Born and raised in East London in the ’80s, the eldest of four daughters in a single-parent household, Emma Grede’s route into business was anything but easy. She dropped out of school at 16 and built her career from the ground up — first in fashion show and events production, before starting launching her talent management and entertainment agency, Independent Talent Brand (ITB).
Today, Grede’s portfolio reads like a blueprint for cultural commerce: co-founder and CEO of Good American alongside Khloé Kardashian, founding partner and chief product officer of Skims with Kim Kardashian, co-founder of Safely alongside Kris Jenner and Chrissy Teigen, and co-founder of Kylie Jenner’s Khy. Add to that her role as chairwoman of the Fifteen Percent Pledge and board member of the Obama Foundation, and her influence stretches far.
Now, with the UK release of her debut book Start With Yourself on April 14, Grede turns her attention to codifying that success. “There are just so many business books out there, but not nearly as many as there should be written by women, and definitely not by women who are mothers of four and who dropped out of high school,” she says. “I wanted to write something that would propel women forward. I am almost in a furious state right now in my feeling that we are so desperate for more women in positions of power, and for more women to have money. I think that is what is going to change our world.”
Ahead of the launch, Grede distills that philosophy over Zoom into five essential lessons in building a brand.
1. Extend your relevancy curve
A core pillar of Grede’s strategy is what she calls the “relevancy curve” — a shifting boundary that defines how far a brand can evolve without losing its credibility. The curve is rooted in her belief that most brands will have their moment, before eventually waning. The only way to endure, Grede argues, is to evolve with culture without departing from a brand’s central values.
“Often, to survive a downturn and extend a relevancy curve, everything about your business will need to change, except for the principles of the business itself,” she writes in her book. Grede points to Skims as proof. What began as an underwear and shapewear line, quickly expanded into categories the team had not predicted. “Two years later, we were making Skims clothing — out of the gate, nobody would have guessed that people would be falling over themselves to buy a ski puffer and pants from us in collaboration with The North Face. At face value, the product seems entirely different, and yet, at our heart, we are the same: a solutions-based clothing business focused on solving problems for customers.”
To extend that curve, Grede draws on a concept she credits to LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, called “transition on the way up”, where founders must obsess over specific problems that are uniquely theirs to solve.
“That really starts from knowing who you are as a brand,” she tells me over Zoom. “What are the personality traits? What are the principles? What is the purpose that this brand solves for? The more rigorously those questions are answered, the more intuitive expansion becomes. You don’t have to make a decision, it’s made for you. Your customers are either going to accept that from you or they won’t.”
2. Get rid of your employee mentality
The shift from manager to owner begins with a fundamental reframing of authority — one Grede credits, in part, to her husband and business partner Jens Grede. “Your board follows your direction as the leader of the company — stop pretending like you have six bosses,” she recalls him telling her; Grede was negotiating her salary with her board of directors at ITB Worldwide, the agency she built in London.
It marked a turning point away from what she describes as an “employee mentality” — a tendency to look for a “boss everywhere”, even in their absence, and to instinctively defer to “someone who must know better”. The instinct is deeply ingrained and limited, especially for women. “More largely in culture, we imagine that somebody always knows better than us,” Grede says. Whether that’s a banker, a lawyer, or an external advisor, there is a consequential habit of deferring judgement or seeking permission rather than exercising it.
Instead, the most effective leaders operate differently. “You are not supposed to know everything. That’s just not how it goes,” she says. “It is your job to hold this vision, reinforce this vision, and create the container in which fantastic people do their best work to help you realise this vision.”
3. Put money at the center of your plans
If there is one idea Grede is intent on reframing, it is the role of money in women-led businesses. “My experience when I get business proposals is that, oftentimes, I’ll get seven or eight pages in and I still can’t understand how this business is making money,” she says. “But I understand how they are giving back to their community, or how they’re going to give a charity some money.”
For Grede, this is part of a broader issue: women have a tendency to soften commercial ambition with purpose, before the fundamentals are even in place. “I’m like, hold on, you don’t have to make an excuse because you’re making money. You can do deeply meaningful and impactful work and care about money,” she says. “When I say put money in the center of your plans, I mean let’s talk about profit. Let’s talk about the point of running a business, and then let’s talk about all of the other stuff that you can do once you’re successful.”
Grede is unapologetic in her approach. “My ability to put money at the center of my plans is the biggest thing that I’ve learned, and not shying away from that.” It’s a stance that can be polarizing, particularly in an industry that can favor narrative over numbers. “It doesn’t always endear you to people.”
It’s only through normalizing conversation around profit that we can begin to address the well-documented funding gap between men and women, she adds.
4. Real brand power happens off camera
Grede may command more than a million followers on Instagram and sit behind some of the internet’s most viral campaigns — from Skims’s headline-making “nipple bra” and “bush underwear”, to Good American’s open casting calls — but she’s steadfast on the misalignment between cultural noise and lasting value.
“Marketing is not even the icing on the cake; it’s the cherry on the icing. You must focus on making and baking the cake, which is not always the ‘fun part’,” her book reads. Instead, product, price, and distribution are the most important ingredients, despite the noise often generated by social media.
“You can’t Instagram your pricing strategy, it’s just not that sexy,” says Grede. “What we see are the dinners, the collabs, the fabulous events, and the influencer strategy, and I think all of that is a really appealing and important part of the business, but it isn’t the business.”
For Grede, the real work of brand-building often happens away from the spotlight. “If you think about the best brands in history, like Colgate, rarely do you think about them in terms of their advertising,” she says. “There are outliers like Apple and Coca-Cola, but only when you’ve got an amazing product, market fit, and distribution does everything click into place.”
Operational efficiency also remains overlooked, which many fail to fully leverage. “If you figure out how you can take 12 hours out of your delivery-to-customer timeline, then that’s a game changer,” she says. These are the decisions that should shape how a business allocates both time and talent, Grede continues. “If you know that the head of logistics is more important than the head of marketing, you might think about it differently. That reorientation really is key.”
5. Control your emotions
Unlike the many swathes of business books before it, Grede’s features a section dedicated to emotional regulation. “The reason I can write sections on building a brand and leadership is because I’ve managed to get control of my emotions, and I don’t allow my emotions, despite being full of them, to control my decision-making,” she says.
In part two of her book, titled “Managing Emotions”, Grede explores anger, fear, guilt, sadness, and joy — and how they manifest in people’s day-to-day lives, often holding them back. “I wanted to really explain that stuff: the fear of getting things wrong, this idea that we should be perfect, this kind of guilt that sits on mothers — that stuff is not allowing you to do what needs to be done,” she says. “And unless you wrap your head around being able to move through that and own the emotion, you will not be successful.”
Grede stresses that emotional literacy and intelligence are critical skills for reading a room, tapping into cultural trends, understanding the motivations of others, and realizing what you want; all of which are extremely important in business, but only if you have control. “It’s not like I don’t have fear or guilt or any of that stuff in my life. I have it all,” she continues. “I just don’t allow it to be the front thing. I don’t allow it to be the place from which I operate. The fear needs to send a different signal to your brain, and it’s only when you can contextualize it that you can actually make better decisions.”
