Martha Stewart’s Lifestyle Empire Knows No Limits

It was 1990 when people began to suspect Martha Stewart had designs on the universe. Caricatured in the New Yorker, the high priestess of homemaking was portrayed staging formal dinner on Mars, Sunday brunch on Pluto and an “Ultra-Perfect Christmas Feast for 200 in Alpha Centauri System.”

The cartoonist’s lampoon may only have been premature: Stewart is poised for liftoff.

With Martha Stewart Living magazine at a circulation of 2 million, she is seeking to wrest control from Time Warner. After five years as merely a consultant in the venture built on her name, Stewart is engaged in “discussions over the nature of their partnership,” says her spokeswoman, Susan Magrino.

Martha watchers have always been as interested in her business acumen as in her recipe for Valentine’s Day raspberry tart. The first lady of domestic arts is a megabrand of more than national dimension. Her lifestyle empire is estimated at $200 million. She is busily upsizing with a name - Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia - that suggests omnipresence to come. On the horizon: the Internet. Earth to Martha: Will souffles rise in cyberspace?

Declared one of the year’s “10 Most Fascinating People” last month by Barbara Walters, Stewart herself set the imagination rolling. At the National Press Club in November, she described an expanding “minimoguldom” of television, books, the magazine and a profusion of products under her name. What’s more, she warned, her business of “living” has “no limits whatsoever.”

An almost militant proponent of decorative arts, Stewart has been dusting the planet with domestic perfection since her first book, “Entertaining,” was issued by Crown Publishers in 1982. These days, audiences in Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Japan are being treated to nine of her volumes on homekeeping as high art - or, as beleaguered working women complain, how to create the most elaborate, costly and anxiety-inducing party, meal, garden or wedding.

It’s clear not everyone is overjoyed by Stewart’s prescription for graceful living. While she tries “to disseminate as much good information as possible,” critics bemoan her exhortations to perfection and extravagance as little more than wretched excess.

No matter how the partnership tussles with Time Warner end, television viewers will be able to commune with Martha literally morning, noon and night beginning in September, when she adds a full menu of daily programming to late-night reruns and, starting Feb. 11, a Tuesday spot on CBS’s “This Morning” to replace her “Today” show appearances on NBC.

As for the Internet, “we do not have our own presence on it now,” she acknowledged, “but we will.”

Is Martha overexposed?

Trend watchers scour the stars for evidence that the Martha Stewart luster will fade, be diluted by overexposure or at least fail to translate in the global arena.

Cheri De Luca, who handles foreign editions of Stewart’s books for the publisher Clarkson N. Potter, draws the limits of the moguldom around “the G-7 countries.” She adds, “It becomes a question sometimes of how much money people have to spend.”

In August, Fortune magazine described Stewart as the “world’s No. 1 living megabrand.” But links with companies such as Kmart and an advertising and promotion deal with Minute Maid, whose frozen orange juice comes from concentrate, have raised questions about her image as a purveyor of high-quality domestic arts.

“Martha Stewart has widespread appeal but clearly not universal appeal,” says Rajeev Batra, associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan School of Business. He warns of “a clear danger as she extends herself in more media, more ventures and becomes more omnipresent” that she will violate the rule of scarcity.