The Phone Call
On a Tuesday afternoon in 2015, from a cramped office in London where she ran a talent marketing agency that brokered deals between fashion houses and celebrities, Emma Grede picked up the phone and cold-called Kris Jenner. She had no introduction, no mutual friend to smooth the way, no prior relationship with the most commercially formidable family in American entertainment. What she had was an idea — a radically inclusive denim brand built for women the fashion industry had spent decades ignoring — and a conviction, unearned by any conventional measure, that she was the person to build it. She had already decided, in her own mind, that Khloé Kardashian would be her partner. She had already imagined the brand. She had already envisioned the pitch. The only thing she hadn't done was make it real. "The difference between me and someone else," Grede would later say, "is that I made the phone call, I took the meeting, and I made it happen."
Jenner asked when Grede would next be in Los Angeles. Grede, who at the time flew to LA once a quarter, lied and said she was coming the following week. So she booked a flight. A year later, Good American launched and sold $1 million worth of denim on its first day — the largest denim launch in apparel history. Within three years, Grede would co-found Skims with Kim Kardashian, a shapewear brand now valued at $4 billion. She would become the first Black woman to sit in the investor's chair on ABC's Shark Tank. Forbes would name her one of America's Richest Self-Made Women, with an estimated net worth approaching $400 million. She would sit on the board of the Obama Foundation. She would do all of this without a university degree, without family wealth, without a single connection to Hollywood when she started. And it all began with a lie about a flight.
By the Numbers
The Grede Empire
$4BSkims valuation (July 2023)
$1MGood American first-day sales (October 18, 2016)
~$390MEstimated personal net worth (Forbes, 2024)
5+Companies co-founded or founding-partnered
$750MSkims projected sales (2023)
26Age when she founded her first company
Plaistow, or the Education of Appetite
The postal code was E13 — Plaistow, East London, in the years before gentrification softened its edges into something sellable. Emma Findlay (she would take the name Grede when she married) was born in 1982, the eldest of four daughters raised by a single mother whose own parents had emigrated from Jamaica and Trinidad. Her mother, Jenny-Lee Findlay, worked on the Swiss trading desk at Morgan Stanley — a detail that complicates the rags-to-riches arc Grede sometimes draws, though by every account, money was perpetually tight. Four girls. One income. A high-rise flat in a neighborhood that, as Grede puts it with characteristic bluntness, "was not that nice." She has described her childhood as "really poor." She has also described her mother as someone who put on a fabulous suit every morning and went to work at one of the world's most powerful investment banks. Both things can be true. The contradiction is the point.
What E13 gave Emma Grede was hunger — not the metaphorical kind executives invoke at TED talks, but the specific, practical, nearly feral hunger of a kid who understood from age twelve that money meant freedom. She started a paper route at twelve, leaving the house at 5 a.m. She worked in a deli, slicing meat. She worked in a newsagent's, where she sold fireworks. At her comprehensive school, she hawked counterfeit T-shirts to her teachers. "As soon as I got working," she has said, "I understood the power and the freedom that comes with that. And I really enjoyed it. I liked making my own money." There is something important in the word enjoyed. Not endured. Not tolerated. Enjoyed.
At twenty-one, she was diagnosed with dyslexia — retroactive confirmation of what she'd always felt: that school was, for her, an arena of defeat. "School was incredibly hard for me," she told ELLE. "I couldn't cope with the work because of my learning difficulties." She left at fifteen or sixteen — the accounts vary slightly, as they often do in self-made mythologies — and enrolled herself at the London College of Fashion at sixteen. Within six months, she dropped out again. She couldn't afford to study full-time. She was living in a high-rise in East London with no power, and she needed money. So she worked. She did placements. She rotated through the fashion business, figuring out what she didn't want to do, which is a perfectly respectable method of vocational education, even if no institution grants a certificate for it.
What she discovered, in those itinerant years, was that fashion was a world of creative people who needed someone to handle the other part — the contracts, the negotiations, the deals. "Even though I wasn't a creative," she later reflected, "I was very good at working with very creative people and bringing their ideas to life." The self-knowledge came early. The application of it would take another decade.
The Agency Years, or How to Build a Rolodex from Nothing
The through-line of Grede's early career is production — not of garments, but of spectacle. After a stint at Quintessentially, the luxury concierge service where London's moneyed classes outsourced their social lives, she landed at Inca Productions, one of Europe's foremost fashion show and events production companies. There, she worked as a producer and found herself doing something that no one had quite formalized: brokering sponsorship deals between consumer brands and high-fashion designers. Alexander McQueen with Chivas. Christopher Kane with Mercedes-Benz. She was, before the vocabulary existed, inventing influencer marketing — matching cultural heat with commercial capital.
"I understood how contracts worked," she has said, "and I was very good at getting stuff off of people." This is a peculiar and wonderful self-assessment. Most entrepreneurs describe their gift in aspirational terms — vision, creativity, disruption. Grede describes hers as the ability to extract value from other parties in a negotiation. It is the language of someone who learned commerce not in a classroom but in the specific, unglamorous practice of convincing powerful people to part with money.
In 2008, at twenty-six, she founded Independent Talent
Brand Worldwide — ITB — a talent management and entertainment marketing agency. Saturday Group, the fashion marketing firm run by her future husband, Jens Grede, and his partner Erik Torstensson, incubated the venture. ITB operated at the intersection of celebrity and luxury — connecting fashion houses like Dior, Calvin Klein, and H&M with the famous faces that could electrify their campaigns. Under Grede's leadership, the agency helped broker Natalie Portman's long-running relationship with Dior. It represented, as Jens would later recall, "half of London Fashion Week."
The expansion to Los Angeles nearly killed the business. Grede has been candid about this: "I failed miserably in LA because I kind of, you know, really believed that we were the best and that I could export what I was doing anywhere." The hubris of the successful provincial — assuming that what worked in one ecosystem would automatically translate to another — is one of entrepreneurship's most reliable traps. She hired the wrong people, misjudged the culture, expanded too quickly. It was, by her own account, humbling. It was also instructive. The lessons from the LA failure — about humility, about respecting local context, about the difference between confidence and delusion — would become load-bearing elements of her later success.
In 2018, ITB was acquired by Rogers & Cowan, a division of the Interpublic Group, for an undisclosed sum. It was Grede's second successful exit. She was thirty-six. She had never finished college.
The Momager and the Hustler
The Kardashian relationship did not begin with the cold call. It began with lunch.
Sometime around 2013, at L'Avenue — the Parisian restaurant that served, during Fashion Week, as the unofficial canteen of celebrity deal-making — Emma Grede met Kris Jenner. The matriarch of the Kardashian-Jenner dynasty was then circulating through European fashion capitals, trying to land brand partnerships for her daughters. Jenner was buying. Grede was selling. "She would always buy me lunch," Grede recalled to The Cut. "We would meet at L'Avenue and it would be so fabulous."
Kris Jenner — born Kristen Mary Houghton in San Diego in 1955, a former flight attendant who married into the legal aristocracy of the O.J. Simpson trial and then, through sheer managerial ferocity, converted a sex tape scandal into a multi-billion-dollar media and consumer products empire — was perhaps the only person on Earth whose commercial instincts matched Grede's own. Both women understood, with a clarity that bordered on the religious, that fame without product was vapor, and product without fame was shelf-stable anonymity. The two of them meeting at L'Avenue was, in retrospect, one of those historical inevitabilities that only look inevitable afterward.
The pitch, when it came in 2015, was simple. Grede had observed what anyone who tried on jeans could have observed: the fashion industry made denim for a single body type and ignored everyone else. Women above a size 12 were either excluded entirely or offered shapeless, poorly constructed afterthoughts in a segregated "plus" section. Grede wanted to build a brand that treated all sizes — 00 to 24 — as equally deserving of thoughtful design, premium fabric, and actual fit engineering. Not plus-size fashion. Not body-positivity marketing. A good pair of jeans, built with the same four-piece waistband construction she'd learned from Savile Row tailors, available to every woman who walked into a store.
She chose Khloé Kardashian as her partner because Khloé — who had spent years publicly navigating life as the curvy sister, the one whose body didn't conform to the sample-size ideal that Kim and Kourtney embodied — was the argument made flesh. "She embodied that idea right from the beginning," Grede told Fortune. The partnership wasn't celebrity endorsement. It was casting for a role that only one person could play.
"I have no imposter syndrome and no delusions of who gets to run a business," Grede has said. "I just thought, if not me, then who?"
Day One, and the Problem of Success
October 18, 2016. Good American went live. By close of business, the brand had sold $1 million worth of jeans. It was, according to every available record, the most successful denim launch in the history of the apparel industry. Grede was a hero at 9 a.m. By the afternoon, she had a different problem: there was nothing left to sell.
"What happens when you sell $1 million on day one is that you then have no business, because we were not prepared for that," Grede told Shopify. "I had nothing to sell anyone." The board was disappointed. The customers — the ones who had shown up on day two, credit cards ready, and found empty shelves — were frustrated. And Grede was staring at a paradox that would define her approach to business for the next decade: the first thing Good American did was prove there was massive demand, and the second thing it did was fail to meet it.
She turned the shortage into a listening exercise. With nothing to sell, the team simply talked to customers. What did you want? What color? What did we get wrong? What would you like to see? "Having nothing to sell was a blessing for us," Grede later said, "because it meant that we just talked to people." The customer data from those early conversations — gathered not through sophisticated analytics but through apologetic phone calls and waiting-list sign-ups — informed every subsequent product decision. It was focus-group research conducted under duress, and it worked.
The company raised $2 million in initial capital, built on relationships and trust rather than a polished venture pitch. Good American was profitable early. By 2021, it was generating $155 million in annual revenue. By 2022, $200 million. The brand introduced the size 15 — a size that literally didn't exist in the industry — and required every retailer that carried Good American to stock every style in every size. "We don't want people that are using Good American as tokenism, just to tick a box," Grede told Shopify. "You need to be in it for the long run." Stores that refused the full size range were turned away. It was a negotiating position that required either extraordinary confidence or extraordinary leverage. Grede had both.
I decided denim because I really wanted to take a pain product, something that I know women struggle with. What do you really struggle with? Denim and swimwear.
The Skims Proposition
If Good American was proof of concept — evidence that Grede could identify an underserved market, pair it with a celebrity partner, and build a real brand — then Skims was the thesis at scale. The brand launched in September 2019, co-founded by Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede, with Emma serving as founding partner and chief product officer. The original name was "Kimono" — a tone-deaf choice that drew immediate accusations of cultural appropriation and was changed before launch. The near-miss is instructive. Even in an operation this calculated, there are blind spots.
What Skims did, at its core, was take the same insight that animated Good American — that real women's bodies had been systematically ignored by the fashion industry — and apply it to the shapewear category that Spanx had pioneered but never fully modernized. Skims offered shapewear in nine skin tones and sizes XXS through 4X, with the kind of hyped, drop-based release strategy borrowed from streetwear. Kim Kardashian, who had spent years literally cutting and reconstructing her own shapewear to fit her body and her outfits, served as creative director and fitting model. Her 364 million Instagram followers served as a distribution channel that no amount of paid media could replicate.
The numbers moved fast. On launch day, all models sold out within minutes, generating $2 million. By 2021, the company had a $1.6 billion valuation. The January 2022 Series B, led by Lone Pine Capital, climbed to $240 million. Sales hit nearly $500 million in 2022, then $750 million in 2023. By July 2023, Skims was valued at $4 billion — more than Calvin Klein, more than Patagonia, more than Tom Ford.
Jens Grede runs Skims as CEO, overseeing marketing and strategy. Emma develops the product. The division of labor is precise and, by all accounts, genuine. "Emma is just insanely good at product," Jens has said. It is a marriage in both the literal and corporate senses — a husband-and-wife power structure that operates within and between their shared ventures, with a holding company called Popular Culture that reflects the center of their life's work.
The Harvard Business School case study on Skims, published in September 2023 by Ayelet Israeli, Jill Avery, and Leonard Schlesinger, frames the company's success as an anomaly among direct-to-consumer brands — a category that, by 2023, was littered with the corpses of companies that had burned through venture capital and failed to achieve profitability. Skims was profitable. Skims was growing. Skims was, the case study suggested, not really a DTC brand at all. Its founders drew inspiration from Nike, Apple, and Lululemon — companies that had achieved iconic status by transcending their product categories. The question the case study posed — whether Skims could continue its trajectory or would succumb to the same forces dragging down its peers — remained open. But the trajectory, at least through 2023, was almost absurdly vertical.
The Architecture of the Deal
What distinguishes Grede from the standard celebrity-brand operator is the structure of her arrangements. She doesn't just manage brands on behalf of famous people. She owns them. Her reported 23% stake in Good American, 8% stake in Skims, and 22% stake in Safely — the plant-powered cleaning company she co-founded with Kris Jenner in 2021 — represent genuine equity positions, not consulting fees or advisory roles dressed up with a title. She is, in the language of her own industry, a founding partner. She has skin in every game.
The Kardashian relationship is not a single deal but a lattice of overlapping ventures. Good American with Khloé. Skims with Kim. Safely with Kris. A founding investment in Khy, Kylie Jenner's fashion line, which debuted in late 2023 with pleather coats and dresses under $200. In 2025, Off Season, a sports apparel brand created in partnership with NFL designer Kristin Juszczyk and Fanatics. The pattern is legible: Grede identifies a category gap, designs a product that fills it, and pairs it with a famous partner who embodies the brand's thesis. Then she runs the operation.
I don't think Skims and Good American at the scale we are today can be considered celebrity brands. A lot of celebrity brands fail. Our focus is on providing best-in-class product. It's brand above all else. It's product over everything else.
The insistence on this distinction — that these are product companies, not celebrity licensing deals — is central to Grede's self-conception. She argues that while a famous face can get a customer to look, it cannot make them come back. "Customers may check out a brand that's tied to a famous face," she told Fortune, "but they won't return if the product doesn't meet their standards." The evidence supports her. Good American's 78% revenue growth in 2020 — during a pandemic that devastated retail — didn't come from Khloé Kardashian's Instagram posts. It came from women reordering jeans that actually fit.
The companies share a campus in Los Angeles but, Grede insists, no overarching strategy. "It's every brand for itself." She works on both Good American and Skims on the same day, structuring her time by theme — product on some days, marketing on others. She directly manages twelve people at Good American. At Skims, she is purely focused on product development. The organizational discipline required to operate across this many entities without collapsing into incoherence is, in itself, a kind of talent.
Jens, or the Swedish Parallel
The other half of the equation deserves its own brief. Jens Grede — born in Sweden in 1978, the son of film director Kjell Grede and, for thirteen years, step-son of the actress Bibi Andersson — dropped out of school at twenty and moved to London. He and his friend Erik Torstensson founded the Saturday Group (later renamed Wednesday Agency) in 2003, a fashion marketing firm that became known for an almost preternatural ability to match brands with cultural heat. The
Beyoncé-H&M beach campaign. Justin Bieber in Calvin Klein. Natalie Portman for Miss Dior. Gwyneth Paltrow for Hugo Boss. "When people do something so obvious," Jens has said of successful brand-celebrity pairings, "everyone was like, 'That's so obvious' — but no one did it."
Torstensson — a Swedish creative director whose romantic partner is Natalie Massenet, the founder of Net-a-Porter — co-founded Mr Porter with Jens in 2011 and Frame, the supermodel-beloved denim brand, with him in 2012. The Gredes and Torstensson represent a particular strand of early-2000s London fashion commerce: Scandinavian-accented, aesthetically literate, commercially rapacious, networked into both the fashion establishment and the emerging celebrity economy.
Jens is, by temperament, the quieter of the two Gredes — "a quiet, contemplative Swede," the Financial Times observed, "who once had ambitions of being a professional skateboarder." Where Emma is bright-eyed and electrifying, a people magnet, Jens has the gentle intensity of an enthusiastic startup exec. They have been working together for over sixteen years, romantically involved for fourteen, married for ten. The Cut's profile of the couple noted their office environment with dry precision: a beige room full of beige furniture, including a beige mini-fridge that a publicist described as "Skims-inspired" because "all Skims things have soft edges." The journalist was reminded, generally, of baby binkies.
The Fifteen Percent Pledge and the Uses of Power
In the summer of 2020, in the convulsive weeks after the murder of George Floyd, a fashion designer named Aurora James posted an open letter on Instagram calling on major retailers to commit 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned brands. James — a Canadian-born designer of Ghanaian descent who founded the accessories brand Brother Vellies — had been making luxury goods from African craft traditions for years, working with artisan communities in South Africa, Kenya, and Morocco. Her letter was not a business proposal. It was a moral demand, issued at a moment when moral demands briefly had the force of commercial imperatives.
Grede messaged James after reading the post. The two had never met. Within months, Grede was chairwoman of what became the Fifteen Percent Pledge, a nonprofit that has since pressured major retailers — Sephora, Macy's, Nordstrom — to diversify their purchasing. "I didn't want to be just another Instagram activist or a fashion brand only talking about token 'diversity,'" Grede told the Financial Times. "I wanted to act."
The commitment to the Pledge is real, time-consuming, and — Grede would argue — commercially rational. "At the end of the day, DEI makes really, really good business," she told British GQ. "Our customers come from all different places. And so when you make a brand that makes sense to more customers, you're going to have more sales, you're going to be more relevant to more people. It's really not that complicated." The argument is deliberately stripped of moral grandeur. It is the language of a woman who has spent her career translating social insight into market position. Whether the business case and the justice case are ultimately the same case is a question Grede leaves to others. She is busy making the numbers work.
The Texture of Ambition
There is a quality to Emma Grede's public self-presentation that sits uneasily between inspiration and provocation. She is disarmingly honest about money. "I am unashamedly focused on making money," she told The Times in 2022. "I've never really had a problem talking about it. People talk about their purpose and why they do their jobs — I wanted to be able to afford a certain lifestyle. Money has always been a pillar for me, because I didn't have any growing up." The frankness is refreshing in an era of purpose-washed corporate rhetoric. It is also, for some, grating — a reminder that the narratives we tell about female entrepreneurship tend to require a softer justification than simple avarice.
She wakes at 4:45 a.m. She meditates for twenty minutes (she is supposed to do forty). She doesn't touch her phone until seven. She spends 20% of her time finding and hiring talent. She does not do Zoom unless she has to. "I honestly don't sit and send a million emails," she told British GQ. "I just find it the least effective way to communicate." Four mornings a week, during her commute, she speaks on the phone with a female founder — typically a Black woman who has reached out via social media or a mutual friend — answering questions and offering guidance.
In January 2024, she triggered minor controversy by telling The Diary of a CEO podcast that work-life balance, as commonly understood, is a fiction. "If you are leading an extraordinary life," she said, "to think that extraordinary effort wouldn't be coupled to that somehow is crazy." If it's possible to have true work-life balance, "tell me who she is, and I'll show you a liar." The statement was criticized as dismissive of structural barriers that make the lives of most working women considerably harder than her own. Grede didn't walk it back. "I stand by my remarks because they are my truth," she told TIME. "I don't think you can be a people pleaser and a leader."
The brittleness of the statement — its refusal to accommodate the possibility that other people's truths might differ from her own — coexists with genuine generosity. The mentoring calls. The Fifteen Percent Pledge. The Seat at the Table dinners she hosts, bringing together young founders and powerful women in business. The $2 million Good American raised from early investors was built on trust and relationships, not a polished deck. She gave her staff a cash bonus for adopting AI in their work — then, after a wake-up call from Mark Cuban about his sixty AI apps, enrolled herself in courses at Wharton and Harvard because, as she put it with disarming candor, "I'm using AI like a 42-year-old woman."
In April 2025, she joined the board of the Obama Foundation, contributing to marketing, communications, and fundraising. In May 2025, she launched her podcast,
Aspire with Emma Grede, whose guests include Gwyneth Paltrow, Michelle Obama, and Meghan Markle. Her first book,
Start With Yourself, is due from Simon & Schuster. She has described it as "super honest and super practical" — a phrase that, coming from a woman who once sold counterfeit T-shirts to her schoolteachers, carries a specific weight.
It isn't small at the top. It's minuscule.
Malibu, Bel Air, and the View from the Top
The Gredes bought Brad Pitt's former Malibu holiday home for $45 million in 2022, adding it to the $24 million Bel Air mansion — a seven-bedroom, 12,000-square-foot property formerly owned by fashion billionaire Serge Azria — where they live with their four children: Grey, Lola, and twins Lake and Rafferty. Emma is on set for filming days before 7 a.m., in a fluffy white robe, hair pulled off her bare face, about to go into "glam." The Malibu weekends, the personal assistants, the phalanx of publicists — the material life she has built is precisely the one she imagined as a girl in Plaistow, cutting pictures of models out of fashion magazines and filing them.
She has not lost her East London accent, save for the transatlanticisms that seep in after years in California — "to-dally," "responsibili-dee" — and she laughs easily. Her language, The Times observed, is light on Valley Girl word salads. She calls herself "Emma Greedy" with the self-aware glee of someone who knows exactly how the name sounds and doesn't care. The persona is precise: warm enough to be approachable, blunt enough to be credible, polished enough to sit across a table from Kim Kardashian, rough enough to remember where she came from.
The personal life, when it surfaces, complicates the image of effortless hustle. She has spoken about infertility, about her journey to parenthood through surrogacy, about the guilt that attends any working mother's choices. "I have an unbelievable amount of help," she told Harper's Bazaar. "We were never supposed to raise kids all alone." The admission is deliberate — a correction to the myth that successful women do it by themselves, a myth that Grede recognizes as both seductive and destructive.
The Girl from E13
What kind of story is this? A rags-to-riches narrative would be the easiest frame: council-estate kid makes good, builds billion-dollar brands, buys Brad Pitt's beach house. But the story resists that tidiness. Grede's mother worked at Morgan Stanley. Grede attended the London College of Fashion, however briefly. She married into a Swedish fashion dynasty. The bootstrapping is real, but it is not the whole truth.
A celebrity-industrial complex story would be another option: the operator behind the famous faces, the woman who monetizes fame on behalf of those who generate it. But Grede is not a manager. She is an owner. She builds the products. She runs the companies. The celebrities are her partners, not her clients.
The story that holds together, I think, is one about translation — about a woman who learned, very early, to move between worlds that don't naturally communicate with each other. East London and Paris Fashion Week. Fashion production and corporate negotiation. Celebrity culture and product engineering. Black British identity and the overwhelmingly white American fashion establishment. In each case, Grede's gift has been to see what each world has that the other needs, and to position herself at the point of exchange.
"If I have a superpower," she said on
Trading Secrets, "it's understanding what women, girls, people need and how much they want to pay for it."
On a recent morning in Bel Air, before the glam team arrived, before the filming began, she sat in her robe and talked about the businesses. Good American is now a certified B Corp. Skims has collaborations with Nike, the NBA, the WNBA, USA Basketball, Team USA at the Olympics. Off Season is bringing sports fashion to a female audience that has never had it. The podcast is scaling mentorship. The book is scaling memoir. She is forty-two years old, and there is the distinct sense that she is just beginning.
Somewhere in E13, a twelve-year-old girl with a paper route is leaving the house at 5 a.m.
