Emma Grede dropped out of high school in East London. At 12 she was delivering newspapers in Plaistow.
By 16 she had saved enough to cover half the tuition for a business course at the London College of Fashion, money she made selling fireworks, toasted sandwiches, and beaded bags that, by her own description, had “fallen off trucks.”
Nothing about her background suggested she would go on to co-found one of the most commercially successful apparel brands in history, become the founding partner of a $5 billion shapewear company, build a portfolio of businesses across fashion, consumer products, and sports apparel, and earn a spot on Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women four years running.
On April 14, 2026, she published her first book, Start With Yourself, through Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster.
The Wall Street Journal described it as “Lean In for the post-girlboss era.” Grede, who is 43, describes it more simply as a wake-up call.
Who Is Emma Grede?
Before the Kardashian partnerships that made her name recognizable outside business circles, Grede built and sold ITB Worldwide, a marketing company specializing in talent-driven brand partnerships where she served as CEO.
That operational foundation was what she brought to the table when she and Khloé Kardashian co-founded Good American in October 2016, a size-inclusive denim brand that made $1 million on its first day of sales, the largest denim launch in history at the time.
Grede is the CEO. Revenue reached approximately $200 million by 2023. The brand has since expanded into ready-to-wear, swim, shoes, and activewear, and helped normalize extended denim sizing at mass retail, including a partnership with Zara.
In 2019 she co-founded SKIMS with Kim Kardashian, serving as founding partner and chief product officer.
The company is now valued at approximately $5 billion. Revenue has more than quintupled over three years and is forecast to exceed $1 billion in net sales in 2026.
Grede was a central architect of the NikeSkims partnership, the first time Nike built a brand in collaboration with an outside company.
She has also co-founded Safely (a cleaning brand launched during COVID-19 with Kris Jenner and Chrissy Teigen), Off Season (a sports apparel brand launched in January 2025 with designer Kristin Juszczyk in collaboration with the NFL and Fanatics), and is co-founder of Kylie Jenner’s fashion brand Khy.
Her estimated net worth is $320 million. She holds approximately 8% of SKIMS, 23% of Good American, and 22% of Safely.
She serves on the board of directors of the Obama Foundation and Baby2Baby, chairs the Fifteen Percent Pledge, and is a King’s Trust Ambassador.
She hosts the Aspire with Emma Grede podcast and has appeared as a guest investor on both Shark Tank and Dragons’ Den.
She is married to Jens Grede, Swedish co-founder of SKIMS and the denim brand Frame, and lives in Bel Air with their four children. She discovered she is “super-dyslexic” in her mid-twenties.
What Does Grede’s Book Argue?
Start With Yourself grew out of a pattern Grede kept noticing. People were asking her the same questions over and over about how she had built what she built.
“They want to know how to do it for themselves,” she told CNBC. The book is her answer, and it is not the answer many of them are looking for.
Grede is direct, blunt, and deliberately uncomfortable to read. “A lot of my friends who read my book said, ‘Oh my God, I wanted to throw it across the room,'” she told Newsweek.
That is fine by her, as long as they pick it back up. Ambition, she says, “really requires discomfort.”
The book’s central framework is what Grede calls “old thoughts,” the inherited, deeply embedded ideas women absorb about ambition, success, money, careers, and work-life balance.
These are not facts, she argues. They are cultural scripts, repeated and absorbed until they feel like the natural order of things. Her project is to name them, dismantle them, and rewrite them.
One of the most persistent of these scripts is the scarcity mindset, the belief that knowledge, money, and opportunity are finite, and that someone else’s success necessarily diminishes your own.
Grede treats this as both psychologically damaging and factually wrong. “It doesn’t mean because you have a piece of information that I’m going to miss out; it doesn’t mean because you get more, I get less,” she told Newsweek.
She calls it a “magic trick,” fear-driven, learned, and not necessarily real.
The antidote is not positive thinking. It is candor. Women, she argues, need to talk to each other in specifics, about money, contracts, motherhood, IVF, ambition, and failure. Not the broad strokes.
The actual numbers. The mistakes. The details that matter. “I think that we need to talk about everything,” she said. “When I say talk, I don’t mean have a chat. I mean, get into the details, share the nitty-gritty, give the information that matters.”
What Does Grede Argue Women Should Leave Behind?
The book is organized, in part, around individual “old thoughts” and the new ones Grede proposes to replace them. ADWEEK captured one example from the book. “Part of your job is to make people comfortable” becomes “Your wants and needs are as important as everyone else’s.”
This extends to how women think about waiting, for permission, for a promotion, for someone to recognize their value.
She calls this the “employee mentality,” and she does not have patience for it. “Power has to be taken, no one is going to hand it to you,” she said while driving through Los Angeles three weeks before the book’s launch. “You have to think of yourself first because nobody else ever will.”
On work-life balance, she is equally blunt and equally controversial. On The Diary of a CEO podcast, she said “work-life balance is your problem, not the employer’s responsibility.”
In the book she describes her own approach to balancing ambition and four children, acknowledging it means making choices that often do not look the way conventional parenting wisdom says they should.
She marks her more confrontational positions in the book with the phrase “unsavory but true.” She does not apologize for them.
She is similarly firm on manifesting, one of the most widely endorsed concepts in the female entrepreneurship space.
Both Oprah Winfrey and Spanx founder Sara Blakely have spoken positively about manifesting. Grede disagrees. “You can’t manifest your way to anything, or at least that hasn’t been my personal experience,” she told Newsweek.
The distinction she draws is between manifesting, a passive, wishful process, and holding a vision. Understanding clearly what you want to live, what you value, and ensuring that every decision moves toward those things. One is a feeling. The other is a practice.
Fear, Risk, And What Failure Costs
Risk is not something Grede asks readers to tolerate. She asks them to require it. “Risk is a requirement; playing it safe is the real danger. Risk is the bridge between who you are today and where you’re going,” she writes. Fear and failure come with it, she treats both as entwined, and neither as terminal.
In her own career, she told GQ, “Every day or every week, there are failures in my business.” That is not a confession. It is a data point about how success actually works, as opposed to how it is typically described.
Failure, for her, is “less an ending than a catalyst,” something to extract learning from, use as momentum, and move through.
What has changed over time is her relationship to fear itself. It has not disappeared.
What she can do now is read it differently, “not as a warning, but as a ‘signal,’ something that points to what is new, uncertain and worth aiming toward.”
She pairs this with a push against perfectionism. Progress matters more than polish. Waiting until you understand every operational detail before starting a business, she argues, is exactly how women stop themselves before they begin.
“Are you a visionary? Do you have a creative bone? Do you have something that you’re trying to do? If so,” she says, lead with that and bring people in to fill the gaps.
Mentorship And Hard Work
Grede has become a mentor figure herself, through her podcast, her public appearances, her role on Shark Tank and Dragons’ Den (where her bluntness toward one entrepreneur drew criticism from some viewers).
She values mentorship but refuses to romanticize it or treat it as something that arrives automatically when you need it.
You still have to show up, ask the right questions, and do the work. And no amount of consumption substitutes for it. “You can’t consume your way to success. Watching successful people isn’t the same as becoming one,” she told Newsweek.
Sweat equity, what she calls grit, determination, ambition, is at the core of everything she has built. Her own story is the argument.
A girl from Plaistow who delivered newspapers at 12 and sold what she could find to save tuition money at 16 did not become a co-founder of a $5 billion company because she found the right mentor or stumbled into the right room.
She built things, made mistakes, extracted lessons, and built again.
“This book should feel like a wake-up call,” she says. The women she is writing for are the ones who want “money, power, career and families,” and are willing to do something about it, rather than waiting for circumstances to arrange themselves.
The title is both the instruction and the method. Start With Yourself. Not your employer, not your circumstances, not the conditions that aren’t fair, which she acknowledges are real.
“You are not a bystander in your own life.” That line is in the book. It is also the whole book.
