The strongest brands are built to outlast their founders

Much like Adanola, SKIMS is a brand that I’d actively decided to ignore. Between having Kim Kardashian as the founder, endless celebrity campaigns, and the kind of omnipresent social media presence that makes you feel ambushed — I’d decided the business was all vanity metrics, no value. I didn’t think there was any real depth to examine.

Then I did some digging. In November 2025, SKIMS raised $225 million, putting the company at a $5 billion valuation. Going deeper, I found a business projecting over $1 billion in 2025 revenue, running a 37% compound annual growth rate between 2022 and 2024.

Needless to say, I’d made the same mistake most people make with this brand — I’d looked at the surface and assumed I understood what was underneath. Totally happy to admit that I didn’t. And I bet I’m not the only one that dismissed it as a celebrity vanity project.

In this edition of Strong Brand Strong Business, I want to examine the commercial architecture that puts the business on rock-solid foundations — specifically, how CEO Jens Grede has spent six years building a business designed to outlast its most valuable and arguably highest risk asset: Kim Kardashian herself.

What is the real commercial risk of a celebrity-founded brand — and how is SKIMS managing it?

Every business has a dependency it doesn’t want to admit — or talk about. For most founder-led brands it’s the founder’s energy, relationships, or taste. For SKIMS it’s the cultural relevance of one of the most famous women on the planet. And Jens Grede — the CEO who actually runs this business — sought to mitigate this risk from day one.

Understanding what SKIMS has built requires separating two things that most commentary fails to separate: the celebrity engine that acquired the customers, and the commercial architecture that keeps them. That is, the side that gets all the attention, and the side that makes it worth something.

How did SKIMS go from a controversial launch to a $5 billion business in six years?

SKIMS launched on 10 September 2019 — but despite having Kardashian-sized backing, it wasn’t without its teething problems. The brand was originally called Kimono, a choice that triggered backlash for cultural (mis)appropriation of Japanese heritage. Naturally, for one of social media’s most followed profiles, there was a dedicated hashtag: “#KimOhNo”. The mayor of Kyoto personally wrote to Kardashian asking her to reconsider. Within days, Kardashian issued a public apology and announced a full rebrand. Six weeks later, the company launched with the name, “SKIMS”.

A lot of brands wouldn’t survive that level of pre-launch crisis, especially given the speed at which it spread across social media. Fair play to SKIMS for coming out the other side — and the speed at which they recovered tells you something important about the people running it. Grede’s own reflection on the controversy was direct and refreshingly candid. He told The Drum, “We were so tone-deaf”. He acknowledged the mistake, took accountability, and moved on. That pattern of identifying the problem, responding to it structurally, and keeping moving, has been repeated throughout SKIMS’ history to date. It’s the considered, rational lifeblood that mitigates the risks associated with the algorithmic (i.e. irrational and volatile) world of its founder.

The launch featured a tight, 36-piece debut collection which sold out in minutes, generating $2 million in the first ten. The founding insight — that women of all sizes and skin tones were underserved by the shapewear and intimates market — proved itself to be a genuine product gap that Kardashian had identified over years of altering her own clothes. The range ran from XXS to 5XL, making inclusivity part of the core product architecture rather than a superficial marketing exercise.

From there, the growth rocketed. Revenue hit approximately $750M in 2023, and as mentioned earlier, there’s over $1 billion projected for 2025.

Now you’re clear on what’s happened to get SKIMS to where it is today, we can move onto why it matters — commercially — for the brand’s future.

What makes SKIMS different to other celebrity-founded brands?

A $5 billion valuation on the back of a celebrity founder is not inherently impressive. There are plenty of brands that inflate on hype and deflate when the cultural moment passes — even within the Kardashian portfolio. Coty acquired a 51% stake in Kylie Cosmetics for $600 million in 2019, valuing it at $1.2 billion. But it struggled to grow beyond its launch moment — sales declined, Forbes reported the business had been less profitable than publicly claimed, and Kylie Jenner was reportedly dissatisfied with how the brand was being managed under Coty’s ownership. The celebrity hype hadn’t been anchored to the business beneath it.

What’s interesting about SKIMS is the specific set of structural decisions Grede has made to ensure the business doesn’t depend on that hype lasting forever.

What does it mean to build a brand that outlasts its most famous founder?

This is the question that Grede has been focused on answering since before the brand launched. His framing is ambitious yes, but when we move into future sections of this article, you’ll also understand why it’s also worth taking seriously.

The ambitious bit is that he’s compared building SKIMS with Kim Kardashian to Nike building Air Jordan with Michael Jordan — where the athlete is the cultural ignition needed to open doors, but the business has to stand on its own commercial logic to stay in the room. It’s easy to understand why Grede sets the Jordan Brand as the benchmark, given it’s now a $7 billion annual revenue business, even though Michael Jordan hasn’t played professional basketball since 2003.

It’s safe to assume that Grede is making structural decisions that will protect SKIMS when the cultural tailwind eventually slows. At least, that’s what his pattern of decisions suggest — which we’ll be exploring in more detail, next.

How does SKIMS use scarcity as a commercial tool rather than a marketing gimmick?

The limited-edition drop model is often discussed as a marketing tactic. In my view, it’s actually a margin and inventory management decision rolled into one. Limited drops mean products sell through quickly, overstocking risk is minimal, and the perpetual demand signal keeps brand perception elevated — also helping it to maintain price points.

More than 10 million people have been customers, and SKIMS launched its own app and loyalty programme in 2024 — reaching close to 1 million members in its first nine months, with over 15% of the business now running through it. Yes, that means 85% of the business isn’t running through it yet — but it’s still a proprietary customer data asset of over 1 million members, being built independently of any social platform’s algorithm or any celebrity’s cultural moment.

Why is SKIMS making such an aggressive move into physical retail — and what does it reveal about the business?

This is one of the most commercially directional and bullish decisions SKIMS has made, but I’m yet to find commentary that does the business smarts justice. Grede has been candid about why he’s pursuing physical retail in an age where being online-only is considered normal. He told WWD that across the apparel industry, “80% of purchases are done in physical stores” — yet 80% of SKIMS’ own purchases happen online. He’s identified a structural misalignment between where the category customer actually shops and where SKIMS currently captures revenue — and he’s making a deliberate correction. It’s retail 101 of “meet your customer where they are.”

In 2025, SKIMS has a domestic footprint of 18 stores, with 2 franchise stores in Mexico, and a Regent Street flagship in London signed for summer 2026 — making it a neighbour of GymShark, another Gen Z darling.

This is a CEO who has looked at his revenue distribution, identified where the growth is being left on the table, and has the neck to invest in capturing it. In my mind, the retail rollout is a commercial decision, rather than a vanity “let’s be everywhere” one.

Are SKIMS’ partnerships marketing coups or genuine capability exchanges?

Most coverage of the NikeSKIMS partnership — announced in February 2025 and launched in September 2025 — treats it as a marketing story. Understandable, given we had two big names, wrapped up in a big campaign, broadcast as a big social-media fuelled moment. After seeing many, many brand collabs, it can get a bit boring. But in this instance, the commercial logic is pretty interesting.

From SKIMS’ side, they’re getting access to Nike’s performance technology, manufacturing capabilities, and development infrastructure in activewear — a category where SKIMS has no heritage or supply chain credibility.

For Nike, they’re getting cultural access to a female consumer it has consistently struggled to convert — about 40% of Nike’s customers are women, in a category where Lululemon, Alo Yoga, and Vuori have built deep loyalty Nike has been unable to match… but needs to, to offset financial headwinds of its own.

So from a collab perspective, both brands are acquiring something structural, not just trading a shared news opportunity. Grede has been explicit that NikeSKIMS is, “More than a collaboration — it’s a new brand” — hence the previously mentioned parallel with Jordan Brand. Nike did pretty well out of the gates: it’s share price lifted 6.2% the day the partnership was announced, adding $6.7 billion in market value.

How did Grede build a leadership structure that separates creative direction from commercial execution?

SKIMS’ founding structure is deliberate and this is part of how it’s become such a solid business. Where Kardashian holds creative direction, Grede holds the commercial engine, and Emma Grede — Jens’ wife and co-founder — serves as Chief Product Officer. According to The Robin Report, Kardashian is “unbelievably involved every single day in making the product experience exactly what she wants it to be”, while Grede’s role is to facilitate and commercialise that vision.

Personally, I think this sets SKIMS apart because this isn’t a celebrity lending her name and letting someone else do the dirty work… but it’s also not a founder running a business without commercial discipline. Rather, the creative and commercial functions are separated by design — which means neither oversteps the other.

And Grede isn’t a random choice either — he brings a specific track record to that role. Before SKIMS he co-founded luxury brand Frame, built and sold a marketing agency to BBDO, and runs Brady — Tom Brady’s athletic wear line — in parallel. He’s a proven commercial operator who specifically chose this opportunity, not a fashion industry insider who stumbled into it and figured he’d ride the celebrity wave.

What does SKIMS’ move away from paid social reveal about how they think about commercial sustainability?

It’s already clear that SKIMS considers merchandising, marketing and product to work as a system, rather than in silos. And I want to specifically address how this presents itself in the social media strategy — it’s one of the most ballsy decisions (technical term) in the brand’s recent history.

As the business has matured, Grede has pulled back from paid social — describing the cost-to-effectiveness equation as broken. He’s said, “The cost of paid social has gone up so substantially over the past few years while the effectiveness is down trending”. Granted, this might be partly because Kim has enough organic reach that they don’t need to pay, but it’s still an exceptionally confident move in today’s discovery landscape.

In its place, SKIMS has moved toward out-of-home, earned media through high-impact cultural moments — the 2024 Team USA Olympics partnership being the clearest example, generating brand status that no paid campaign budget could have replicated.

Summarised in a single sentence, SKIMS’ focus for social media is to drive shareable, peer-to-peer growth that compounds, as opposed to push marketing that doesn’t.

Is SKIMS prepared for the age of agentic commerce — or is it waiting to see what happens?

We can’t discuss SKIMS — as a future-focused, intentional brand — without considering how it’s using AI to support its operations, and what it’s doing to actively prepare for agentic commerce.

On the operational side, SKIMS is already using AI in ways that directly protect its commercial architecture. It has partnered with Altana, a supply chain AI platform, to map and monitor its supplier network in real time — “to ensure ethical and sustainable production across all of its extended supplier networks.” My personal perspective is that this has been a clear move to retain favour from its 70% Gen Z and Millennial customer base — a cohort that demands transparency around operational ethics and associated marketing claims. Separately, even back in March 2024, its VP of Strategic Operations Nina Khoury was already speaking publicly about using AI agents for demand forecasting and personalisation, and even experimenting with autonomous robots in its fulfilment centres. It’s fair to say that SKIMS isn’t using AI to make headlines — just like every other structural decision Grede has made, it’s about pulling relevant levers to make the business as strong as possible.

Then there’s the agentic commerce question. In the US, SKIMS is now enabled for ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout — an OpenAI agentic commerce feature powered by Stripe, where an AI agent can complete a purchase on behalf of a consumer without them leaving the chat interface. It’s going to be interesting to see whether this supports the brand’s growth and market share — the extent to which searches will be pre-branded, or whether ChatGPT will actively recommend SKIMS as an option — or whether it’ll simply adjust where its existing customer base converts, if users already buy SKIMS and want a shorter path to purchase.

Looking ahead, I believe it’s going to get more interesting for a company such as SKIMS that is also on an aggressive physical retail push. The Regent Street store and the increasing domestic store network look different through this lens of both agentic shopping as a growth opportunity, and offline shopping as an engagement opportunity. SKIMS is actively de-risking itself from being entirely at the mercy of whatever algorithm or agent sits between it and the customer. Instead, it’s ensuring it’s a brand with physical presence, tactile product experience, and the kind of earned advocacy that an AI can’t manufacture.

In a world of increasing digital efficiency, it’s investing in human connection — perhaps forecasting that it will become the scarcest and most valuable commercial asset of all. Whether that was Grede’s explicit intention or a case of the stars aligning, the outcome is the same: SKIMS is building on both sides of the equation with AI in the infrastructure, and human experience at the front end.

What would Jens Grede ask about your business?

Nobody can replicate SKIMS’ founding conditions of the cultural platform, the celebrity distribution, the specific product gap that existed in 2019. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t learn structural logic worth borrowing — and use it as inspiration when navigating the gap between what drives business growth today and what sustains it long-term.

One: What is the most dangerous dependency in your business — and are you managing it or ignoring it? Every business has an asset that is simultaneously its biggest advantage and its biggest risk. For SKIMS it’s Kim Kardashian. For most founder-led businesses it’s the founder themselves — their relationships, their reputation, and their energy. The question you need to ask is less about whether the dependency exists (it does), and more about whether you’re building infrastructure around it that doesn’t require it to last forever.

Two: Where is the structural misalignment between where your revenue comes from and where your customer actually wants to engage? SKIMS found its 80/80 inversion of physical and online sales, and is making a deliberate architectural correction. Most businesses have a version of this misalignment and haven’t identified it clearly enough to take action. Finding it and acting on it is what differentiates a marketing-dependent brand from a commercially sound business.

Three: Are your partnerships strengthening your infrastructure, or just generating a news cycle? The test is simple: what does each party have after the campaign ends that they didn’t have before? If the answer is good PR, it’s a marketing play. If the answer is new capability, it’s a commercial investment.

SKIMS is not a finished story — it’s been front and centre at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games as the official Team USA underwear and loungewear sponsor again, and its retail expansion is being stress-tested in real time. Concurrent with that, NikeSKIMS is still proving itself as a standalone business, and the IPO question — which Grede has acknowledged but not committed to — will eventually force a level of public scrutiny and disclosure that the brand hasn’t faced before.

From my perspective, I don’t think that the dependency question will ever fully resolve. We can’t ignore that Kim Kardashian is 44, and there’s a new generation of cultural figures. It’s a harsh reality that she has a level of cultural relevance that doesn’t last forever, and no amount of structural, commercial architecture fully eliminates that risk.

But what Grede has built is real: a proprietary customer database, a retail network, a manufacturing partnership with Nike, a leadership structure that separates creative from commercial, and an earned media model that doesn’t depend on paid social. None of these things require Kim Kardashian to be culturally dominant in 2030 for SKIMS to still be a billion-dollar business. This what building a brand that can outlast its founder looks like.

Strong brands. Strong businesses. Strong people. That’s the only architecture that holds.