Origin Story

Emma, Jens’s business and life partner, brought him into the Kardashian orbit. After she met Kim’s mother, Kris Jenner, through her fashion PR and marketing work with The Wednesday Agency Group, Emma helped Khloé launch her Good American denim brand. The couple got closer to the Kardashian clan after moving to Los Angeles in 2015 from the U.K., Emma’s homeland and Swedish-born Jens’ adopted country.

“When I met Kim and she showed me what her early ideas around SKIMS were, I wasn’t looking for a project,” Jens said. “I had no interest in starting another business, but when I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. I just had a gut feeling that what she was showing me was something that I had to help bring to reality.”

In those early days, he sensed an opportunity to disrupt the women’s undergarment space, dominated by Victoria’s Secret and a handful of department store brands that were all trending downwards. “It was a very stale market that was ripe for disruption, and Kim felt the same way,” he said. They put their heads together to develop the concept over some three years and launched SKIMS online as an exclusive direct-to-consumer brand in September 2019. It proved to be an opportune time to introduce the brand, as the pandemic’s store closures forced people to shop online, and it gave SKIMS an early opportunity to expand horizontally beyond shapewear into loungewear.

The brand’s DNA was centered around size and color inclusivity, offering a much wider range of matching skin tones than other undies brands. It also leveraged Kardashian’s social media following by dropping limited new product releases within a narrow time window, resulting in FoMO sellouts that often occurred within 24 hours.

Ready for Disruption

In calculating SKIMS’ upstart opportunity, Grede observed that “Big brands, like Victoria’s Secret, tend to be too focused on what they are doing, not necessarily what the customer needs. They also tend to be less innovative and develop more slowly in response to what’s happening in customers’ lives.”

He tips his hat toward the innovation that Spanx introduced into shapewear, “They make a wonderful product,” he said. But, Grede believed that advances in fabric technology could offer more comfort into the category. He also saw an opportunity to evolve traditional shapewear, which was designed to compress and contain, in garments that accentuate and celebrate the female form, as most effectively modeled by Kim.  “We don’t want to live in a world where there’s only one option,” he said. “We saw an opportunity to cater to a different customer who needed something slightly different from our product.”

Kardashian is the brand’s guiding force, as well as creative director. “She’s unbelievably involved every single day in making the product experience exactly what she wants it to be, and my role is more to facilitate that,” Grede said. The company has achieved a comfort level in shapewear unmatched by any other brand through an innovative blend of quality fabrication and knitting techniques that provide for four-way stretch.

SKIMS has followed the same rigorous design philosophy it applied to shapewear to expand into a wide range of products, including women’s bras and panties, loungewear, swimwear, sleepwear, socks and slippers, activewear, and men’s underwear, as well as tanks and tees.

Major Milestones

Through foure investment rounds – , the most recent led by Goldman Sachs netted $225 million – , SKIMS  just reached a $5 billion valuation, a remarkable feat after less than five years in operation, that puts it on equal footing  with Victoria’s Secret.

Even more remarkable, SKIMS only opened its first store in June 2024 in the Georgetown area of D.C., followed by flagship locations on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood and Fifth Avenue in New York City. By comparison, Victoria’s Secret operates just under 800 stores.

SKIMS now has branded stores in major U.S. cities and Mexico City, as well as several outlet mall locations. It has just opened its largest store to date, at 8,000 square feet, in Bloomington’s Mall of America, and has plans to expand to London’s Regent Street in 2026, with Dubai following.

SKIMS has also forged wholesale relationships with Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. Most recently, it launched a high-profile partnership with Nike under the NikeSKIMS banner. Unlike short-term collaborations, NikeSKIMS will operate as a Nike sub-brand, along the lines of its best-selling Jordan Brand.

“NikeSKIMS is more than a collaboration, it’s a new brand redefining activewear. With this launch, we are establishing a platform to grow NikeSKIMS, reach consumers worldwide and set a new benchmark for how activewear is experienced across retail, digital and cultural touch points,” said Grede.

SKIMS is reported to have broken the $1 billion mark in revenues last year, after nearly doubling revenues since 2022, according to Seeking Alpha. Despite rumors that SKIMS is planning an IPO soon, Grede says the company is in no hurry to go into the public market. “We have never made a decision to go public. All I’ve ever said, and maybe that was a mistake, was that at some point we deserve to be a public company,” he shared with WWD. But he added, “We have institutional investors, so of course, at some point, we need to offer them optionality. But we have long-term investors. They’re incredibly supportive of our journey. And I think as people, both of us would say we are enjoying our time right now. We might make that position in the future, but that’s not what I’m thinking about.”

Radical Results

While it is impossible to put a value on Kim Kardashian’s influence on SKIMS’ overwhelming success, few other celebrity brands have achieved what SKIMS has in six short years.:

• Rihanna’s Fenty brands (Beauty and Savage x Fenty) come closest, valued at around $4 billion.
• Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty has an estimated $1.3 billion valuation; it generated less than $400 million in 2023, according to Forbes.
• Sister Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics, in partnership with Coty, is reportedly worth approximately $1.2 billion.
• Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand, Rhode, was acquired by e.l.f. Beauty for $800 million with the potential for another $200 million payout.
• Other celeb brands trail far behind. Jessica Alba’s Honest Company is valued at $550 million, and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop at $250 million.

Grede understands the power Kardashian plays in SKIMS’ success: “Kim is for an influencer generation,” he said, noting that Nike’s Jordan Brand started that way in 1997, while Michael Jordan was still in the NBA. However, the Jordan Brand continues to grow long after his retirement. It holds the number three spot in sneaker brand market share after Nike and Adidas this year.

Under Grede’s leadership, SKIMS is playing the long game to leverage Kardashian’s cultural capital into a sustainable lifestyle brand and ongoing business. To do that, he keeps focused on the customer and his or her needs, informed by pop culture trends, but not held hostage to them. “It’s not that a brand comes along and then the world shifts or mobilizes around the brand. It’s far more common that the changes are happening and the brand is in the right place at the right time. They say luck is where opportunity meets preparation,” he observed.

Being prepared for the next opportunity is what Grede focuses on, and in true merchant fashion, he believes, “Product is omnipotent. It’s number one, two and three, and everything else we do is just to aid awareness and sell the product.” He follows a traditional retail playbook, ensuring SKIMS provides the right product at the right price in the right places. He describes himself as an objective person who doesn’t get emotionally involved in the decision-making.

Yet, he is acutely aware that customers must feel emotionally connected to the brand for it to keep growing, and he leans into that with emotional intensity. “A lot of founders are in love with their own product, and spend a lot of time wanting to convince everyone why their product is the best in the world, rather than letting people tell them what they think about what they make. So out of the gate, we created a very strong feedback loop with our own community. We didn’t want to lose ourselves in our own house,” he said.

“We’re seeing this fundamental shift in our economy and in capital, from the old economy to the new economy. I truly believe that a brand has to reflect the values of its people. And I think for too long in corporate America, we made the distinction between our beliefs, the company’s beliefs and our customers’ views. I believe that the values of our business should be the values of us, as people. I aim to eliminate the sense of a corporate veil between the customer and the brand. That builds trust, and once you have a customer’s trust, they’re very loyal, super-retentive,” he concluded. That alone makes Grede and SKIMS an iconoclastic Retail Radical.

About the Retail Radicals

The 2025 Crave Retail Radicals Awards include Le Bon Marché, Build-A-Bear Workshops, Pacsun, SKIMS and Sprouts. For the past seven years, we have identified radical thinkers and doers (innovators and entrepreneurial leaders) driving major transformations within their respective retail brands. In a marketplace that is defined by transactions and risk-avoidance, these five retailers have bucked the trend and are helping to transform the industry by rewriting the rules of retail by being bold and brave. Each is a role model for keeping retail relevant and vibrant, and exceeding expectations experientially and financially.