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
$4B
Part IIThe Playbook
The following principles are drawn from Emma Grede's two decades of building, scaling, and operating consumer brands — from a talent agency in London to a portfolio of companies now valued in the billions. They are not abstract inspirations. They are structural decisions, repeated across multiple ventures, that reveal a coherent philosophy of entrepreneurship.
Table of Contents
1.Cold-call your way into the room.
2.Build for the ignored customer, not the aspirational one.
3.Pair conviction with celebrity — but never confuse the two.
4.Sell the shortage.
5.Treat inclusivity as market expansion, not moral posture.
6.Exit to learn, not just to earn.
7.Own equity, not credit.
Hire above yourself — and pay them accordingly.
In Their Own Words
At that point I'd done a few really successful talent-based equity partnerships, where the talent took equity in the brand. When I saw how well they went, I was like, 'I'm going to do one of these for myself!
The idea for Good American came about because I thought there was a shift happening in popular culture.
When I was coming up through the ranks everybody was stick thin, and that was what most women aspired to. But it's so different now.
I thought fashion was missing this. It wasn't about plus-size or regular size, instead I thought there should be brands that are made for everybody. So that's how Good American started.
Here's the thing: Work-life balance is your problem, that's yours to figure out.
Because the way we run organizations now is that no one misses dentist appointments or a doctor's appointment or a haircut or their kid's parent-teacher conference ... that's just not how we work anymore, right?
You come in, you have set hours, but there's flexibility within your working life. It's not like 'Oh my goodness, such and such is not at their desk.' That's just not how we work anymore.
I cannot tell you how many times fear has tried to stop me. But here's what I've learned: fear only has the power you give it.
The moment you shift the narrative from 'what if I fail?' to 'what if I thrive?' everything changes.
You have to get out of your head. You have to change the narrative.
I was getting a lot of experience in business, in branding, in scaling mission-driven platforms, and I really wanted to take that and expand it.
I made sure—and make sure on a daily basis—that my world and my life are not run by my feelings, but rather run by the goals and the vision that I have for myself.
Skims 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.
— Emma Grede
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.
— Emma Grede, Fortune, 2022
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.
— Emma Grede, TIME, 2026
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.
8.
9.Fail fast in foreign markets — then fail differently.
10.Treat your naivety as an asset until it becomes a liability.
11.Make the decision and move on.
12.Scale mentorship as ruthlessly as you scale product.
Principle 1
Cold-call your way into the room.
Grede had no introduction to Kris Jenner. She had no warm lead, no mutual friend, no agent smoothing the path. She picked up the phone. When Jenner asked when she'd be in LA, she lied about her travel schedule and booked a flight. The story has become a signature anecdote, repeated across podcasts and profiles, but its power lies not in its drama but in its ordinariness. Most people who have an idea for a brand do not call the most powerful manager in entertainment. They wait for a warmer opportunity, refine their pitch deck, attend another networking event. The distance between the idea and the phone call is where most ventures die.
Before the Kardashian call, Grede spent years cold-calling brands as a young agency founder. "For six or seven months, I had to do everything myself from scratch," she recalled. "I would go out and win the business, service the business and then go back to the office late at night and make the invoice to get paid." The cold-call muscle was built long before the stakes were high.
Tactic: Identify the single person who can greenlight your idea and contact them directly — before you feel ready, before the pitch is perfect, before someone introduces you.
Principle 2
Build for the ignored customer, not the aspirational one.
Good American's founding insight was not that body positivity was trending. It was that 68% of American women wear a size 14 or above, and the fashion industry had spent decades pretending they didn't exist. Grede didn't build a brand for the woman who aspired to look like a model. She built for the woman who couldn't find jeans that fit.
The same logic animated Skims: shapewear existed, but it came in three skin tones and a narrow size range, designed for a body that most women did not have. Grede's brands don't create desire. They solve problems. "I decided denim because I really wanted to take a pain product," she has said — and the word pain is doing heavy work there. The customer isn't aspirational. She's frustrated.
👖
Good American's Size Strategy
How the brand turned inclusivity from a marketing message into a structural commitment.
Industry standard
Good American approach
Sizes 00–12, with "plus" as a separate line
Sizes 00–24 in every style, same price, same design integrity
Retailers can cherry-pick sizes to stock
Retailers must carry the full range or lose the brand
One model per product shot
Multiple models of varying sizes in every campaign
Plus-size as a marketing initiative
Inclusivity as foundational design philosophy
Tactic: Before you build anything, identify the largest group of potential customers who are being actively poorly served by the incumbents — and design the product around their specific frustrations.
Principle 3
Pair conviction with celebrity — but never confuse the two.
Grede partners with celebrities not because they're famous but because they embody the brand's thesis. Khloé Kardashian was not chosen to sell jeans. She was chosen because she had spent years publicly navigating the experience of being the sister whose body didn't fit the sample size. Kim Kardashian was not chosen to sell shapewear. She was chosen because she had been literally cutting and reconstructing her own shapewear for years. The celebrity is the proof of concept, not the marketing strategy.
"A lot of celebrity brands fail," Grede has said — and the data bears this out. For every Fenty Beauty, there are dozens of celebrity ventures that launched with fanfare and died quietly. The difference, in Grede's model, is that the celebrity partner must have authentic domain expertise and personal investment in the product's mission. When customers return for a second and third purchase, they're not returning for the famous name. They're returning for the fit.
Tactic: If you're building a brand with a famous partner, ensure the partner's personal story is inseparable from the product's value proposition — not just attached to it.
Principle 4
Sell the shortage.
Good American's $1 million launch day could have been a disaster. The brand sold out entirely. There was nothing left to offer on day two. Instead of panicking, Grede turned the shortage into a customer-research engine — apologizing, asking questions, building waiting lists, learning what colors and fits and sizes the market wanted next. The artificial scarcity (unintentional, in this case) generated demand that sustained the brand through its early supply-chain stumbles.
Skims operationalized this lesson deliberately, adopting the drop model from streetwear: limited releases, timed availability windows, waiting lists. The Fendi x Skims collaboration generated more than $3 million in sales within the first ten minutes.
Tactic: If you can't meet demand in your early days, don't apologize and go silent — use the gap as a listening device and let scarcity work for you.
Principle 5
Treat inclusivity as market expansion, not moral posture.
Grede never frames inclusivity as charity. She frames it as commercial intelligence. When Good American requires retailers to stock every size or lose the brand, the mandate is not principally about representation — it is about ensuring that the brand's target market (which is all women, not a subset) can actually access the product. "When you make a brand that makes sense to more customers, you're going to have more sales," she told British GQ. "It's really not that complicated."
The Fifteen Percent Pledge operates on the same logic. Pushing retailers to dedicate shelf space to Black-owned brands is both a justice project and a commercial one: it expands the range of products available to a diverse customer base. The genius of Grede's framing is that it renders the moral and commercial arguments indistinguishable.
Tactic: When building an inclusive brand, never present diversity as a cost center or a concession — present it as the market strategy, with revenue data to prove it.
Principle 6
Exit to learn, not just to earn.
ITB, Grede's first company, was acquired by Rogers & Cowan in 2018 after a decade of operation. The financial terms were undisclosed, but the strategic value of the exit was clear: it gave Grede capital, credibility, and — crucially — the operational lessons that informed everything that came after. She has spoken candidly about ITB's failures, particularly the botched expansion to Los Angeles. Those failures taught her about cultural context, about the limits of confidence, about the difference between being the best in one market and being competent in another.
Tactic: Treat your first venture as a tuition payment. The skills, failures, and network you accumulate matter more than the exit price.
Principle 7
Own equity, not credit.
Grede's 23% stake in Good American, her 8% stake in Skims, and her 22% stake in Safely represent genuine ownership positions. She is not a consultant. She is not a brand ambassador. She is not an advisory board member with a token equity grant. She negotiated founding-partner stakes in every venture because she understood, from her agency years, that the people who create the most value in celebrity-brand partnerships are often the operators, not the faces.
The decision to take equity rather than fees — particularly early in her career, when she was "hiring people that I was paying more than myself, because I needed to compensate for my own inadequacies or gaps in my knowledge" — reflects a specific philosophy about how wealth is built. Revenue is temporary. Equity compounds.
Tactic: Whenever possible, negotiate for ownership stakes rather than fees, salaries, or bonuses — especially in ventures where you are providing operational expertise that the other partners cannot.
Principle 8
Hire above yourself — and pay them accordingly.
In the early days of ITB, Grede hired employees she paid more than herself. "Some people, they'll be like, 'I'm the CEO. I'm the top dog. I should be getting paid the most money,'" she told CNBC. "For me, it was about compensating for my own inadequacies or gaps in my knowledge." She currently spends 20% of her time on hiring, which she describes as one of her core skills. "I'm not a micromanager. I think it's important to hire the best people and then get out of their way."
The discipline is counterintuitive for ego-driven founders. It requires admitting what you don't know — which, for a high-school dropout competing against MBA-credentialed executives, is a daily exercise in strategic humility.
Tactic: Identify your three biggest skill gaps, hire people who are world-class in those areas, and pay them what they're worth — even if it means paying them more than yourself.
Principle 9
Fail fast in foreign markets — then fail differently.
Grede's LA expansion of ITB was a humbling disaster. "I failed miserably in LA because I really believed that we were the best and that I could export what I was doing anywhere," she admitted. The lesson — that operational excellence in one market does not guarantee relevance in another — became a foundation of her later, more careful expansion strategies.
When she moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to launch Good American and then Skims, she didn't repeat the ITB playbook. She rebuilt from local context. She hired locally. She absorbed the culture rather than imposing her own. The failure in LA circa 2010 made the success in LA circa 2016 possible.
Tactic: When expanding to a new market, assume everything you know is wrong. Hire people from that market, listen before you strategize, and budget for the education.
Principle 10
Treat your naivety as an asset until it becomes a liability.
"I think everything I didn't know led me to a place where I had that naivety," Grede has said. "I didn't know what could go wrong and so in a way I just got on with things that right now just would seem scary or stupid." The naivety argument recurs throughout Grede's public narrative: the idea that not knowing the rules gave her license to break them, that ignorance of convention enabled unconventional moves.
This is true — to a point. The same naivety that enabled the ITB launch also produced the failed LA expansion. The trick, which Grede seems to have mastered by her mid-thirties, is knowing when to stop relying on instinct and start relying on expertise. The cash bonus she offered employees for using AI, followed by her own enrollment in Wharton and Harvard courses, is a microcosm of this principle in action: be naive enough to start, then humble enough to learn.
Tactic: In the early stages, move faster than your knowledge warrants. In the later stages, invest in the education you skipped.
Principle 11
Make the decision and move on.
"My husband once told me, 'Make a decision and move on,'" Grede told Sourcing Journal. "My job is all about making decisions, and you're going to make good ones and bad ones, but better to make a decision and move on than procrastinate." She describes her daily role across multiple companies as a continuous stream of judgment calls — product, marketing, hiring, strategy — and her edge is velocity, not perfection.
The philosophy is deliberately anti-perfectionist. Grede has argued on her podcast that "the No. 1 mistake founders make is waiting until everything feels perfect." Starting, iterating, and correcting is faster than planning, planning, and planning some more. Imperfect action beats perfect inaction. This is not original wisdom, but Grede's execution of it — across five companies simultaneously — constitutes a kind of proof.
Tactic: Set a maximum deliberation window for every category of decision (hours for operational, days for strategic, weeks for existential) — and enforce it.
Principle 12
Scale mentorship as ruthlessly as you scale product.
Four mornings a week, during her commute, Grede calls a female founder — typically someone who reached out via DM — and offers thirty minutes of guidance. She hosts Seat at the Table dinners that pair early-stage founders with established executives. She co-hosts Side Hustlers on the Roku Channel, mentoring entrepreneurs on camera. She launched the Aspire podcast explicitly to "scale mentorship" — to reach people she can't phone individually. Her book, Start With Yourself, extends the effort further.
The mentorship is not altruism divorced from strategy. Every conversation Grede has with a founder — every question she answers about fundraising, supply chains, or retail strategy — reinforces her network, her cultural intelligence, and her deal flow. The portfolio of investments she has made in female-founded consumer brands draws directly from these relationships. Mentorship, in Grede's model, is both generosity and reconnaissance.
Tactic: Dedicate a fixed, non-negotiable block of time each week to mentoring founders outside your organization — and track what you learn from them as carefully as what you teach.
Part IIIQuotes / Maxims
In her words
The difference between me and someone else is that I made the phone call, I took the meeting, and I made it happen. I have no imposter syndrome and no delusions of who gets to run a business. I just thought, if not me, then who?
— Emma Grede, Fortune, 2025
If you are leading an extraordinary life, to think that extraordinary effort wouldn't be coupled to that somehow is crazy. Tell me who she is, and I'll show you a liar.
— Emma Grede, The Diary of a CEO, 2025
I was a really poor kid growing up, and I've made it my business to find financial freedom.
— Emma Grede, ELLE, 2024
I made sure — and make sure on a daily basis — that my world and my life are not run by my feelings, but rather run by the goals and the vision that I have for myself. I don't think you can be a people pleaser and a leader.
— Emma Grede, TIME, 2026
My naivety was a superpower. The fact that I knew nothing was brilliant. Because if I'd known what I didn't know, I would never have done it because I would have been too scared — but I just went for it.
— Emma Grede, NET-A-PORTER Incredible Women podcast
Maxims
Build for the frustrated, not the aspirational. The biggest market opportunity in consumer products is not the customer who wants something new — it's the customer who has been failed by everything that already exists.
An idea in your head is just an idea in your head. The gap between vision and execution is a phone call, a flight, a lie about your schedule. Close it.
Celebrity is a distribution channel, not a product strategy. A famous face gets the first click. The product earns the second purchase.
Pay yourself last. In the early years, compensate for your skill gaps by hiring people better than you — and pay them what it takes to keep them.
Inclusivity is market sizing. Every customer segment you exclude is revenue you forfeit. Expand the aperture and the top line follows.
Failure is tuition, not a sentence. The botched LA expansion taught more than the London success. Budget for the education.
Talk about money loudly and often. The silence around compensation, profit, and wealth creation — especially among women founders — is a structural disadvantage. Break it.
Own equity, not credit. Consulting fees are income. Founding stakes are wealth. Know the difference and negotiate accordingly.
Scarcity creates listening. When you can't fulfill demand, use the gap to learn what customers actually want — not what you assumed they'd want.
Scale your mentorship like a product line. Every founder you help is a node in your network, a source of intelligence, and a potential deal. Generosity and strategy are not opposed.
