Martha Stewart Bought This Celebrity Chef's Brand For A Hefty Price

From her impeccable taste in home decor to the ability to mix up any of her 12 favorite cocktails on cue, Martha Stewart has a well-earned reputation as America's domestic goddess. But behind her polished image lies a shrewd businesswoman who built a multimillion dollar company. Not content to only be a master of old school hosting tips and repurposing Mason jars, Stewart knows her way around the overlapping industries of publishing, television, digital media, and retail, so it's perhaps no surprise that she would acquire a rival culinary company when the chance to buy Emeril Lagasse's brand presented itself in 2008. 

Stewart likely saw it as an opportunity to strengthen her own company's fortunes while bringing together two of the industry's most recognized names. It certainly wasn't cheap, however. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc (MSLO) shelled out $45 million for the rights to Lagasse's collection of cookbooks, TV shows, website and branded kitchen products. When calculated for inflation, the acquisition would be almost $68 million today.

To understand why Stewart's company felt that Lagasse's portfolio was worth spending so much on, you'd first need to consider the media landscape in 2008. We take for granted now that most of the food-related content we see is on a screen, but back then, publishing was in the painful process of adapting from print media to digital platforms, and brands like Stewart's, which was built on print magazines and cookbooks, were feeling the heat to either get with the times or get out of the kitchen.

Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse were huge names in the culinary media scene when she bought the rights to his brand in 2008, so it made sense from a business perspective to join forces and hedge their bets against the unknown future of publishing with multiple revenue streams. Lagasse's brand also allowed Stewart's company to capitalize on consumers who weren't necessarily into her media and merchanidse, especially men.

The buyout also took some of the pressure away from dependence on Stewart's name alone. "It's a great brand extension and it diversifies the risk away from pure reliance on the Martha Stewart brand," David Bank, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets said in a 2008 New York Times article. Because let's not forget that Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia took a huge hit to its reputation when Stewart was sentenced to prison time for insider trading in 2004.

Despite the big investment in Emeril, however, the sale was not that big of a game changer. As Lagasse's star power faded in the years after the sale, and Martha's brand had to compete with other younger lifestyle gurus, MSLO was sold to Sequential Brands Group for $353 million in 2015, and sold again in 2019 for $175 million to Marquee Brands, which were both significantly less than the $2 billion the company was worth in the early 2000s. Martha is fine, however, with an estimated personal net worth of more than $400 million in 2025, which surely she would say is a good thing.