Business lessons from the woman behind Kardashians' empires
What do Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS, Khloe Kardashian’s Good American, and Kris Jenner’s Safely all have in common?
The trio share the same wizard behind the curtain: Emma Grede, a serial entrepreneur who helped parlay the Kardashians’ celebrity into lucrative businesses.
Grede got her start working in fashion show production, before founding and selling a talent management and marketing firm, ITB. She spoke to Yahoo Finance at Chase for Business’ Make Your Move Summit in Frisco, Texas, where she unpacked the philosophy behind her success.
"There is no one better than the Kardashian family to really connect with popular culture, but when you break that down, what does it mean? It's an understanding of women, of consumers and what they might want to buy," Grede told Yahoo Finance.
The secret behind Kardshians' hits are simple: Identify gaps in the market, produce quality products that fill that need, and make inclusiveness a central principle.
For example, when Good American was launched in 2016, no one in the denim industry was making jeans for women of all sizes. The company produced jeans in every size — from 00 to 32 plus — and shot its campaigns on different-sized models. The launch generated $1 million in sales on the first day — a record for the industry.
"What was so wonderful was that the mission and our purpose really chimed with customers," said Grede. "So many women, especially in that plus-size community, are really left out of the fashion conversation ... There's such limited options around clothing for women of a certain size that we were just filling an obvious gap, an obvious white space."
Similarly, Kim Kardashian's SKIMS, recently valued at $4 billion, is known for its wide range of sizes and high quality-to-price ratio. "You might be driven to buy the product because you've seen Kim or Khloe or Kris, but they've got to be really, really great products for you to come back and buy time and time again," said Grede.
"We're taking categories that really need innovation ... and delivering customers a superior product in that category. And I think that's the only way you can build a business."
It's a tricky time for the consumer. In an interview this week with Yahoo Finance, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said that, while middle and upper class consumers are "performing quite well," there are "signs of stress" among those in lower income brackets.
But customers are still looking for quality and durability, and if you have products that people want to use all the time, then the business will be better positioned for tough times.
"We really want people to feel like these are companies that they can come to time and time again to buy things that will last and that they'll wear forever," said Grede.
In her spare time, Grede also invests in startups, particularly ones that are women- or minority-founded. In founders, she looks for many of the same markers as she does when building her businesses.
"A founder that's super passionate about what they do, but somebody that's solving a problem, that's filling a white space," said Grede. "It's not at all for me about experience because I look for people that are approaching things differently."
Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @agarfinks and on LinkedIn.
