In September 2011, a Madison, Wisconsin metal artist named Alisa Toninato hung 48 cast-iron skillets on a gallery wall at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Each pan was poured in the shape of a state, and together they formed the contiguous United States. She called it “Made in America” and told herself, according to Isthmus, “This is the one gallery piece I’ll do in my life.” Her commercial product was a single Wisconsin-shaped skillet, sold through her studio, FeLion, and a few local shops.
Then Martha Stewart’s staff found her on Etsy. That detail comes from the Cap Times, and it matters more than anything else in this story. Toninato appeared on the final live taping of The Martha Stewart Show, where Stewart suggested the Smithsonian as a home for the skillet map. FeLion was named one of ten honorees in the first Martha Stewart American Made awards in 2012. HFN reported in October 2013 that the studio’s sales rose 2,000 percent during the 2012 holiday season, credited to the publicity. In 2013 she formed the American Skillet Company to scale production.
Nobody at Martha Stewart opened a cold email from FeLion. An editor went looking, and Toninato had left something findable, specific, and photogenic exactly where editors look. If you want to know how to get featured on Martha Stewart, that is the whole lesson in one skillet. The rest of this post is about where the brand looks now, because almost every door Toninato walked through has changed shape since 2012.
What “Martha Stewart” Means as a Media Target in 2026
Most founders pitch Martha Stewart as if it were 2005: one magazine, one editor in chief opening the mail. That brand no longer exists.
Here is the actual structure. Martha Stewart Living launched in 1990 as a quarterly published by Time Inc., went monthly in 1994, and became the flagship of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia after Stewart took it with her in 1997. Meredith took over editorial and operational control in 2015. The brand intellectual property has changed hands twice since: Sequential Brands bought it for an estimated $355 million, then sold the Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse properties to Marquee Brands in 2019 for an estimated $175 million, per License Global. Marquee licenses the name. The media operation runs elsewhere.
That elsewhere is People Inc., which is what Dotdash Meredith renamed itself on July 31, 2025. The company says it reaches more than 175 million monthly visitors across over 40 brands, including PEOPLE, Food & Wine, and Allrecipes. MarthaStewart.com sits inside that machine.
Print is the part most people get wrong. MediaPost reported in April 2022 that the May 2022 issue would be the last regular print edition of Martha Stewart Living. Before the cut it published 10 issues a year with a rate base of just over 2 million. Martha Stewart Weddings, which started as an annual in 1994 and went quarterly in 1999, had already gone online-only in 2018. The brand has not abandoned paper entirely. Seasonal special issues, such as Martha Stewart Holidays, came back to newsstands for 2025. But the monthly magazine you picture on a coffee table is gone.
So when a client asks us how to get featured on Martha Stewart, the first answer is a correction: you are pitching a digital editorial team at a large publisher, with some seasonal print products on the side. That team runs on a content calendar, search data, and commerce programs.
The Three Doors Framework
Our working answer to how to get featured on Martha Stewart is a model we call the Three Doors. Each door has a different gatekeeper, timeline, and definition of a good pitch. Pick the wrong door and a strong story goes nowhere.
Door One: the editorial desk
This is the classic feature: a maker profile, a home tour, a recipe built around your product, a gardening story that quotes you. A 2023 Dotdash Meredith job listing for an associate editorial director at Martha Stewart, posted on Talking Biz News, shows how this desk works. The role manages the daily editorial calendar, top-edits work from staff and freelancers, optimizes content for search, and manages freelance budgets. Lifestyle content sits at the center, especially gardening and food.
Two things follow from that. First, freelancers write a meaningful share of the site, so a freelance writer who covers your category can be a better first contact than a senior editor. Second, the calendar is search-driven and evergreen. A pitch that hands the editor a story with clear seasonal timing (“the heirloom tomato seed company that saved 40 varieties,” in late winter, when people plan gardens) fits the machine.
Door Two: the commerce desk
Product roundups, gift guides, and tested reviews live here. People Inc. commerce roles across its brands describe the same playbook. A Real Simple commerce writer listing at the same company described the job as researching new products and trends, watching TikTok and Instagram for commerce opportunities, lining up experts for quotes, and testing products “in the lab and/or real world settings,” with testing at roughly 15 percent of the role. That is your map. Commerce writers find products where shoppers already talk about them, then they test. If your product cannot survive a hands-on test, or you cannot ship samples fast, this door closes on you.
Door Three: the program door
This is the door Toninato walked through. Martha Stewart American Made ran from 2012, honored ten makers each year, and gave winners $10,000, a trip to New York, features on MarthaStewart.com and in Martha Stewart Living, and marketing and PR support, per Vermont Business Magazine. The 2013 awards opened at Grand Central Terminal alongside an eBay storefront with more than 600 maker items. The brand marked the program’s fifth year in October 2016. We could not verify an open call for 2026, so treat this door as closed until the brand announces otherwise. When programs like this run, they reward makers who already have a following, because public voting decides at least one award.
How Editors Actually Find Products and Weddings
The FeLion story and the commerce job descriptions point at the same truth: Martha Stewart editors go looking for products, not only waiting for pitches. Your job is to be findable in the places they shop, and to make your pitch confirm what they half know already.
Start with the platforms. Stewart’s team found Toninato on Etsy. Today’s commerce writers are told to watch TikTok and Instagram. That means your product page, your Etsy or Shopify listing, and your social grid are part of your press kit whether you treat them that way or not. The photography should be clean enough to run as-is. An editor building a gift guide at 11 p.m. should be able to confirm price, availability, and origin without emailing you.
Then look at what happened in 2014, when competition got crowded. Stacia Guzzo of Handcrafted Honey Bee in Tehachapi, California, entered American Made against more than 4,000 entrants and nearly 1,000 finalists, The Loop reported in November 2014. She ran her own campaign, pitching bloggers and local news and editing promotional videos, and pulled in almost 33,000 votes. She finished second in the overall popular vote and first in her category. “We’ve definitely seen an increase in sales as a result of being at the top of the pack in American Made,” she told the paper. Notice what drove her result: coverage she earned in smaller outlets before and during the Martha Stewart moment. Her local press built the audience that voted.
Weddings work on similar logic, with one honest caveat. Martha Stewart Weddings does not publish a current public submission form that we could verify. In our experience, real-wedding features at most wedding titles come through photographers and planners who submit full galleries with vendor credits, and a clear concept with original detail beats a big budget. If you are a florist, stationer, or venue, your fastest path is the photographers you already work with. Ask them which editors they submit to, and make sure your credit line, Instagram handle, and website are spelled out in every gallery they send.
Across all three doors, the pitch itself should be short. Name the door, state the story in one sentence, link three images that could run tomorrow, give price and where to buy, and add one line of proof, such as press, a waitlist, or a retail partner. Toninato could point to an ArtPrize debut and a local shop, the Kitchen Gallery in Madison, that had sold more than 140 Wisconsin skillets since June 2012. That is the kind of proof an editor can verify in a minute.
Build the Proof Stack Before You Pitch
Here is the part founders skip. Editors at a brand like Martha Stewart get to be picky, so they look for evidence that someone else already vetted you. When an editor likes a pitch, the obvious next move is to search your brand name. What comes back is your proof stack.
We call it a stack because it builds in layers. The bottom layer is your owned presence: a site that loads, a clear about page, and consistent product information. The middle layer is third-party coverage in outlets that fit your category. The top layer is the Martha Stewart feature itself, which almost never arrives without the two layers beneath it. Neither Toninato nor Guzzo started at the top.
This is where the Instant Press catalog data is useful. Of the 1,016 publications we place in, 73 are lifestyle titles, 22 are fashion titles, and 713 are news outlets, with a mean Domain Authority of 62.3 and 96 percent of them indexed by Google. Standard placements publish in one to three days, and the median price across the catalog is $1,500. For a maker, that means you can build the middle layer of the stack in a few weeks: a lifestyle feature on your process, a local or regional news story on your founding, and a business piece on your growth. When a Martha Stewart editor searches your name, she finds three credible articles instead of an empty results page and an Instagram link.
Pair that with your Google presence. If your brand name returns a Knowledge Panel, consistent images, and accurate details, an editor spends her one minute of research confirming your story rather than questioning it. Our sister company GoogleMe builds exactly that through its three-month programs, and the Instant Press team can map which publications fit the door you are aiming for. You can see placement options on our pricing page or read more pitching playbooks on the Instant Press blog.
Then sequence it. Spend the first month on your owned presence and photography. Spend the second month earning or placing two or three category-relevant articles. In the third month, pitch the specific Martha Stewart door that fits, timed to the season the editor is planning for, not the season you are in. Gift guides get built in late summer and early fall, so in mid-October your best target is early spring content.
None of this guarantees coverage, and anyone promising a paid Martha Stewart feature is selling you something else. What the proof stack does is change the math: it turns a cold pitch into confirmation of something the editor can already see, which is how a Wisconsin skillet ended up in Grand Central.
The next Toninato is already listing something on Etsy tonight, and the editors will find whoever made it easiest to say yes.