A serial entrepreneur tells us how to build a business with a cult-following

You may not have heard of Emma Grede, but you will have seen the impact of her ideas. A pioneering advocate of inclusive sizing, the British-born, Los Angeles-based entrepreneur works quietly behind the scenes of her billion-dollar companies—which include the denim brand Good American and the shapewear line Skims—while harnessing the influence of her Kardashian business partners. 

The eldest of four sisters raised by a single mother in East London, Grede decided at a young age that she was going to work for herself. ‘My mentality has always been that, regardless of background, my thoughts are as valid as anybody else’s, and somebody needs to hear them.’ After dropping out of the London College of Fashion, she took a job working on sponsorship deals for catwalk shows featuring designers including Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen and Mary Katrantzou.

Seeing how a fashion fan base could be monetised, she looked to celebrities with a following to forge equity deals and, at 24, she opened her entertainment-marketing agency Independent Talent Brand. Here, she developed the influencer economy long before the term entered the lexicon. ‘My skill was in interpreting a creative person’s vision and generating real business from it,’ she says. ‘I was a poor kid, and I wanted to create something that had profit.’

Having overseen multiple celebrity partnerships–among the most lucrative being those with the Kardashian-Jenner family–Grede found herself wanting equity in her own projects. So, in 2016, she took her idea for a size-inclusive denim brand to their matriarch and manager Kris Jenner, who suggested Khloé Kardashian to front the brand. ‘If you go back seven years, people weren’t talking about body positivity in the same way they do now. There was a huge gap in the fashion market because so many women were left out of the conversation,’ she says. ‘At my agency, I was being asked by my clients to put forward the image of inclusivity and diversity, but the companies weren’t actually reflecting those values. I saw there was an opportunity to do things differently, and Kris and Khloé felt strongly about what I was saying; they got it instantly.’

By stocking US sizes from 00 to 32, Grede was setting a new standard for the way clothes are made and marketed—but this came with its own set of challenges. ‘I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to make the same pair of seamless jeans in a size eight and a size 20—it wasn’t physically possible without changing existing machinery—and then to get people to understand what we were doing and stand behind it. But that only fired me up. I just kept bashing the door down until people said yes, or until I found a way.’ Her resilience paid off: the company generated $1 million on its first day of trading, and last year exceeded $200 million in profit.

Hot on the heels of Good American’s success, Grede and Kim Kardashian brought the shapewear label Skims to the market in 2019; it has recently been valued at $3.2 billion (its competitor Spanx is estimated to be worth $1.2 billion). Like Good American, the brand upholds principles of diversity, accommodating a wide range of skin tones and body shapes with comfort and style. ‘Our success goes to prove that diversity is a superpower in business. If you look to include everybody when you’re designing products, then more people can enjoy them.’ Of course, it helps to have some of the best-known women in the world associated with your brands (she has also recently launched the natural cleaning-product range Safely with Kris Jenner, which was quickly picked up by major US retailers), but as Grede puts it: ‘Celebrity is never the be-all and end-all. Kim or Khloé can make you buy something once, but you’re not going to repeatedly spend £150 on a pair of jeans that don’t fit you well. The product has to stand on its own.’

While many celebrity brands flounder, Grede says the secrets of her success with the Kardashians are having an astute understanding of who their customers are, being united in the desire to innovate and playing to each other’s strengths. ‘We all do something very different and we’re respectful of one another’s roles,’ she says. ‘I can’t emulate what they bring: they have been the most famous people on the planet for 16 years, and when you’ve been in conversation with that many women over that amount of time, you really start to know what they want.’ Nevertheless, Grede is testament to the fact that it is equally important to understand what you want—and then go after it. 

This piece originally appeared in the February 2023 print edition of Harper's Bazaar UK