Emma Grede: the real mastermind of the Kardashian empire

Illustration by Andy Bunday

Who is the mastermind of the Kardashian empire? Familiar characters spring to mind: the matriarch “mom-ager”, Kris Jenner; perhaps Kim, who takes credit for her family’s fame. Maybe the simplest answer is reality TV. Maybe even Instagram.

But should we be thinking of Emma Grede? The 42-year-old east London-born entrepreneur is the woman behind some of the family’s most lucrative ventures in the past decade. She is a co-founder of Kris’s cleaning product company, Safely, and Khloe’s inclusive denim line, Good American, where she also serves as chief executive. She is a founding partner, as well as chief product officer, of Kim’s shapewear and clothing brand, Skims. In 2023, she became a founding investor in Kylie Jenner’s clothing line, Khy.

Grede has been quietly but intimately involved in the family’s reputational transformation that has taken them from “trashy reality stars” to serious businesswomen. These businesses aren’t just PR gambits either: Good American is valued at $3bn (£2.3m) and Skims at $4bn as of 2023. As of last May, Grede’s own net worth is $390m.

Her ascent is something she frames as a rags-to-riches story. She has described her upbringing as “really poor”, growing up in Plaistow as the oldest of four daughters to immigrant parents from Jamaica and Trinidad, raised from a young age solely by her mother. Despite her story of struggling to pay bills, she says her drive comes from her mother – who, in fact, worked on Morgan Stanley’s Swiss trading desk.

She says she always had the “gift of the gab”, trying to sell products to teachers at her comprehensive school, and always looking for new ways to make money. “I was born that way,” she said on the Trading Secrets podcast this month. “My entire career started from that place of being a hungry little monster. Being a little hustler and leaning into whatever opportunity was in front of me.”

Grede left school for the London College of Fashion at 16, dropping out to join luxury concierge service and lifestyle management company Quintessentially. By 26, she had started her own business, Independent Talent Brand (ITB) Worldwide, a talent management and marketing agency.

Compared with the other young entrepreneurs coming out of the UK, Grede has a down-to-earth warmth and no-bullshit attitude, which makes her relatable and fun to listen to. This careful communication may be the main secret behind Grede’s rich portfolio. “If I have a superpower,” she said on Trading Secrets, “it’s understanding what women, girls, people need and how much they want to pay for it.”

Until recently, fans of the KarJenners would have known Grede through brief appearances on The Kardashians TV show, but in the last year she has begun to cement herself as a celebrity in her own right. She has made headlines for her comments on things like work-life balance and working from home, guest-starring on Dragon’s Den and this month launching her own podcast, Aspire, interviewing other entrepreneurs such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Michael Rubin.

This week, Skims announced its first bricks-and-mortar store outside the US – a 10-year lease on London’s Regent Street, set to open next summer. In February, she was named as one of CNBC’s Changemakers, which celebrates women who are transforming business, coming off the heels of a three-year streak as one of Forbes’ richest self-made women in America.

Last month, it was announced that Grede had also joined the Obama Foundation’s board of directors. “[She was] a very impressive person,” Ben Elliot, a co-founder of Quintessentially and the former chairman of the Conservative party tells me. “She was very dynamic and driven.”

That attitude is what led Grede to approach Kris Jenner at Paris fashion week about creating a denim line with Khloe Kardashian. Her husband, Jens Grede, a co-founder of Skims and the company’s chief executive, is also the founder of Frame, a luxury denim outlet, leading her to the idea.

Both Gredes are heavily involved in the family’s businesses (Jens is also a founding investor of Khy) and now live in a Kardashian-esque Bel-Air mansion with their four children. Grede credits her relationship with Jens – who grew up in Sweden as the child of an artist and a film director – for helping her to flourish – having someone by her side who understands her and can also pick up the slack on childcare.

“It’s not just about love,” she told podcaster Steven Bartlett. “It’s about someone who sees your talent even before you do.”

Good American and Skims have also made it big by championing inclusivity, a personal trademark of Grede’s. She is chairwoman of The Fifteen Percent Pledge, a charity that works with retailers to dedicate 15% of their monthly budget to Black-owned businesses. She was also the first Black investor on the US Dragon’s Den counterpart, Shark Tank.

Likability is also why Grede can parrot the same controversial ideas as her more prominent counterparts without getting the same level of blowback. After wading into the work-life balance debate many times since February – arguing that to have an extraordinary career, not just a successful one, you will need to make sacrifices – she received minimal backlash compared with the flak that followed Molly-Mae Hague’s pronouncement that “we all have the same 24 hours in a day”. (You get the sense, however, that doggedly repeating this idea is also a bid by Grede for virality.)

Grede’s intelligence, empathy and humour means she flies comparatively under the radar. It’s easy to forget that she’s an extremely wealthy celebrity and hypervigilant businesswoman. (I was reminded of this when her PR team got word of this profile and sent several concerned emails, asking whether the piece would be “celebratory”.)

But how much of Grede’s success is down to her expertise, rather than the names fronting her brands? As one fashion communications executive told me: “Kim Kardashian could market a bucket of vomit and people would want to buy it.”

“Emma undoubtedly steers the ship, but from a marketing point of view, for consumers, Kim is Skims,” says Rebecca Stewart, brand editor at Adweek. “If you want to put a number on Kim’s pull … within 24 hours of the Nike x Skims announcement, Nike’s share price rose 6.2%, adding $6.7bn to its market value.

So is it Grede or is it the Kardashians? Recent moves suggest that Grede is eager to answer that question. Done with the role of the background schemer, she appears ready to step into the spotlight.

“I have such a high value on how much I care about what I think,” she told Bartlett. “What other people think just pales into insignificance for me.”