairman’s 30-minute address proved to be little more than an infomercial for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia - her online, print, TV, and radio empire that already bombards over 88 million people each month (never miss a chance to get 2000 more). As a sociocultural anthropologist who researches contemporary "material culture and consumption," I found her insights as a "consumer lifestyle expert" flaccid and disappointingly Martha-centric. Indeed she believes that most American (heck, why not most global) consumers want whatever she’s peddling at the moment.

She diagrammed her corporate marketing strategy as a pyramid of penetration. At the apex, high-end consumers shop Martha By Mail and at marthastewart.com while low end is captured by her Martha Stewart Everyday line for K-mart. In between (where she eats a bit of humble pie - perhaps a with a pâte brisèe or gruyére crust - and admits not yet dominating) lies her specialty shops and national chain store merchandise.

Martha’s Sub-Urban Sombrero - Bluelight Especiál

While Martha is an easy target in many respects, her purported omniscience regarding consumers’ desires and aspirations is no doubt due to her undeniable success (the Everyday line has done more than $1.4 billion in sales so far). What seems so amazing, however, is the stark contrast between what she touts as ideal home accoutrements - like her kitchen drawer with no less than eleven cooking whisks - and reality. What she really sells is fantasy.

But for most product-makers, fantasy does not reality make - unless you control the media (or Omnimedia).

But there is a place in Martha’s heart for the struggling product designer. She is now working on a new homekeeping book that will include housewares, and remarked that anyone with ideas that they would like to give her could email her through her website. And I bet she’d even let you snailmail your sketchbook to her.

Martha’s housewares proclamations:

1. "I want good quality."
2. "I want everything I need."
3. "I want it to be there."

Martha goes to Japan
in search of houseware ideas.
Coming in 2001 for her
Everyday line-Japanese 
lacquered bowl, seats two.

• Martha was born and raised in Nutley, New Jersey, in a family with six children, where she developed a 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; 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.
  
  
• She was married in her sophomore year, and upon graduating became a successful stockbroker on Wall Street, where she gained her early business training.
  
  
• After moving to Westport, Connecticut, in 1972 with her husband and daughter, Alexis, 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. One of the most beautiful and influential books ever published, "Entertaining" has become an American classic.
  
  
• Martha Stewart has been named one of the "50 Most Powerful Women" twice by Fortune Magazine (October 1998 and October 1999).
  
  
• She has also been counted among "America’s 25 Most Influential People" in Time Magazine (June 1996) and "New York’s 100 Most Influential Women in Business" in Crain’s New York Business.
  
  
• She has earned six Daytime Emmy Awards and a total of 29 nominations