Martha Stewart Does Office Supplies

In a corner of a Manhattan Staples store Tuesday, nestled among a plethora of printers and paperclips, was a mockup of an office fit for a fashionista. The pale desktop was accented with a strawberry-hued file folder and a turquoise binder. Behind it were shelves with neatly placed pocket folders and notebooks.

It’s how Martha Stewart does office supplies.

The original domestic goddess is out with a new line of more than 300 organizational products for time-starved moms, made in conjunction with Avery and sold exclusively at Staples. “This was such a good opportunity to enter into yet another area of helping the homemaker organize—live better, live more beautifully,” Stewart said Tuesday at the unveiling of the collection  Tuesday.

The bulk of the items are colorful takes on standard supplies, with Stewart’s signature shade of teal and a pop of red. There are labels of all sizes and shapes, along with a system of stackable desktop bins.

But what caught our eye were a handful of more innovative products, including decals that serve as dry erase boards and stick to a variety of surfaces without leaving a residue. Stickers with chalkboard-esque surfaces offer labeling flexibility while tags affixed to elastic bands make it easy to organize cords or other hard-to-wrangle items.

Stewart was particularly interested in the new fabric labels, which can withstand several washes without ironing or sewing. “They just press into the kids’ clothing and they stay!” she exclaimed in an interview. “I had to sew in like 500 labels into underpants for gods sakes!”

But, given the digital revolution in our midst, we had to ask: Do people really need office supplies, even the pretty ones?

“They do,” Stewart said—and went on to offer evidence. Fifteen years ago, she bought the domain name PaperlessHome.com. “Guess what? Fifteen years later, there’s no lack of paper in my domain.” (The web address redirects to her company’s homepage.)

Stewart said she saves everything, including the contracts from her first catering deals. She recommends starting small and working from there. Try using a single accordion file, then tackle a shelf, move on to a desktop and then go for an entire closet.

Later, she turned to this reporter, who was clutching a slightly ragged spiral-bound notebook.

“Do you save all your notebooks?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I got so sick and tired of saving ugly notebooks,” she said, eying mine. She then picked up a turquoise hard cover journal from her new line. “My notebooks are all like this now.”

Stewart went on to explain that she uses the various colors to organize them by topic—one for business conversations, another for personal discussions—and adds labels on the spine with the date.

I suggested I might give her new version a try.

“It’s going to look much nicer,” she said.