Meet Emma Grede, a Black Woman in Business with the Kardashians 

British entrepreneur Emma Grede is the co-CEO of Good American, a founding partner of Skims, and the co-founder of Safely.

Together with her business partner Khloe Kardashian, she founded Good America. The most successful denim debut in history, Good America, a company that develops new sizes and fits, saw over $1 million in sales on the day of the launch.

For their campaigns, Good American is renowned for using e-commerce models of various sizes, and they introduced the size 15 to suit additional body shapes. They now sell dresses, activewear, and tops in addition to denim, which was their original focus.

“Khloe and I right from the get go said we’re going to have a company that’s based on a set of principles because we don’t want to negotiate every step of the way. You have to do it our way or it’s a no go,” Grede told ABC News’on an episode of No Limits with Rebecca Jarvis. 

“It completely cleared out anyone just wanting to be in this for a stamp of body positivity approval,” Emma Grede remarked.

Grede was raised in East London, England, where she was born. She is the daughter of a Jamaican and a Trinidadian father and Jenny-Lee Findlay, an English mother who worked for Morgan Stanley.

Her three younger sisters are Katie-Beth, Charlotte, and Rachelle. Her mother raised her in London’s Plaistow district. She attended the London College of Fashion to study business. She left college after getting an internship at Gucci.

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Career 

Emma Grede began her career as a producer at the fashion show and events firm Inca Productions before founding and serving as CEO of Independent Talent Brand (ITB) Worldwide, a talent management and entertainment marketing agency with offices in London, in 2008. 

Grede left the company after ITB was acquired by Rogers & Cowan in 2018.

Grede approached Kris Jenner with a denim business proposal sometime in 2015, stating that she hoped to collaborate with Jenner’s daughter Khloé Kardashian.

In 2016, Grede and Kardashian established Good American as a women’s clothing business with a size inclusivity and body positivity focus. She served as the company’s CEO.

The company’s portfolio now includes dresses, activewear, shirts, swimwear, sleepwear, and shoes in addition to its original focus on selling denim pants. To accommodate a wider range of body forms, they also developed the size 15.

Emma Grede is a founding partner in the shapewear company Skims, which was established in 2019 by her husband Jens Grede and Kim Kardashian.

Grede oversees product development for the business. Grede founded Safely, a line of plant-based cleaning and self-care products, along with Kris Jenner and Chrissy Teigen, in March 2021.

On the first episode of season 13 of the reality television programme Shark Tank in 2021, Grede appears as a guest shark.

She is the founder of the 15% Pledge, a campaign to encourage merchants to dedicate 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned companies.

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