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Emma Grede, whose fortune is estimated at £300 million ($567 million), has some robust advice for any woman hoping to emulate her success, including “to work from home is career suicide” and “you cannot be a people pleaser and a leader”. She suggests making life plans detailing your aspirations while also understanding that you will need to make sacrifices.
“If you are ambitious, it’s going to require some discomfort,” she says. “If you want money – or at least to be paid what you deserve – you’re going to need audacity.”
This is a bracing distillation of Grede’s business wisdom, acquired over 30 years, starting with doing a paper round in east London aged 12, and including setting up the Good American denim brand with Khloé Kardashian and becoming the founding partner in Kim Kardashian’s wildly successful shapewear brand, Skims.
The expanded version of that outlook can be found in her book, Start with Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life. A combination of memoir and manifesto, it details the strategies that enabled Grede to leave school at 16 and, by 43, be running numerous companies and sitting on the board of the Obama Foundation. She moves between two Los Angeles homes with her husband, Swedish fashion entrepreneur Jens Grede, and their four children, aged from four to 12.
The book grew out of her podcast, Aspire with Emma Grede, in which she talks to Michelle Obama, Gwyneth Paltrow, Meghan Markle and other women. Her 1.4 million Instagram followers will be familiar with her elevator outfit reveals: videos of her emerging from the lift of her LA office, phone in one hand, silver Yeti mug in the other, bag dangling from her arm (Bottega, Chanel, Hermès) as she strides out in heels.
This level of professional polish might seem unfathomable to working women with any children, let alone four. “Listen, people imagine that I found some 25th hour in the day,” she says. “The important conversation is about what I am not doing: I am not cooking; I am not cleaning; I am not answering school emails. I have four nannies, two working at any one time. I have an army of people.”
Another limiting notion, according to Grede, is that it is unseemly for wealth to be a central ambition for women. “I unashamedly put money at the centre of my plans,” she says. “What’s really important is for women to understand that you can do impactful, meaningful work and care about money.”
In addition to “investing in businesses I think wouldn’t otherwise get investment”, Grede is chairwoman of Fifteen Percent Pledge, a charity that urges retail businesses to dedicate 15 per cent of their shelf space to black-owned brands.
Grede grew up with her mother, Jenny-Lee Findlay, who worked on the trading desk at investment bank Morgan Stanley, and her three younger sisters. Her parents separated when she was five and, growing up, her father was not part of her life. “When I was 12, I could cook a roast for six. I did every bit of housework, every bit of washing, helped with homework, went to parents’ evenings ... There was no room to feel sorry for yourself.”
She was not particularly successful academically (she was later diagnosed as dyslexic) but what she did love was fashion. “It was the early ’90s, and because Alexander McQueen was from east London and Kate Moss was from Croydon, it felt reachable.” At 16, Grede got a place at the London College of Fashion. “I saw going to college as a big opportunity, so I left [school],” she says.
Grede dropped out of her course after a couple of terms. She was making money working in retail, which she coupled with work experience at fashion companies. Unlike most people she met in the fashion world, she hadn’t been to university, didn’t have family connections and spoke differently. Someone once told her she sounded like a barrow boy. “I thought, ‘That is so low.’ But my eyes are always on the prize.”
At that point, the “prize” was a job in the fashion industry and earning enough cash to “get to a club on a Friday, to buy all the clothes”. Her first major purchase was a Gucci diamanté thong, which she wore visible above the waistband of her Miss Sixty jeans.
By her late 20s, Grede had a job at Saturday Group, a marketing company founded by Jens Grede and Erik Torstensson. She soon formed her own division within the company. “I’d been doing fashion blogger partnerships and we put together a company that was like an aggregated platform for selling advertising around the early fashion influencers. That then morphed into celebrity.”
This was how she first encountered the Kardashians. “At the time, Kris Jenner was a manager. So when I had a deal that someone wanted one of the girls for, I would call Kris.” When Grede had the idea for Good American, she knew Khloé Kardashian would be the perfect face for it. They made $US1 million in sales on the first day of trading.
Skims, however, was Kim Kardashian’s idea – and Grede leapt at the opportunity. “There’s that great quote: ‘If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat.’ Kim had such conviction, such a clear aesthetic. I would have swept the floors.” The label they launched in 2019 is now valued at $US5 billion and Grede has an estimated 8 per cent stake.
Saturday Group was also, of course, how she met her husband. Grede says that one of the things she told him early in the relationship was, “I do not go backwards in lifestyle.”
But despite all the sumptuous luxury of their homes, she insists she is never wasteful. In the book, she writes that if Jens puts mouldy cheese in the bin, she will fish it out and cut off the mould. “One hundred per cent. I’m such a tight-arse. I am so upset when my husband opens a new milk bottle when one is already open, I could divorce him over it.”
The couple moved to America in 2017 and Grede has no plans to return to the UK, much as she misses crumpets and her mother and sisters. “Post-Brexit, it feels like a needlessly complicated business environment. But I’d be lying if I said America is straightforward right now either.”
Grede describes herself as an “ambitious little monster” who is “hard-wired not to give a f--- what people think of me”. She has endured genuine hardship but has used those experiences to sort of turboboost to her innate drive. “All these buzzwords, like resilience, I think, ‘Are you crazy?’ I was forged in fire. Nothing can touch me.”
One of the toughest periods of Grede’s life was when she found that after having her first two children, she could not conceive again. “You go through the process, try for a year, start the IVF cycle. I did it over and over again. I got pregnant and lost the baby every time. It was heartbreaking, all-consuming.
“It was COVID time, year one of Skims, an intense moment. I could not think about anything else. The idea of surrogacy felt ludicrous. I thought, ‘I’m going to be judged. My family is going to think I’ve moved to LA and lost my mind.’ And then I thought, ‘F--- that. Let me see if this works.’ It worked the first time. I had an incredible surrogate. It was a profound experience.”
It also got her thinking about what she considers the “have it all” falsehoods. “All I’m saying is: don’t feed women lies. Don’t say, ‘Don’t worry. Think about it later. Freeze your eggs.’ I don’t know how many friends you have who have had babies from frozen eggs. I don’t have any, not one.
“We don’t always get to choose the timing. Work is a trade-off; family is also a trade-off. Without having a vision for your life and what you want, you won’t think about family until it might be too late.”
Grede says that she still thinks about earning more money “all the time”, even though there is now nothing she can’t do. “Almost nothing – I mean, I can’t go to space tomorrow. I ain’t got Elon [Musk] money. But then, I’ve zero ambition to go to space.”
If she had, she’d already be there.
Start with Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life (Simon & Schuster) by Emma Grede is out now.
The Times Magazine/News Licensing
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