Martha Stewart once raked in $65 million a year from Kmart royalties alone.
The businesswoman discussed the deal as her “first big money” moment while breaking down her profits in Monday’s “Other People’s Business” podcast episode.
“We were selling close to $2 billion worth of merchandise,” she told MasterClass CEO David Rogier. “That’s a lot of money. That was funding the whole development of my magazine, the whole business. That was an amazing thing.”
The confession shocked Rogier, whose jaw dropped before he said, “Holy s–t.”
Stewart, notably, signed her Kmart deal — which Rogier called “one of the best deals ever made” — in the ’80s.
“I would get a huge royalty on every sale of every product I designed,” she recalled during the sitdown. “They would pay for all the advertising. The original budget for the first year was $20 million for advertising.
“We sold hundreds of millions of dollars of product, and they didn’t know we would,” the 85-year-old continued of the company, which she parted ways with in 2009. “They took a chance.”
Stewart noted she doesn’t take “full credit” since her “really smart” then-husband, Andrew Stewart, helped negotiate.
She clarified that the amount of revenue made from the deal is “harder” to reach now since “companies are paying such small royalties.”
The media mogul added that, as an influencer, she often gets paid in goods — specifically highlighting an instance when she was given $40,000 worth of clothes in exchange for attending a fashion show.
Before becoming the “original influencer” and “original tradwife,” Stewart said she “was grossing a little more than $1 million at a catering business” and “killing [her]self physically” with “hard work … 24/7.”
Her later projects were “very lucrative” and Stewart pulled back the curtain on these earnings Monday, including the millions she has made in “cash up front” doing commercials.
The cookbook author noted that she earned “a lot” — more than the $5 million Rogier guessed — publishing her magazine.
Additionally, Stewart’s first cookbook advance was $100,000, and she made “a lot more than” six figures on subsequent deals since she was “much more valuable.”
She called her shows “free advertisement” and not a means of making money as much as a way to “popularize everything else.”
As the lifestyle guru discussed Kim Kardashian and more celebs following her “influencer playbook” elsewhere in the episode, she explained why she doesn’t have a private jet like the reality star.
“I fell in a hole,” Stewart told listeners, sharing that she “lost about a billion dollars” navigating her legal problems in the early 200s.
Stewart, notably, was convicted in an insider trading scandal and served five months in prison, five more in home confinement and two years of supervised probation.
“The lawyers took me to the cleaners,” Stewart said. “I’m back. I’m pretty good.”
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