The Martha-ization of Kmart's home - Martha Stewart soft home retail brand - Home Market Trends

Discount Store News, Dec 9, 1996 by James Mammarella

Stephen Ross, Kmart's senior vice president, general merchandise manager of soft lines, envisions that Martha Stewart will overnight become the largest soft home retail brand in the country, if not the world. "This is going to be one of the single biggest feats of shipping in the United States," Ross said.

It is no exaggeration to say that Kmart is banking the success of its home decor reset on the woman who has become America's first lady of home and hearth.

The 2,100-store introduction of the licensed lines of Martha Stewart soft home products is set to roll. According to the plan, stores will begin receiving Martha Stewart bed and bath goods in late January and will set up the departments during February. Kmart will launch its advertising campaign by April.

With bed, bath and such ancillary categories as beach towels slated for spring/summer presentations, fall 1997 will see the rollout into kitchen and the addition of bath accessories, as well as the flow-in of a powerful seasonal and holiday emphasis.

Throughout 1997, Kmart will be eliminating its inventories of the two house lines that it has built up over the past decade, Color Classics and Ashley Taylor. Ross, along with Kmart divisional vice president for soft home Steve Ryman, believes there is no risk in convincing the Kmart customer to happily make the transition.

"This isn't just taking Color Classics and putting on another name," Ross said. "They're going to be getting the same product, in fresher colors, at the same price that they paid for Color Classics."

To really make the program an early success, Kmart's field staff must create a Martha Stewart world across many departments. Ross said that the stores will deliver to shoppers "the value of an integrated home decor concept."

Executing this idea is crucial, from crisp merchandise presentations to new fixtures and signage to product packaging with abundant helpful hints. The easier it is for shoppers to see integrated decorating themes in the store, the better Kmart can turn Martha Stewart's talents into a storewide increase in average cash register rings and sales per square foot.

"The opportunity with Martha," Ross explained, "is to inspire this customer." Kmart will not attempt to trade up the customer in price. Instead he emphasized, "We think there's the ability to trade her up in terms of multiple purchases."

How will introducing the Martha Stewart collection enable the home departments to meet that key corporate goal?

Ross said that the customer is ready. "We're going to make a case for her to do something to freshen up her home - whether her bedroom or bathroom - give her a reason to do it because we've given her some decor tips and we're making it easy to do."

Indeed, the "decor tips" are a major factor in the rapid rise of Martha Stewart's expanding array of products and publications. "How-to" is her middle name, as she explained at the recent annual gathering of the Association of National Advertisers.

"Demystifying" a subject, she said, is the way Martha Stewart Living magazine increases interest among its readers in a range of cooking and home decor ideas, galvanizing them to action and guiding them in selecting products from tea and caviar to stenciling paint and pillowcases. This approach has occasionally led to retailers across the nation reporting short-term out-of-stocks in product categories highlighted in the magazine, she said.

The demystification is achieved through presenting a wealth of information, and Stewart lauded Kmart and its ad agency for the abundant new research conducted about their shoppers' home decor attitudes and buying patterns.

Those attitudes include a reluctance to pay $80 for a gallon of European import Martha Stewart home decor paint. Therefore, Kmart will introduce a popular-priced program by Sherwin-Williams, featuring up to 256 designer colors.

These new programs with Kmart form the most ambitious flowering of Stewart's relationship with the chain since her initial consulting arrangement in 1987. Both parties benefited by the arrangement, as legions of do-it-yourself decorators were introduced to Stewart and she in turn became a corporate icon for Kmart, which basked in her growing aura. By 1990, however, Kmart's underlying weakness in distribution logistics led to lackluster presentations in-store.

This was a factor in the decision by Kmart merchants to reverse what had been an aggressive rollout across multiple product categories to refocus on domestics alone. Since 1990, a Martha Stewart licensing agreement with the chain has remained in effect, but it had not been treated as a front burner issue until Kmart's change in management in 1995.

Today, two factors have convinced Kmart to explode her franchise across the store. One is the enhanced position of the Martha Stewart brand; the other is the overall Kmart strategy of projecting headquarters status for key national brands and private labels. That is, telling fewer stories better - and coordinating soft lines and hard lines presentations as never before, in the mode of merchandising coming to be known in the mass channel as "total home."