The Journal. Sep 20, 2026 24m 11m saved
With Emma Grede, Co-Founder and CEO of Good American and Founding Partner of Skims
Forbes put Emma Grede's net worth at $405 million last year. Told the number on stage, she said Forbes had missed a bit.
Most advice aimed at women in business is about confidence. Grede's argument is narrower and more commercial: men talk about money constantly and specifically, women do not, and the gap between those two habits shows up in what each group gets paid.
"And what happens when you avoid conversations around money is that the money avoids you."
Emma Grede, Co-Founder and CEO of Good American, on The Journal, started in fashion production working for European houses, moved to the US because that is where the money was, built two brands with the Kardashians as business partners rather than endorsers, sits on the boards of companies she owns pieces of, and employs several hundred people.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 24 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 principles that matter.
Key Takeaways
Celebrity is an accelerator, not a business: it buys visibility, and only product quality brings a customer back
She says more celebrity brand partnerships have failed than have worked
The money is in the customer everybody else treats as an afterthought — the plus-size range that gets the last 15% of a line's attention
She does not look at trend forecasts or fashion week, because the products that built her companies did not exist to be forecast
Women hold the household's purchasing power and still get the oversized t-shirt at the stadium, which she calls a large commercial opening
The hard part of fan apparel is the league licensing, which costs money but mostly takes effort most companies will not spend
Men talk about money constantly and specifically; women do not, and she says that gap ends up in what each group earns
Asked about the $405M Forbes number, she said the valuations are not what she cares about — the path to ownership is
"Manifesting" is not a business plan, and she says the same story is never told about men
She is a max three-hour mom and will not apologize for it, because the guilt is inherited rather than earned
The better question is what she does not do, not how many hours she spends with her children
1. One Golden Goose In 10 Years
This was recorded at a live show in New York the week before it aired, in front of an audience, during New York Fashion Week. The first question was where the money in fashion is going now.
Grede answered by way of her own route into the business. She started on the production side in Europe and spent a decade wondering where the profit actually sat.
She learned the business from production, and could not find the money in it
I started my career in production, working for the great and the good of the European fashion business.
Emma Grede
So she moved to the market that had the money
So decided to come to America where the money was and sort it out with feverish intention.
Emma Grede
Good American is approaching its tenth anniversary, and she said the striking thing looking back is how many companies came and went in the same window, and how many things she started before and between.
One business out of many became the outlier
And you get this kind of one golden goose moment, which for me has been really around skims.
Emma Grede
2. Partners, Not Endorsers
Asked about building companies with the Kardashians as partners rather than as faces, Grede rejected the framing that it is a distinction you choose. The failures, she said, are the businesses built on the assumption that fame plus a product equals a brand.
Most celebrity brand partnerships do not work
I think we can all count way more businesses that have failed than have succeeded.
Emma Grede
What fame buys is attention, and that is all it buys
Talent can be an incredible accelerator to popularity, to visibility.
Emma Grede
The host suggested that makes it marketing. Grede would not accept the reduction, and drew the line at what the partner has to be capable of doing.
A following is not a qualification for partnership
But to make a real product work, you need a business partner. And if you're going into a partnership, the partnership has to equate to more than somebody's following.
Emma Grede
3. The Overlooked 15%
Asked how much of the outcome was the partner, the product or the timing, Grede said timing decides it, and that her method is to look for the space the rest of the industry has neglected.
Timing is the variable that decides the rest
I think the timing is everything.
Emma Grede
Her example is the plus-size market as it stood when Good American launched in 2016, before the industry had the vocabulary it uses now. Most brands, she said, design the main line and then bolt on an extension.
The extended range gets the leftover attention
And here's this extra 15% that we're going to put no thought into.
Emma Grede
Serving that customer properly is what she says built the loyalty, and loyalty is the part celebrity cannot supply.
Fame delivers the first purchase; the product delivers the rest
As celebrity talent can drive you to a product once, but it can't keep customers coming back over and over again. Only fierce loyalty for an excellent product can do that.
Emma Grede
4. She Does Not Watch Trends
Asked how she decides what will sell, Grede said the question does not describe how she works.
Fashion week and trend reports are not inputs for her
We're not looking at fashion week. I'm not looking at trends.
Emma Grede
Her argument is that the products that made her companies could not have come off a trend report, because they did not exist as categories.
Nobody forecasts a product that has not been invented
No one can tell you to make one-legged shapewear or a bra with a nipple on it. Those things didn't exist. They were innovations.
Emma Grede
She allows that iterating on last year's sellers is a real part of running a fashion business. It is being led by it that she says kills companies.
Following is a survivable habit, until it isn't
But if that's how you're led, you will die pretty quickly.
Emma Grede
5. The Gap In Fan Apparel
The host raised Off Season, the sports apparel brand Grede runs with the designer Kristin Juszczyk, and said her own household is a New York Jets household and the site carries less Jets merchandise than Eagles or 49ers. Grede's answer treated it as a question about how the assortment gets built: every business, she said, is part math and science and part art.
Then she set out why the category interested her at all.
The stands are full of women, and the merchandise is not designed for them
and yet you look around the stands and the customer and the fans that are there, it's full of women. And women hold all of the purchasing power for the rest of their family.
Emma Grede
Underserved customers are where she thinks the commercial opportunity sits
And in that lies a massive commercial opportunity.
Emma Grede
The obstacle is the rights. Licensing deals with the leagues are expensive, but she said cost is not really the barrier.
The licensing is difficult more than it is costly
And, it's like, well, not so much it costs money, but it's really difficult to do.
Emma Grede
Difficulty is the point, because it keeps most competitors out
And so I think where I get excited and where I see opportunity is doing the things that take enormous effort that will hopefully yield enormous results.
Emma Grede
Her claim is that the customer can feel the difference between a business that took the turnkey route and one that did not, and that what comes back is repeat purchases.
6. Why Women Must Talk Money
Asked why she keeps telling women to talk about money, Grede said the observation comes from running companies with several hundred staff and watching how the two groups behave.
Silence about money has a price
And what happens when you avoid conversations around money is that the money avoids you.
Emma Grede
She frames it as training rather than temperament
And what I've seen over and over and over again is that as women, it's just that we weren't necessarily raised and trained to have those conversations.
Emma Grede
Men treat it as ordinary conversation, everywhere
And what happens with men is that they just speak so freely about money. And they do it everywhere.
Emma Grede
She listed what men talk about specifically: a mortgage, the rate on a credit card, an investment. Women, she said, have those conversations less often and with less detail, and the money story people grow up with stays with them until something breaks it.
Her stated reason for the book and the podcast is the opposite of gatekeeping
It's like, I want to share so that you get more and you get more and you get more.
Emma Grede
Someone, she added, then gets less, and she is comfortable with that being the group that has been getting more for a long time.
7. The $405M Question
The host asked her outright how much she made last year. Grede declined on the grounds that the answer would make her jealous, and the host then read the published figure: Forbes put her net worth at $405 million last year.
Her reply was that the number was low
I think they missed a bit.
Emma Grede
Asked whether she is proud of it, she went back to how she grew up. She was raised in East London by a single mother, the eldest of four girls, and said having little made her specific about what she wanted.
She does not dodge the numbers, and does not find them interesting
It's very well publicised the value of my companies, how much I own of those companies, and the net worth that is somewhat attributed to that.
Emma Grede
What she says matters is ownership, not valuation
What I do care about, however, though, is the path to ownership.
Emma Grede
On paper, she said, a school leaver with very little education who arrived in the country less than ten years ago should not have those numbers attached to her. The reason she does is the part she wants people to look at.
The route ran through risk and trade-offs she is willing to itemize
I took a lot of risks. I made an enormous amount of trade-offs, which also I don't shy away from talking about.
Emma Grede
8. Manifesting Is Not A Plan
Grede's sharpest disagreement with the current culture is with the idea that wealth arrives through intention. She said the default story told to women now is that they will manifest their way to millions, and that she does not believe it works.
The same story is never told about a man who got rich
Nobody thinks like he manifested his way to it.
Emma Grede
What she wants instead is disclosure: what the money cost, what the day actually looks like, and what was given up. She was explicit that the framing is gendered, and deliberately so.
She repeats the word on purpose
And again, I do say women three times because it doesn't exist in the same way for men.
Emma Grede
9. A Max Three-Hour Mom
Asked how she thinks about the space work takes up, given four children, Grede started with the word most people would not use.
She treats the working itself as the achievement
I think about it with a great degree of pride, because I worked very hard to be able to work this hard.
Emma Grede
Her account of mom guilt is that it is handed down rather than produced by anything a mother has done.
The guilt is inherited
And I think for so many of us, that guilt is a story that's passed down from other women, from our grandmothers and from our mothers
Emma Grede
She was in New York and away from her children while saying it. The honest version, she said, is that she enjoys the trip: three nights in a hotel, sleeping diagonally in the bed. Plenty of women feel the same, she added, and will not say so.
She has stopped apologizing for the childcare and the marriage that make it possible
And so I've just kind of wiped that behaviour from my thoughts and from my vernacular.
Emma Grede
On the phrase that went viral earlier this year, she said the max three hour line was an honest one delivered as a joke. She works Monday to Friday and does not keep office hours, and by Saturday lunchtime she is done.
The weekend is not organized around the children
The reality is by 12 o'clock noon, I'm like, oh, I'm done with you lot?
Emma Grede
What she objects to is the scoring system attached to it.
The labels are the distraction
And I think there are all of these labels and all of these things, and it's just such a big distraction.
Emma Grede
The question she says is worth asking instead
And actually, the better question is, Emma, what don't you do? And what are you spending your time on?
Emma Grede
She named the trade-offs she does not make: a performance or an art show, never. A parent coffee morning is what gets scheduled over.
10. Lean In, And What Is New
The host put it to her that this conversation has been running since Lean In and girl boss, and asked what she is adding. Grede did not claim to be adding anything.
Her answer was that she is not offering a new theory
I don't know that I'm offering anything new and different.
Emma Grede
The picture she says she is correcting is the one where she arrives at work looking immaculate, puts her feet on the desk and tells people what to do — Louboutins on, as she put it. That, she said, has never been her working life.
Why the conversation persists, on her account, is not that it lacks new material. It is that the rules for women get re-litigated by women.
The debate continues because the participants keep judging the terms
Because the rules that we have laid out for women are constantly judged and constantly discussed and constantly debated by us.
Emma Grede
What she wants is agreement on the destination rather than the method
But there is a commonality in the goal.
Emma Grede
And the goal she names is a count, not a mood
I think that we can all accept and we can all appreciate and we can all agree more importantly that more women in positions of power would be a pretty good thing in this world.
Emma Grede
With responsibility attached to why it has been slow
But we have to also accept the responsibility that we have in that perhaps not coming to fruition as quickly as it should.
Emma Grede
Bonus Insights
She thinks repeating herself is a management asset
The host noted she makes the same points over and over in the book and the podcast, and apologized for being repetitive. Grede's reply was that everybody around her knows exactly what she wants from them.
The men in the room were her own aside
Partway through the section on how women's choices get judged, Grede said the men in the audience would have no idea what she was talking about, and imitated them moving on. It was a live taping, and the room reacted.
20 years, or 13
Asked when Lean In came out, Grede guessed about 20 years ago and the host corrected her to 2013. Neither pressed the point, and the exchange shows how long this argument has been running.
Grede's bottom line is that the businesses worth building are the ones serving a customer everyone else treats as an afterthought, that a famous partner gets you attention and nothing more — and that the women who want the outcomes she has should start by having the money conversations men have been having all along, in public, with numbers in them.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Good American (The denim and apparel brand she co-founded with Khloé Kardashian in 2016, built around a plus-size customer she says the industry treated as an afterthought; approaching its tenth anniversary)
Skims (Her other company with Kim Kardashian, and the one she calls her golden goose moment)
Off Season (The sports apparel brand she runs with designer Kristin Juszczyk, aimed at the women in the stands; she says the league licensing is the hard part)
The San Francisco 49ers, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Jets (The teams that came up when the host asked why the site carries more merchandise for some clubs than others)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Start With Yourself – Emma Grede (The book she published in April, which she says exists to tell the truth about what her career cost rather than to sell a method)
Aspire with Emma Grede (Her podcast, launched in the last year, and the other place she makes the argument about women talking about money)
Lean In – Sheryl Sandberg (Raised by the host as the reference point for this argument; Grede said she is not claiming to offer anything new against it)
Forbes' profile of Emma Grede (Source of the $405 million net worth figure the host read out, which Grede said was a little low)
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