Lessons from market makers on leading with authenticity and innovation

From the outside, the world of Martha Stewart appears complex and multi-faceted. She is, after all, a legendary businesswoman, founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, creator of Martha Stewart Living magazine, Emmy Award-winning TV host and author of 100 books.

Stewart, however, considers her business “very simple.”

“Most founders of companies early on realize what their customers need and want,” she told the crowd at NRF 2024: Retail’s Big Show. “When I started writing books, that was my big question: What does my reader really need and want? I always modeled everything after myself because I was the homemaker, a housewife, a mother.” She certainly knew what she wanted and needed.

“Of course, those needs have gotten bigger and more lavish as years go on,” she continued. “But we want authenticity, we want good construction, we want beauty, we want practicality, we want affordability. All of those things are so terribly important to the homemaker.”

As the business has always centered on the home, she said, she “couldn’t have thought of a better name than ‘Living.’”

Authentic connections

Stewart was one of three industry leaders to take part in the Market Makers series at NRF 2024. In addition to Stewart — who participated in a main stage conversation with Roelant Prins, chief commercial officer of Adyen, a global financial technology platform for retailers — the other powerhouses on stage included Chewy CEO Sumit Singh and Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt.

As Prins and Stewart emphasized the importance of delivering a consistent, positive customer experience across platforms, Stewart touched on her successful partnerships with the likes of Kmart, Macy’s, The Home Depot and Amazon. (She did note that “Kmartha” was a missed opportunity.) Content married with “really good product” is very important, she said, and she strives to learn something new every day so she has something to teach or share.

Good retailers recognize the need to be as “authentic and realistic as possible,” and Stewart has maintained that concept by staying curious, being true to herself, being personally involved, paying attention to the customer, and using “every single available kind of communication tool that we can find right away.”

New market expansion

Singh, meanwhile, spoke on the humanization of pets, and Chewy’s recent foray into the veterinary space. Vet health is a $40 billion market, Singh said, growing much faster than food and supplies.

At the same time, the veterinary demographic is shifting, with demand expected to soon outpace supply. There are also more female vets, many of them seeking work/life balance and flexible hours. With these and other factors, it can take weeks to book a vet appointment. In addition, “What do you do when Fluffy eats chocolate at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving eve?” Singh said.

Chewy is going to market with a proprietary B2B SaaS solution that allows the integration of pharmacy, products, insurance and telehealth (or the vet’s entire back office) in a one-stop shop for vets and customers alike. It’s a particularly seamless offering for Chewy’s customers who already have pet profiles in place.

As for that humanization of pets, Singh noted that attitudes — and spending habits in some categories — have changed significantly, and not just with higher-quality food. Dogs these days are more likely to be on the couch or bed than the porch.

In community with customers

Daunt, in conversation with the Wall Street Journal’s Lauren Thomas, spoke about Barnes & Noble as “the last really substantial” retail chain for books. He has been a bookseller for 35 years and said “changing the nature of what we do has been really important.”

“Changing the nature of what we do has been really important.”

James Daunt, CEO, Barnes & Noble

Bookselling chains worldwide have experienced hardships, while independent booksellers are doing fine. One challenge with bookstores is that, unlike other segments of retail, products change every week or month. There’s been an eye toward providing homogeneity and a consistent offering across bookstores amid all those changing arrays, Daunt said, but looking to the independents as an example has moved the needle.

“If you give them freedom and you allow them to do their own thing, they will resonate much more effectively with the communities in which they are,” Daunt said. “Translating that into a chain setting actually turned out to work. We really did it because we had to do it.”

The new Barnes & Noble model is no longer solely a 20,000- to 30,000-square-foot box. The company is now opening various sizes, whether 6,000 or 35,000 square feet. There’s a new location in New York’s Upper East Side, for example, that’s a more intimate version of the nearby space that closed in 2020.

“People really like being in our stores,” he said. “And if you run better ones with better service, and more attractive, you will get more customers. We have seen a really nice uptick.” 

There’s also an element of luck, he admitted, as the pandemic threw people back into reading. “There’s a lot more reading going on. If you’re a bookseller, that’s good news.”