She didn't start with a famous surname or family money. She started with a clear understanding of how the fashion industry works — and who it was ignoring.
Emma Grede grew up in East London. She didn't attend a prestigious fashion school or come from a family with industry connections. She started her career in fashion PR and marketing, working her way up through agencies before founding ITB Worldwide, a brand consultancy and talent management firm. Before she built consumer brands, she spent years understanding how brands are positioned, how celebrity partnerships work commercially, and where the gaps in the market actually were.
The Good American opportunity
In 2016, Emma Grede co-founded Good American with Khloé Kardashian. The brand launched with a single product: denim jeans in an extended size range, from size 00 to 24, photographed on models of different body types. The commercial insight was straightforward but had been largely ignored by the industry: the average American woman is a size 16–18, and the fashion industry was almost entirely designing for and marketing to women significantly smaller than that. Good American's launch was widely reported as generating $1 million in sales on its first day — this figure has been cited in multiple outlets including Forbes and Business of Fashion, though it has not been officially confirmed by the company.
The size-inclusive positioning wasn't just marketing. The jeans were engineered with different cuts, different stretch ratios and different construction to actually fit a wider range of bodies, rather than simply offering larger versions of the same pattern. That technical detail is what made the brand credible rather than opportunistic.
The SKIMS founding partnership
In 2019, Emma Grede became a founding partner of SKIMS, the shapewear and clothing brand co-founded with Kim Kardashian. In 2023, SKIMS raised funding at a reported valuation of $4 billion, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Her role as a founding partner is well-documented; the specific details of her day-to-day operational responsibilities are not consistently reported in primary sources.
What she did differently
She understood the difference between a celebrity partnership and a celebrity brand. Many celebrity-fronted businesses fail because the celebrity is the product, not the business. The approach with both Good American and SKIMS was to use celebrity reach to launch brands with genuine commercial foundations — real products solving real problems for real customers. Both brands have demonstrated they can stand on their own.
She picked underserved markets deliberately. Both brands launched into markets where the existing options were inadequate for a large portion of potential customers. This is a more reliable route to rapid growth than trying to take market share from established brands already serving their customers well.
She built operational expertise before building brands. Years of running a consultancy gave her detailed knowledge of supply chains, brand positioning, retail relationships and marketing mechanics. She wasn't learning those things while also trying to build a business.
The Shark Tank chapter
Emma Grede has appeared as a guest shark on the US version of Shark Tank on multiple occasions. She used a high-visibility platform to build her own brand authority, not just to invest in other businesses. The investments she made on the show were real, but the strategic value of the platform was arguably larger.
Setbacks and challenges
Good American faced criticism in its early years for not going far enough with size inclusivity — some customers felt the brand's marketing outpaced its actual product range. The brand has expanded its range significantly since launch. This is a common tension for brands built on a values-based positioning: the promise has to be backed by the product, and the product has to keep up with the promise.
What a normal small business owner can take from this
You don't have access to the Kardashian network. That's not the lesson. The lesson is: find the customers the market is ignoring and build something that actually works for them. Every industry has underserved segments. The fashion industry ignored plus-size women for decades not because there was no demand, but because the people making decisions weren't those customers. That pattern repeats in almost every sector. The second lesson is about sequencing: build expertise before you build a brand. Grede understood the industry from the inside before she tried to disrupt it.
What can a small business learn from this?
The most durable businesses are often built on a simple observation: a large group of customers is being ignored or poorly served. Emma Grede's career is a case study in finding that gap, building a product that genuinely addresses it, and using operational expertise to execute. The celebrity element is real but secondary — the commercial foundations are what made both businesses last.
Useful next step
If you're building a product-based business, our guide to starting a clothing brand covers many of the principles that apply across physical product categories.
From Business Handbook
