Female Disruptors: Kathryn Mullen of GODDESS MAGAZINE TV On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Finding the confidence within yourself to take a chance, take a risk with everything and step into the unknown. Men apparently are fearless. Mature women…not so much. It’s harder for us to jump into risk with both feet. The trick is to jump in with both feet and a great connection to Source.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kathryn Mullen.
Kathryn Mullen of GODDESS MAGAZINE TV cannabis friendly Fashion beauty and lifestyle magazine and on demand video content for MATURE WOMEN.
Model, Actor, Talent Agent, Publicist to Online Magazine Publisher and Video Producer 30+ years fashion professional.
Kathryn found her life purpose in lifting the hearts and minds of mature women!
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
My career in media production began when I was five. I was the tagalong child of the Director! In 1966, my mom Beverly, directed BRIGADOON, a performance done at an All Black High School in South Dallas. UNHEARD OF for a white woman to go into “THAT” neighborhood. MUCH LESS direct a very “white” Musical with an All Black cast!! Talk about a Female Disruptor!!!
My career in fashion began in 1998. When the plus size fashion segment of the industry was just opening up.I was selected by an Agency as a full figure model
Being a fashion “speciality”, it was very apparent that this “specialty” was a large part of the fashion consumer market. And the plus size fashion consumer market was totally unaddressed by a fashion magazine.
I published GODDESSmag.com as a fashion magazine for full figures from 1999 until 2006.
Boom- First disruption! I was a fashion blogger before there were fashion bloggers!
Even before Twitter and Facebook existed
GoddessMag.com had earned more than 250,000 readers a month with 29% returning readers.
The magazine morphed into the next season every quarter and was on average 180 pages. Goddessmag.com featured Fashion, Beauty, alternative health, political stories and more.
Do to the newness of the internet and the inability to monetize it at the time, I gradually moved from online fashion publishing into Media Placements.
For the last several years I am an accomplished media publicist, specializing in cannabis businesses and Experts, with a track record for national placements.
Since mature women are the main consumers and buyers of cannabis; and being an avid cannabist myself using it not only for recreation but as a anti-anxiety supplement: another realization was that there is no outlet for cannabis companies to advertise their products where the general public can learn about them.
To me consumer-wise the general public is mature women.
This made business sense. The micro niche that I had found was actually very very large. Mature women Fashion Beauty and Cannabis.
Another Disruption!
How does it get better than that?
The same thing that motivated me to renew and update GODDESS magazine TV into a Mecca for mature women was the same thing that inspired me to start it as a Plus Size to begin with: I want to see a magazine that features women like me. Imperfect, older, fallible and …hopefully…beautiful.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
To begin with, there is not a single magazine extant that addresses the needs desires and consumer interest that concern mature women. NOT ONE!!
That right there is very disruptive.
How is GODDESS Magazine TV disruptive? GODDESS Magazine. TV opens up an entirely new consumer demographic- mature women.
GMTV skews the readership from mainstream fashion magazines and opens the doors for those mature readers to find themselves in a magazine that is NOT about celebrity worship, impossible to attain overly photoshopped images and advertisements aimed at a 20- something with her father’s money.
GODDESS MAGAZINE TV understands the desires and economics of mature women.
Goddess Magazine.TV is also created in order to be a gathering point- a total media platform–and a chat room, of sorts, for women to find community around the traditional roles of men and women, what mature women are interested in and how to raise and maintain a family of adults.
Supporting and reinforcing the family unit.
Now that’s Disruptive!
Additionally, GODDESS Magazine.TV embraces the use of cannabis as medicine, as a recreational substance, as face and body care, apparel and HomeGoods.
NO OTHER WOMEN’S MAGAZINE PROMOTES CANNABIS USE. NOT ONE!
ANOTHER DISRUPTION!!
Goddess Magazine.TV is all about gathering, inspiring and directing the consumer power of the largest wealthiest consumer demographic in the country- mature women.
Our purpose is to drive home the point to advertisers and marketers that mature women exist and we are the largest consumers of virtually any given product manufactured.
We buy for ourselves, our children, our loved ones, our pets and our homes.
And in order for advertisers and marketers to dramatically increase their bottom line with very little adjustment: recognizing mature women, understanding mature women and marketing to mature women is their most successful strategy
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting?
Producing fashion shows is a large part of what I do. I produced a fashion show in Dallas with friends as models and a line of beautiful glittering women’s evening cocktail dresses. The event was at a high end bar.
The music started and the show went off without a hitch until our model Dorothy was so enamored of how pretty she looked in her iridescent sequin dress she refused to take off the dress and put on her next two changes.
In order to keep the show timing right I had to keep her in the show in the same dress four times…
“…you may remember Dorothy in this dress from the last two walks…”
Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Plan for ANY and ALL inevitabilities!! And…maybe hire professionals for a job.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors?
My main Mentor is my Mom. Not that she’s shown me how to put together a digital magazine and On Demand content. But in my older years I looked back on the memories I have of my mother, who was a widow for 17 years after my father died. I watched her life and never really knew what she was going through until I hit my fifties. Her loneliness, her solo hobbies, her intelligence disregarded, scaling the impossible task of raising four children by herself in the 1960s; never really knowing what she loved, what impacted her, what inspired and moved her forward.
But I saw her when I was young and it took me to be an adult to understand how important a mom is, how very little of her life is of concern to her children and how the path that mature women walk is so far from what people think.
Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
My mom sued LTV for sex discrimination in the early seventies and won. My mom taught literacy two adults on TV in the early sixties. My mom was a fashion model when she was in her twenties.
My mom turned into a successful banking executive and a partner in an advertising firm.
Everything that I love, everything that I’ve done, has grown out of the things I watched my mom accomplish and the things she was interested in.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive– and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Disruption is positive when it singles out an issue that is important and needs to be addressed.
In this case mature women, across the board, feel invisible and unimportant. Not only because we have lost a sense of ourselves, as we have given so much, throughout the last 20 to 25 years of our family’s lives, but because we have been marginalized by mainstream advertising: they opt instead for the 18 to 35 year olds money and time.
When in fact the greater profitability is to the largest wealthiest consumer demographic in the country–mature women.
Disruption is not positive when the issue of “invisibility” becomes clouded by ageist or bigoted comments aimed to emotionally damage the target.
Mature women already feel invisible, unimportant and irrelevant. We are sad for the life potential we lost when we were young and we are grieving our youth and beauty. We already feel helpless, hopeless, unattractive and frustrated.
Read that as angry Karens. Regardless the race.
When disruption is stacked with hateful and divisive comments directed at mature women, who are most powerfully motivated by love: the desire to give love and share love; when hurtful and hateful comments are directed to us more we feel it more than most people and it deeply piercees our hearts and minds.
Why? Because our main purpose in life as mature women is to love. And in order to give love one must feel loved. So many mature women have been discarded by their spouses or by their children and the wounds are very, very deep.
Angry disruption is never good.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
My Mom said “act like you’re THAT PERSON, and you will become that person”.
My first real corporate job. I was 21. I was terribly afraid because I had just gotten a promotion to a position I knew nothing about. I remember my mom took me to lunch and so gently and confidently said
“You can do this. It’s not bigger than you. Just act like you’re that person and you will become that person.”.
That comment changed my life and it made me realize that I can be anything as a career or anybody that I want to be… I just have to believe in myself.
Another Mentor John Tayloe, a Real Estate investor, told me “… It’s all in how you write the contract”.
Meaning, that it is possible to create a unique and one of a kind agreement with another party that benefits everyone. You don’t have to take what your offered you can modify it. It’s all in how you write the contract.
My main Mentor The Holy Creator source related to me in meditation…” you already have in your experience everything you need to accomplish the task at hand”. And I realize this is so very true. Most people do not look around them for answers they look beyond themselves for answers. When everything you need to accomplish the task at hand is already in your experience.
We are sure you aren’t done.
How are you going to shake things up next?
My company Goddess OmniMedia ltd in the process of creating on demand video content for ROKU that we plan to launch in late Autumn 2022.
Remember, as a fashion and lifestyle magazine we are 85% advertising. And we do it in a soft sell manner so the ads are more like fun vignettes.
Once we have our GODDESS MAGAZINE TV Roku site up for GMTV-
we will go into production of an online magazine and On Demand video content for Big and Tall men and a christian conservative young women’s media platform.
This year are planned exciting and fun live events that bring together the community of mature women in locations across this country and eventually across the globe!
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Funding. Men have unlimited funding options and are more often taken seriously when a new concept is proposed.
Finding an open unfilled niche’ that you love. Men work for money. Women work our passions.
Finding the confidence within yourself to take a chance, take a risk with everything and step into the unknown. Men apparently are fearless. Mature women…not so much. It’s harder for us to jump into risk with both feet. The trick is to jump in with both feet and a great connection to Source.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
I AM Discourse By St Germaine- I really enjoy this book because it is an instruction manual on the spiritual energy around us and how we can manipulate it to produce our wildest dreams.
I AM Discourse discusses personal responsibility around our own thoughts and how our thoughts create our lives. Personally I have found the techniques and information in this book profoundly impacting in my spirituality and my ability to run my business.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
The movement I am creating is a movement towards love and understanding of your mother: to think about what her life was like when you were young, what motivates her and inspires her.
To bring mature women into the light so that we do not consider ourselves — or feel –invisible: to advertisers, politicians and to our children.
A movement that informs people and softens them towards the most important person in their life- their mother; all this and the main focus of lifting the hearts and minds of mature women through media live events and Beauty/ Fashion makeovers.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I was raised the youngest child in a family of four by a single mom. We did not have a lot extra. Mom worked all the time. I was a latch key kid.
As I grew up I realized I was not as affluent as the other kids- that I often have times had to make do with whatever I had.
In a prayerful meditation when I was older I realized that “everything I need in order to move forward with my life, everything I needed to move forward with my company was already extant in my experience” and all I had to do was find it. I use this quote daily to do my job!
How can our readers follow you online?
GODDESS MAGAZINE.TV website
GODDESS MAGAZINE TV channel on YouTube
GODDESS MAGAZINE TV on Instagram
GODDESS MAGAZINE TV on GAB
Boomer Nation channel on YouTube
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
__thank you so much for this opportunity to let the world know about GODDESS Magazine TV and our mission to uplift the hearts and minds of mature women everywhere!! I hope your readers join us!
Female Disruptors: Kathryn Mullen of GODDESS MAGAZINE TV On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.