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They started off as reality TV stars who were, well, just famous for being famous. But these days a great chunk of their millions come from big-bucks endorsements and the savvy business deals they’ve set up over the past few years.
Their colossal fame has certainly helped the Kardashian-Jenner clan expand their empire – but it’s their collaboration with a woman with a brain for business and a nose for success that’s helped to turn it into a proper financial success.
London-born Emma Grede may be nowhere near as well-known as the Kardashian-Jenners, but she’s the behind-the-scenes genius who has launched billion-dollar companies with members of the famous family.
The 41-year-old is co-founder and CEO of the clothing line Good American with Khloé Kardashian and the founding partner of Skims, Kim Kardashian’s hit shapewear range. She’s also co-founder of Kris Jenner’s cleaning supplies company, Safely, which launched in 2021.
“Emma is one of the hardest-working people I know,” Khloé says. “She not only immerses herself in every component of the business, she consistently pushes the envelope for what a modern, inclusive brand can and should be.”
And it’s paying off big time. Skims, recently valued at around $4 billion (R71,9bn), was named by Time magazine as one of its 100 most influential companies and Good American recently opened its first store in the US.
Emma, who’s worth a cool $320 million (R5,7bn), is on the latest Forbes list of America’s wealthiest self-made women and lives in swanky Bel-Air, Los Angeles, with her Swedish husband and business partner, Jens Grede, and kids Grey (9), Lola (6) and twins Lake and Rafferty (1).
She’s been a guest judge on entrepreneur reality show Shark Tank and has a passion for raising awareness of underfunded black-owned businesses.
Emma is also chairperson of Fifteen Percent Pledge, a campaign that kicked off after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and asks retailers to dedicate 15% of shelf space to black-owned brands. Racial injustice in the US and her own rising profile in the business world spurred her into action, she told Forbes magazine.
“I felt that with my position and what I’ve been able to build for myself and where I am in my life, the right thing to do would be to leverage that.”
Emma, who’s of Jamaican and Trinidadian descent, hasn’t always had it easy.
She was raised in Plaistow, East London, by single mom Jenny-Lee Findlay, who worked hard to support Emma and her sisters, Charlotte, Rachelle and Katie-Beth. Jenny-Lee worked at investment bank Morgan Stanley, but the kids were expected to contribute to the family coffers too.
Emma had a job delivering newspapers in her neighbourhood and as a teen worked in a deli and managed the cash register at a local shop. She saved whatever she could to finance her dream of a career in fashion.
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“I think that because everything was so bleak and grim around me, I was drawn to fashion – it was escapism for me,” she recalls. “As a kid I used to save my pocket money to buy Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire – I was always scraping around to find £7,50 for all three.”
She credits her upbringing for being the driving force behind her success.
“We knew our neighbours and there was a real sense of community,” she says. “You could trust people, you were as good as your word and I’ve taken that mentality with me.
“I was under no illusion that it wasn’t hard work bringing us up. Mum was gone a lot, but I always understood that she went to work to put a roof over our heads. That set the way I think – you get up each day and you graft.”
After school Emma went to the London College of Fashion but she battled to cope and soon dropped out. “I’m super dyslexic, which I didn’t find out until my mid-twenties,” she says.
She entered the working world, landing placements at PR firms and emerging fashion labels and later interned for designers such as Gucci.
“The best thing about being in London then was that if you wanted to be in fashion, you would meet people. I met everyone.”
Emma helped to produce runway shows for London Fashion Week and by 2008 ventured out on her own as CEO and chairwoman of talent agency ITB Worldwide, where she combined her love of fashion with her interest in showbiz.
She later worked as a business development director at the marketing company Saturday Group, where she met her husband and worked with clients such as designer Vivienne Westwood and actress Natalie Portman.
In 2013 she met Kris, who often chatted to Emma about “all the girls and what their ambitions were”.
“Kris was honest with me early on,” she says. “She said, ‘I am looking for opportunities for my girls to have meaningful participation in what they do. This is not about just taking another endorsement for them – we’re past that’,” Emma told Elle.
Emma came up with the idea of developing a size-inclusive clothing line – and Khloé was immediately interested.
“In Khloé I found a partner,” she says. “We’re very different, but in those partnerships comes the magic. When we started the brand, it was a very different time.
“There was a lot of chat about body positivity, but the reality was that not many companies were actually creating clothes for women of all sizes and we just went, ‘We’re going to do it’.”
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Good American was a hit: $1m (then R15,5m) worth of jeans was sold on the first day of trading.
In 2017 Emma and Jens moved to Los Angeles to be closer to the Kardashian-Jenners and the lucrative US market and two years later Kim approached Emma to help launch Skims. Jens runs the day-to-day operations for the range while Emma concentrates on design, production, planning and merchandising.
“Skims is Kim’s vision, her idea, her aesthetic,” Emma says. “My job is to make it happen.”
Emma and Jens, who helped footballer Tom Brady launch his clothing line, believe merging their customer-focused ideas with big names is the sweet spot in the industry.
“These people all come with incredible, unique storytelling,” Jens says. “Fame is a great accelerator.” Emma says Kris, Khloe´ and Kim are “incredible business partners”. She sometimes gets flak for working with them, but she’s proud of what she does.
“I see and hear the criticism every day, but do I sleep well? Do I have peace with what I do? Absolutely.”
She believes life is all about paying it forward.
“It sounds corny, but we’ve made some money now and to be able to pass on what I’ve learnt in the seven or eight years of Good American and Skims is crucial,” she says.
“It was only yesterday I was going around looking for financial backing myself.”
SOURCES: FORBES.COM, GLAMOURMAGAZINE.CO.UK, NET-A-PORTER.COM, VARIETY.COM, FT.COM, ELLE.COM
