You’ve most likely heard of British entrepreneur Emma Grede due to Skims, the $5 billion shapewear firm she runs with Kim Kardashian. She’s additionally invested in different manufacturers with the household, akin to cleansing merchandise firm Safely and Kylie Jenner’s clothes line, Khy. And the rising empire can all be traced again to at least one cellphone name she made to Kris Jenner that modified every thing.
It was 2015, and Grede had constructed her personal leisure and expertise company, Impartial Expertise Model, which noticed her jetting between London and L.A. “I knew every manager, agent, publicist, lawyer in Hollywood, that was my job,” Grede remembers in an unique interview with Fortune.
It put her in an ideal place to pitch her new thought: a radically inclusive denim model tailor-made for girls who’d been missed by mainstream vogue. In her thoughts, she’d already picked the proper companion for the model: Khloé Kardashian, who “embodied that idea right from the beginning.” The star had typically been trustworthy about her expertise because the curvy sister.
However right here’s the catch: Grede hadn’t run a vogue enterprise earlier than, and the 2 had by no means labored collectively. As an alternative of ready for an introduction, she boldly known as the household matriarch and “momager,” Jenner herself.
“I had an idea, and I formed the partnership in my mind,” the now 43-year-old self-made millionaire says. “The distinction between me and another person is that I made the cellphone name, I took the assembly, and I made it occur.
“I have no impostor syndrome and no delusions of who gets to run a business,” Grede provides. “I just thought, ‘If not me, then who?’”
Jenner requested Grede when she’d subsequent be flying to L.A. to debate the partnership face-to-face. On the time, Grede was solely flying that means as soon as 1 / 4, however she rapidly lied and stated she was heading there the following week. In order that’s precisely what she did—and the remainder is historical past.
When Good American denim dropped a 12 months later, it made $1 million on day one, making it the largest denim launch in attire historical past. And since then, she’s gone on to sit down on the board of the Obama Basis and develop into the primary Black feminine investor on Shark Tank. Most not too long ago, she’s teamed up with tennis champion Coco Gauff for a mentorship marketing campaign with UPS.
In the present day, Grede says, she’s at all times advising founders to repeat her, be extra daring, and put themselves out on a limb: “An idea in your head is just an idea in your head. A lot of people talk and speak about things a lot—sometimes you just got to do.”
Emma Grede says she’s at all times been ‘audacious’
Grede’s confidence isn’t luck—and even one thing she developed alongside the billion-dollar success of her companies. It’s a trait she was simply born with. “I’ve got a lot of audacity, and I think that you need that to get to where you want to go,” the East Londoner tells Fortune.
In her late teenagers, for instance, Grede had aspirations of working in Britain’s equal of Broadway. When the theater bosses ignored her handwritten notes asking for work expertise, she stormed in there in individual.
“I remember pounding the pavement in the West End,” she remembers. “I just thought because I didn’t get any answers, that maybe they weren’t getting my letters. So I took to hand-delivering letters.”
Even when she was holding down a day job, she’d boldly ask prospects with enviable careers for work expertise—and it could work.
“When I was working in a clothes shop, I would talk to everyone. I’d be like, ‘Where do you work? What would you do?’ If a stylist came in on a Friday and was doing a shoot on the weekend, I’d be assisting them on the weekend. I did that multiple times.”
She says she would actively put herself into “situations,” versus passively ready for alternatives to return to her. After discovering out the place prospects labored, she would observe up with: “Do you need some help? Can I come?”
Grede’s recommendation for jobless Gen Z: Kill your darlings
Tens of millions of Gen Zers are presently unemployed—or quite, NEETs, not in employment, schooling, or coaching.
Grede, in the meantime, has been working because the begin of highschool.
Basically, every expertise led to the following. She handled each function—irrespective of how unglamorous—as a solution to accumulate abilities, contacts, and credibility that stacked into her subsequent transfer. Because of a behavior of talking up and standing out, she squeezed actual, résumé-worthy expertise out of even essentially the most unassuming jobs.
After all, even Grede skilled her fair proportion of noes alongside the best way: “I got very, very, very comfortable with rejection. If I think about how many things didn’t work out for me, there are a lot more than the things that seemingly on paper did work out.”
However she dusted herself off and tried once more. It’s why her recommendation for these struggling to interrupt in is to take a look at each expertise as a step ahead—even when it’s not the dream function but.
“I would think about the idea of transferable skills,” she advises Gen Z job seekers. “We all set ourselves up to think about exactly what we might want to do. And the reality is that you can learn pretty interchangeable skills anywhere.”
Rising up, Grede was mounted on the concept of working in vogue. “I could have got a lot of those skills in an advertising agency or working in another creative industry,” she explains. Gaining expertise at an artwork gallery or boutique after which working your means up the ladder is way simpler than pining for a job at a vogue home straight out of school. You simply must put apart your ego and prioritize constructing momentum over perfection.
“I’d do anything to get yourself going in forward motion,” Grede explains.
“In England, we have that lovely saying, ‘killing your darlings,’ and sometimes you just have to kill your darlings. You have to do whatever you’ve got to do to move forward. It’s better to just think about forward motion as opposed to being so fixated on what you’d originally imagined things would be like.”
A model of this story initially revealed on Fortune.com on Sept. 23, 2025
