What would Teri Hatcher do? Starting today, you’ll find out.
The 45-year-old single mom and “Desperate Housewives” star has launched a new inspirational lifestyle Web site, gethatched.com — “A Chick’s Guide to Life.”
What she’ll also be doing is moving to the forefront of celebrities who parlay their name and fame into a new brand-expanding platform.
Gwyneth Paltrow got the ball rolling two years ago, when she took a cue from Oprah Winfrey’s and Martha Stewart’s me-heavy Web sites and created goop.com, a hodge-podge of Paltrow-approved tips about shopping, travel, crafts, diets and workouts.
Distinct from the often standard personal celebrity Web site, Facebook account or Twitter feed, Hatcher’s and Paltrow’s sites are heavy on emotional advice, products plugs and insight into their own lives — seemingly because acting just isn’t enough anymore.
On gethatched, Hatcher (aided by a “team of experts”) will wax philosophical about topics close to her heart, including questions of personal growth and mommy-hood.
It features Hatcher-approved music playlists, interviews with famous friends, a Web series called “In the House” (shot at her own house) and a Skype-like topical Web series called “Chick Chat.”
Two columns — seemingly destined for Internet spoofing — are “The Defender,” in which celebrities explain why they looked so bad in a particular paparazzi shot, and “Style You Can Steal from Your Daughter,” a fashion column apparently inspired by Hatcher’s 12-year-old daughter, Emerson Rose.
“We are offering an entertaining, feel-good online community for women that will touch on various common issues and struggles that matter to women from all walks of life,” Hatcher said in a prepared statement.
“Celebrities are smarter about branding themselves and not just pigeonholing themselves to their [acting],” says Amanda Sanders, a celebrity image consultant at New York Image Consultant.
“A lot of [female actors] have children and don’t want to work around the clock. They want to be able to do other things with their time,” says Sanders. These sites let them “broaden their horizons.”
The Web sites also help them reach people who don’t have time to devote to hours of TV watching, but will click on a Web page at work, Saunders says.
And by eliminating the middleman in name-spreading efforts like magazine interviews, actors control the info they disseminate to celebrity-hungry audiences.
In “giving advice or [putting] their own spin on whatever’s going on . . . they’re creating an even bigger media persona than they would have when all the publicity came from outside sources,” says pop culture expert Elayne Rapping, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).
For female stars of a certain age, that’s like striking oil.
“Most of the publicity these days is about [young] bad girls getting into trouble,” Rapping says. “Older woman in a different stage of life aren’t getting that publicity and wouldn’t want it.
“They want publicity for the image they want to project, which is more admirable and not scandalous.
“Once they get married and have kids, their image does get a little dull,” says Rapping. “This is a way of spicing up their image and making post-starlet personas more interesting.”