Martha Stewart says Kmart once paid her $65 million a year in royalties—enough to bankroll her entire empire

Long before “influencer” became a job title, Martha Stewart was already being paid like one. On MasterClass’s Other People’s Business podcast, Stewart said Kmart’s licensing deal once brought in as much as $65 million a year in royalties. She said that money was helping fund “the whole development” of her magazine and “the whole business.”

That relationship started in 1987, when Kmart brought her in as a lifestyle consultant and spokesperson for its home division. The first run fizzled in the early 1990s, as Stewart complained about merchandising and quality control and Kmart slid toward financial trouble. Then Floyd Hall became CEO in 1995, tried to turn the retailer around, and came back to Stewart.

The big restart came in 1997 with Martha Stewart Everyday, a Kmart-only line of sheets, towels, shower curtains, and other bed-and-bath goods. Stewart said the deal gave her a huge royalty on every sale of every product she designed, while Kmart covered the advertising too, including about $20 million in the first year, most of it for TV spots. She said the line sold hundreds of millions of dollars of product in that first year and later reached close to $2 billion in annual merchandise sales at its peak.

The fit looked odd to a lot of fashion and media people, since Stewart’s brand was built on East Hampton polish and Kmart was a mass-market discounter. Stewart saw reach. Before Amazon, she said, Kmart’s roughly 2,200 stores by 2000 made it “the biggest retailer in America at the time,” even though Walmart had actually passed Kmart in sales around 1990. The deal lasted through her legal troubles and Kmart’s 2002 bankruptcy, and as late as 2008 it still made up 43% of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s merchandising revenue. It ended in January 2010 when Sears Holdings declined to renew.

That Kmart money helped build the empire, but it was also Stewart’s later stock sale that did the real damage. After selling ImClone shares before the FDA rejected its cancer drug, she was convicted in 2004 of conspiracy, obstruction, and lying to investigators. She says the episode cost her about $1 billion, and her company never fully recovered from having its brand tied so tightly to her name. Still, at 85, she is still adding businesses, including a Netflix series, a podcast, a skincare brand, and an AI startup for home management.