The minds behind Skims and Good American: Who are Jens and Emma Grede?

Celebrity brands are not a new phenomenon, yet in the present day, their size rivals traditional conglomerates, competing through scalable models fuelled by the monetisation of star power and social influence.

Husband-and-wife team Jens and Emma Grede have become major players in this world, operating behind the scenes to prove that reach and relevance can be just as valuable as leather and legacy. Their holding company, Popular Culture, isn’t solely positioned as a celebrity brand investment platform. The entrepreneurial couple have instead designed a system that turns cultural moments into scalable businesses, offering a blueprint for how influence can become infrastructure.

Who are the Gredes?

Emma, the daughter of a single mother, grew up in East London. After exiting education at 16 due to financial challenges, she entered the workforce through placements. In an interview with Elle last year, Emma explained how broad exploration during this period led her to a job that allowed her to leverage her negotiation skills. By age 26, she founded Independent Talent Brand (ITB) Worldwide, a talent management and entertainment marketing agency funded by Saturday Group, the firm owned by Jens Grede.

Swedish-born Jens co-founded the fashion marketing agency in 2003 alongside business partner Erik Torstensson. In 2012, the duo also launched Los Angeles-based Frame, a denim brand with fair practices at the core. This same year, Jens and Emma married and continued to build on their respective fashion ventures. That was until 2016, when the couple sought to shift focus to more lucrative ventures after Jens offloaded Saturday Group and Emma stepped down from ITB.

Before ITB was acquired in 2018, Emma was already pitching her idea for a size-inclusive denim brand to the Kardashians, eventually partnering with Khloé Kardashian to launch Good American in 2016. This laid the groundwork for the Gredes’ long-term relationship with the famous family, seeing Emma and Jens eventually go on to co-found Skims with Kim Kardashian, Safely with Kris Jenner, and most recently Kylie Jenner’s Khy brand.

Case study: The Skims success story

Skims itself has transcended celebrity status to become a real, lasting business. Prior to inception, when Emma was building the foundations of Good American, Kim Kardashian had approached the couple with an idea Jens was motivated to make a reality. In conversation with The Robin Report, Jens spoke of wanting to disrupt the women’s underwear space, which at the time was largely dominated by Victoria’s Secret.

Unlike competitors, who Jens said were less focused on customer needs, the Skims concept, developed over three years before launching in 2019, was to have innovation at the core of product development. Comfortable shapewear was an idea that had only briefly been explored, but at Skims it became a priority through the integration of technologically-advanced materials. The company has since expanded into loungewear, swimwear, bras, sleepwear, socks, activewear, and men’s underwear, meeting the customer at almost every point of their life.

How that product is then rolled out to consumers is another factor in Skims’ success. The brand’s launch came at a prime time, ahead of the pandemic when homebound shoppers were digitally seeking activewear and loungewear while socially-distancing. Though this landscape provided a boost in the early days, the brand’s weekly drops and different scarcity mechanics have ensured long-lasting performance. The launch of the Soft Lounge Slip Dress in 2021, for example, drew in a waiting list of 46,000 people, serving as both a marketing stunt, and a means to collect pre-order data from customers.

“Skims didn’t build a brand, it built an audience, and it kept them in this constant state of anticipation,” John Samuel, partner and managing director in the Fashion practice of AlixPartners told FashionUnited. The format of a weekly drop model “doesn’t just create urgency, it creates a live-demand signal before inventory is committed”, Samuel added. This allows Skims to retain low inventory levels, notable at a time when overstock is becoming an increasing pain point for retailers. “Skims’ repeat customer rate sits at around 50 percent, while traditional legacy retailers are still working through markdowns from last season and have inventory issues,” Samuel added.

In figures, Skims’ success is clear. In 2025, the brand finalised its fourth investment round, securing 225 million dollars in funding that brought its valuation to five billion dollars. The company also reportedly surpassed one billion dollars in revenue last year, nearly double that of 2022. Heightened performance coincides with a physical retail expansion. Since opening its first store in the US in 2024, Skims now operates 22 stores in the region, and has ventured further afield with a store in Mexico and additional locations due to launch in the UAE and UK.

The establishment of Popular Culture

There is no doubt that Skims is a huge part of the Gredes portfolio, which, combined, exceeds several billion dollars. Yet, much of their progress has also been reliant on their distinctive approach to business. While other management groups focus on licensing or buy-and-build models, the Gredes focus on retaining significant equity and operational control over brands by serving as founding partners.

The breadth of their portfolio is also expansive, spanning various market segments;

• Skims: Kim Kardashian retains a 35 percent stake in the shapewear business. Combined, the Gredes are understood to hold just under 14 percent stake. Emma serves as chief product officer, while Jens is chief executive officer.
• Good American: Co-founded with Khloé Kardashian, Emma is the chief executive officer and maintains an estimated 23 percent stake in the brand.
• Frame: The lifestyle label co-founded by Jens is reported to be less valuable compared to other ventures. The Gredes’ stake in the business is not publicly disclosed.
• Off Season: A newer venture launched in 2025 focusing on fashion-forward sports apparel. It was co-founded in partnership with Kristin Juszczyk, who went viral online for her NFL-inspired designs.
• Khy: The Gredes’ stake in Kylie Jenner’s clothing brand has not been publicly disclosed, though the couple are described as co-founders and investors alongside Jenner.
• Safely: Emma Grede holds a 22 percent stake in a plant-based cleaning and self-care brand she launched with Kris Jenner and Chrissy Teigen in 2021. Jens is also listed as a partner.

To consolidate these business ventures, the Gredes established their holding company, Popular Culture, in 2020. While the platform relies heavily on ‘celebrity brands’ – sometimes deemed inauthentic, low-quality, and disconnected – Jens has previously affirmed, in conversation with Puck, that the ‘celebrity’ status is utilised simply as a marketing tool, and that his focus remains on product, quality and consumer needs. Grede emphasises that a product must stand on its own, noting to The Guardian that “talent can bring you to a product once, but you don’t come back time and time again”.

The Grede model leverages a direct-to-consumer feedback loop, in which real-time data is used to predict demand and, in turn, manage inventory. “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,” Jens told The Robin Report.

This format was established over just six years, a far-cry from the centuries-old fashion conglomerates that have assembled global portfolios through acquisitions, compounding their heritage on heritage. Popular Culture’s leaner setup – a founding partner approach and shared infrastructure – also strays from operating models adopted by major industry players that are built on licensing, like Authentic Brands Group – “a master class in asset collection”, Samuel said of the group.

Popular Culture’s format is slightly rarer, Samuel notes, “clipping the royalty ticket” as opposed to leveraging licensees, which could be one step away from breaking down in value. This essentially makes the Gredes strategic architects, “bringing the infrastructure, supply chain, intelligence, the content strategy, the cultural relationships, under one umbrella,” Samuel said.

Such a system has also allowed Popular Culture to establish an effective pricing strategy, another area where many retailers fall flat. “Many [retailers] are pricing on instinct and not insight,” Samuel notes, “and that approach leaves margin exposed. Especially when consumer behaviour is in flux.” According to Samuel, brands leading the race are combining competitive data, assortment signals and price elasticity models – which track how sensitive consumers are to price changes – to understand where the consumer is willing to spend more, as opposed to across the board.

From Samuel’s perspective, Popular Culture is running a real world version of this elasticity analysis across its portfolio. Each brand it operates exists within a distinct pricing category, which is integral to a digitally-native, culturally-fluent consumer. “[This consumer has] watched luxury brands raise their prices by 20 to 30 percent post-pandemic, and now they’re making very deliberate decisions about where they spend disposable income, and where their identities are signalled.”

“You can see Emma’s operating fingerprints on a lot of brands in the portfolio, from the inclusive-sizing revolution at Good American to the way they’ve designed the pricing and product architecture at Skims,” Samuel explains. “It’s not just a licensing arrangement, it’s a shared platform. The celebrity isn’t the entry point, the operating system is their defensible asset. Authentic buys the name above the door, Popular Culture builds everything inside the house.”

What comes next?

With a proven blueprint in hand, the Gredes’ next challenge is longevity. Their recent moves signal a strategic 'de-risking' of the portfolio, shifting Popular Culture away from its heavy reliance on the Kardashian-Jenner machine to ensure the group can thrive as a talent-agnostic platform. Samuel notes that the company needs to prove its platform works without Kim in every campaign, particularly as Skims pursues a potential IPO, slated for 2027.

Requiring the reality star and entrepreneur to retain a celebrity status forever is not as convincing for an IPO story, Samuel elaborates, making it a bet that needs to transition into a sustainable business model. The couple are therefore focused on building broader brand value while maintaining these already successful partnerships.

Recent reports have speculated that Emma is slowly separating to build a “self-made, personal” brand, shifting perception through individual ventures, like her own podcast. Rumours began circulating last year about Emma potentially exiting the Kardashian-fronted businesses entirely, though whether there is truth to these reports is yet to be determined.

Jens, meanwhile, is submerging himself further into the Hollywood talent scene. In June last year, it was revealed that Jens was becoming a board member of the United Talent Agency, a Beverly Hills-based global talent agency representing artists across music, theatre, film, sports, and content creation. Samuel said Jens’ appointment “connects Popular Culture directly to the talent pipeline that will power the next generation's brand anchor deals”.

The decision to back designer-led, luxury cashmere label, The Elder Statesman, further points to “a deliberate transition from a talent-dependent model to a talent-agnostic platform”. “That distinction matters enormously in a public market, particularly one in which Skims has already secured significant funding rounds that have valued the company at five billion dollars,” Samuel said.

At the crux of it, the Grede family and Popular Culture want to lean into the ongoing industry-wide pivot from the old economy to the new economy, in which brand values need to more closely reflect that of the consumer. Summarising his mission to The Robin Report, Jens said: “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.”