Emma Grede, who helped found the $5 billion Skims empire, rejects ‘celebrity CEO’ label: ‘I’m a CEO who’s done so well you know my name’ |
Emma Grede, who helped found the $5 billion Skims empire, rejects ‘celebrity CEO’ label: ‘I’m a CEO who’s done so well you know my name’
Emma Grede may be best known for being a founding partner for some of the Kardashian family’s biggest brands, including Skims and Good American, but she wants to make one thing clear: She’s more than a “celebrity CEO.”
“Don’t call me a celebrity CEO,” Grede said on April 15 at Adweek’s Social Media Week in New York City. “I’m not a celebrity CEO. I’m a CEO that’s done so well that you know my name.”
Grede, a serial entrepreneur and investor who is worth an estimated $405 million, according to Forbes, is no stranger to hard work. She got her first job at 12 and has, as she puts it, “done every single job all the way up,” from selling Fendi bags that “fell off the back of the truck” to packing boxes as an intern and eventually serving as a senior executive of her own marketing agency ITB Worldwide. That experience, she said, has shaped how she leads and how she thinks about the value of her team’s work.
“You need everybody along the way, and I think that that understanding, that empathy, makes me a good leader,” Grede said. “My team knows that I know what it........