On April 14, 2026, Emma Grede walked into a Simon & Schuster launch event in Los Angeles holding a copy of her first book, Start With Yourself. The cover photo showed her in a plain white T-shirt, no jewelry, looking straight into the camera. It was a calculated choice from someone who had spent two decades calculating every move. The woman holding that book is a founding partner of SKIMS, which was valued at $5 billion in a November 2025 funding round, co-founded a fashion brand that sold $1 million in denim on its first day, and still describes herself as “the girl from Plaistow who was too dyslexic to finish college.”
Forbes estimated Emma Grede’s net worth at $405 million as of June 3, 2025. That is a dated estimate, not a verified October 2026 total. Her wealth comes mainly from founding stakes in SKIMS and Good American, plus smaller positions in Safely and Off Season.
Last updated: October 2026
How did Emma Grede make her money?
Emma Grede built her fortune by founding or co-founding four consumer brands and retaining meaningful equity in each one. Her wealth didn’t come from a single bet. It came from stacking ownership positions across multiple companies, all within the celebrity-consumer brand network she spent a decade building relationships in.
The biggest piece is SKIMS. Grede is a founding partner and chief product officer of the shapewear brand she co-created with Kim Kardashian in 2019. In its dated profile, Forbes described her stake in SKIMS as roughly three-fourths of her fortune (Forbes, as of June 2025). Separately, an unchanged 8% stake at the November 2025 valuation of $5 billion would imply about $400 million gross on paper, before dilution, discounts and taxes. That is our arithmetic, not a fresh net-worth estimate.
Then there’s Good American, the size-inclusive denim brand she co-founded with Khloe Kardashian in 2016. Wikipedia lists her stake at 23%, and she runs the company as CEO. Good American hit $200 million in annual revenue by 2023. The value of her stake is not disclosed.
Wikipedia reports a 22% stake in Safely, the plant-based cleaning brand she co-founded with Kris Jenner and Chrissy Teigen in 2021. She also launched Off Season with designer Kristin Juszczyk and the NFL’s Fanatics in January 2025. The value of her smaller positions is not disclosed.
Before any of those brands existed, Grede was already building wealth. She co-founded ITB Worldwide, an entertainment marketing agency, in 2008 at age 26. Rogers & Cowan acquired ITB in 2018 for an undisclosed amount.
What is Emma Grede’s stake in SKIMS?
Wikipedia lists Emma Grede’s stake in SKIMS at 8%; we have not verified her current ownership. In November 2025, SKIMS raised $225 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, which valued the company at $5 billion (Reuters).
In that announcement, SKIMS said it was on track to exceed $1 billion in net sales in 2025. Reuters reported it then operated 18 retail stores in the U.S. and two franchise locations in Mexico.
At a $5 billion valuation, an 8% stake would imply roughly $400 million gross on paper (our arithmetic), before dilution, illiquidity discounts and taxes. SKIMS is private, so shares cannot be sold on a public exchange. That is one reason net worth figures for her vary and are only estimates.
Good American and the $1 million first day
Good American sold $1 million worth of denim on its launch day in October 2016. That number gets cited often, but the backstory is what matters for anyone trying to build a consumer brand.
Grede approached Kris Jenner during Paris Fashion Week around 2015 with a pitch: a denim company co-founded with Khloe Kardashian that focused on size inclusivity. At the time, most premium denim brands stopped at size 30 or 32. Grede wanted to go up to size 24 (equivalent to a women’s size 32) and invent a size 15 jean, sitting between the industry-standard 14 and 16, where millions of women fell into a gap that no brand was addressing.
That wasn’t just a marketing angle. It was product strategy. Good American’s size range gave it a built-in audience that traditional denim brands were ignoring. Khloe Kardashian’s following handled awareness. Grede handled everything else: sourcing, operations, pricing, and the partnership structure. Wikipedia reports her stake at 23%; we have not verified the current ownership split.
By 2023, Good American was doing $200 million in annual sales. The brand expanded from denim into swimwear, activewear, shoes, and bodysuits. Grede runs the company day-to-day, making her unusual among celebrity-brand co-founders. Most celebrity partners in fashion are faces. She’s the operator.
Is Emma Grede a billionaire?
Forbes estimated her net worth at $405 million in June 2025. That is a dated estimate, and we have not verified a current total.
For related reading, see our guide to how athletes invest their money.
Forbes ranked Grede #88 on its 2025 list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.
From East London to Bel Air
Emma Findlay Grede was born on September 23, 1982, in Plaistow, a working-class neighborhood in East London. Her mother, Jenny-Lee Findlay, was a white English woman who worked at Morgan Stanley. Her father is Black, of Jamaican and Trinidadian descent. Grede was raised by her mother as a single parent alongside three younger sisters: Charlotte, Rachelle, and Katie-Beth.
She started working as a teenager delivering newspapers and used her earnings to buy copies of Elle and Vogue. Fashion was what she described as her “escapism.” At 16, she enrolled at the London College of Fashion but never completed her degree. She was diagnosed as “super-dyslexic” in her mid-twenties, years after struggling through school without understanding why.
Her early career was a series of roles that put her inside the entertainment and fashion industry without requiring a degree: internships at Gucci, a position at the concierge company Quintessentially, and production work at Inca Productions, which handled fashion shows and events. Each job built the network that would later prove more valuable than any diploma.
In 2008, at 26, she co-founded ITB Worldwide, a London-based talent management and entertainment marketing firm. Over the next decade, she built relationships across the entertainment industry, including with the Kardashian-Jenner family. The terms of the 2018 acquisition by Rogers & Cowan were not disclosed.
She married Jens Grede, a Swedish entrepreneur who co-founded the denim brand Frame. The couple moved to Bel Air in 2017 and have four children. Jens also co-founded SKIMS alongside Emma and Kim Kardashian, making the Gredes one of the most quietly powerful couples in American fashion.
What companies does Emma Grede own?
Wikipedia lists Emma Grede’s equity in four active companies. Current values are undisclosed.
| Company | Role | Reported equity stake | Founded | Current value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SKIMS | Founding Partner, CPO | 8% | 2019 | Undisclosed |
| Good American | Co-Founder, CEO | 23% | 2016 | Undisclosed |
| Safely | Co-Founder | 22% | 2021 | Undisclosed |
| Off Season | Co-Founder | Undisclosed | 2025 | Undisclosed |
Beyond these active companies, Grede exited ITB Worldwide when it was acquired by Rogers & Cowan in 2018. She also serves on the board of the Obama Foundation and chairs the 15 Percent Pledge, a nonprofit that pushed retailers to dedicate 15% of shelf space to Black-owned businesses. By 2022, the Pledge had helped Black business owners generate an estimated $10 billion in revenue.
Her TV work adds visibility but not major income. She appeared as a guest shark on ABC’s Shark Tank in seasons 13, 14, and 15, becoming the first Black woman and first mixed-race woman to invest on the show. She also joined BBC’s Dragons’ Den as a guest dragon in 2024 and co-hosts Side Hustlers on Roku with Ashley Graham, which debuted as the #1 on-demand title on The Roku Channel in March 2024.
What “Start With Yourself” tells us about her playbook
Grede’s book, published by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster on April 14, 2026, isn’t a memoir. It’s a framework book built around what she calls “old thoughts,” the inherited cultural scripts women absorb about ambition, success, money, and work-life balance.
The central argument: most career advice given to women is recycled from a generation that didn’t have the same opportunities or constraints. Grede pushes back on the idea that women need to “lean in” or “have it all” and instead argues for designing a career around your actual priorities, not someone else’s template.
She’s been blunt about this in interviews. She told Newsweek that the career rules holding women back aren’t external barriers but internal beliefs about what they’re supposed to want. She’s called herself a “max 3-hour mom” who is deliberate about how she spends time with her four children rather than trying to maximize total hours.
For founders reading this, the relevant takeaway isn’t the parenting philosophy. It’s the approach to building wealth through equity rather than salary. Grede never chased a high-paying executive role at someone else’s company. Every career move was designed to accumulate ownership positions, starting with ITB and continuing through four brand co-foundings. The book tour was scheduled to run through April 2026.
TIME named her to its Closers 2026 list, and CNBC recognized her as a 2025 Changemaker. The book launch coincides with a period where Grede’s public profile is at its highest point, which is no accident. She’s spent 18 years learning how to time brand moments, and she’s applying that same instinct to her own story.
How old is Emma Grede?
Emma Grede is 44 years old as of October 2026. She was born on September 23, 1982, in Plaistow, East London, and turned 44 on September 23, 2026. By her early 40s, she had co-founded four companies, appeared on two of the biggest investment TV shows in the US and UK, accumulated a net worth that Forbes estimated at $405 million as of June 2025, and published her first book.
