Influencing millions before the internet age is like starting a fire without a match, in the dark, and with your hands tied behind your back: It takes grit, ingenuity, and, above all else, an unmatched instinct to survive. 

Of course, Martha Stewart has all three in abundance, cementing her impact as the “original influencer” over five decades, across multiple generations, and through periods of major personal and professional tumult. With an intimate new documentary Martha directed by R.J. Cutler, now is the moment for Stewart to reflect on all she’s built — and, as she tells Krista Smith on Netflix’s Skip Intro podcast, embrace all that’s still to come. 

“I really am a curious person and I don’t want to go up the same road twice if I don’t have to,” Stewart says. “If I think I’ve seen it, I go back up another road, and it’s just the way I’ve been living my entire life.” But Stewart is quick to clarify that while the times have changed — and so has she — her devoted audience has stuck by her side because of all that’s remained the same. “I don’t like that word reinvention because I’m not reinventing myself,” she adds. “I am still the same flesh and blood. I have the same color eyes I had before. I have the same skin and hair. So, it’s not reinventing — it is evolving, and with evolution, change comes.”

So what’s behind Stewart’s remarkable staying power? The lifestyle mogul has always possessed an uncanny ability to anticipate shifts in culture. “I am my best customer, I am my best reader. I am my best student. I know what I need and what I want, and I try to understand that in our audience,” she says. “The Martha Stewart brand has a very broad audience, so by understanding what people need and want we [didn’t create] this fake fairy-tale life.” And while some might say Stewart’s brand promotes an aspirationally elegant and at times unobtainable kind of living, she’s never wanted to “glorify homemaking by putting pretty aprons and high heels on” in service of a man. 

“We were real. You do it yourself, or you earn the money and buy it,” she adds. “That’s one very basic fact of Martha Stewart Living.”

Plus, she knows where her audience lives — be it in the pages of her magazines and cookbooks, down the aisles of Kmart, on her eponymous television shows, or across your social media feeds. “I’m an early adopter of technology and I always have been. I started on Twitter and the minute it was established, I met with the founder and invested. When Instagram came, I loved it,” she says. “I met the TikTok guys early on and it’s a very useful tool. I learned how to cut a bell pepper the other day better than I was cutting a bell pepper, so then I taught everybody in my kitchen how to do it.”

But Stewart has also attracted her fair share of critics who’ve doubted her vision and plotted her downfall from her earliest days as one of only a few female stockbrokers on Wall Street. “They tried to take me down for being a woman and being successful, but I took it in stride. I had to take everything in stride. I’m not a milquetoast kind of person. I am an, ‘OK, let’s get it over with and move on,’ kind of person.” Calling herself an “original feminist,” Stewart simply points to her own history as proof. “I did not join the feminist movement,” she says. “I lived through it. I admired the Gloria Steinems [of the world] and the other women who really tried to wield their power and also pave a way for younger women.”

And, of course, Stewart has done the same. She walked so that a new generation of homemakers and entrepreneurs could run — now with the opportunity to rack up millions of views across Instagram, TikTok and beyond from the very start of their careers. 

“Well, [it’s] not so hard,” Stewart says about finding success today. “I just came across [the Instagram account] Ballerina Farm. Here’s a woman with eight kids, and she’s milking cows, making beef, doing all kinds of stuff, and then winning [beauty] contests and prancing around in bathing suits. Fabulous! Never could have done that before. Never. You could have done it, but nobody would know about you. Not 12 million people or however many people are following her.”

If Stewart has one piece of advice for the next generation, it would be to just keep moving forward. “If you have a good idea, go with it. If you have the wherewithal to build a business — and I don’t mean money so much as strength and fortitude — stick with it. You can build interest faster now than you could ever before,” she says. “Believe in your idea and find a couple of like-minded people to build it with you.”

Listen to more of Stewart’s conversation with Krista Smith in their Skip Intro episode. Martha is streaming now.

The Trailer for ‘Martha’