Good American Co-Founder & CEO, SKIMS Founding Partner, & Entrepreneur Emma Grede
In this week’s episode of the CNBC Changemakers and Power Players podcast, CNBC Senior Media and Tech Reporter Julia Boorstin sits down with Emma Grede — co-founder and CEO of Good American, founding partner of SKIMS, and an influential entrepreneur in modern retail.
Grede opens up about how growing up in East London shaped her hustle — and her relationship with money — and why early failure ended up being one of her biggest advantages. She partnered with Kim Kardashian to build SKIMS into a $5B brand — and now she’s reinventing retail. She shares how that mindset helped her build retail brands like SKIMS and Good American, and why she thinks the best founders don’t chase trends — they stay ahead of the customer. Plus, her message on ambition: speak up, ask for more, and get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Listen to the full episode here. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
All references must be sourced to CNBC Changemakers and Power Players podcast.
GREDE ON AMBITION
JULIA BOORSTIN: I think that’s why I like the book so much because it’s a it’s your story, but it’s really also about mindset and how anyone can adopt a mindset where they could take whatever challenges they’re faced with, and we’re all going to be faced with different challenges, and figure out how to turn them into opportunities.
EMMA GREDE: It is so much about that, but, you know, I feel like mindset is one of those things that’s so overused because, you know, ambition needs to find you working. And I always talk about this idea of ambition being a little bit uncomfortable and you need to be able to learn to lean into that discomfort. And so, when I talk about mindset, I really think that that has to be coupled with the vision and a plan and a lot of hard work. And so, the last thing I want to do in this book is gaslight anyone like, I’m here not as an expert who’s like, here’s how it works in leadership. I’m like, here’s the stuff that worked for me, like, here’s the honest truth of the last 25 years of my career, and actually it’s laced with a lot of fear and guilt and failure and anger and all the things that wouldn’t be so conducive to success. So I’m trying to take what has been real in my life and show people the ways that I’ve been able to navigate that.
GREDE ON FAILURE TO FUEL
BOORSTIN: What was the moment when you realized this was a company you wanted to found, you saw the opportunity, and you knew you were the one to do it.
GREDE: Well, you know, I always feel like I have to go back a little bit because actually, my agency was global. I just failed, and that’s the first thing to say. I had a thriving agency that worked in London and it worked in Paris and it worked in New York, and when I brought it to LA, I fell on my face. And so, it was some of those learnings from having been here and had a business that didn’t work out that for me, was like, I’m never going to make those mistakes again. So when I came to LA for the second time with Good American. I was like, a, I need to move there. And, you know, I had a two year old, two and a half year old, and a newborn baby, and so leaving, like, what was familiar to me, and all the infrastructure and my family that I had in the UK, was a big leap of faith, but I’d already had this huge failure coming here once before. And I was like, I ain’t doing that again. So I actually use that as a springboard and to me, it was like, just information. You know, I never am somebody that looks at failure and goes, like, I did this bad thing. I’m like, that situation was bad, that thing didn’t work. But what can I take from that, and how am I going to do it differently next time? So coming into Good American, a, I had that failure to kind of go, alright, what’s next, and how am I going to do it differently? But also, I had what I thought was the beginnings of this really, like, incredible business that I never thought of as denim, you know, I thought this is a movement. This is showing people a different way to approach fashion. And I had very strong, you know, gut feelings about it, despite what everybody was telling me. Because whichever retailer I went to, whichever factory I went to, whichever vendor I went to, they were they would literally tell me, like, this is going to fail. You will be out of money and out of business in three months. And so, it was listening to what I knew and the kind of 15 years of work I’d done beforehand that led me to that place. It’s all that information that said to me Good American could be really successful.
GREDE ON BEING COMFORTABLE IN DISCOMFORT
BOORSTIN: One of the other takeaways from your book that I found is that women have been taught a lot of horrible things about being apologetic and feeling guilt and not talking about money, and you’re telling women that this is ridiculous and we need to own our power and feel comfortable sitting in discomfort and talking about money and asking for what we need, and working hard and being unapologetic.
GREDE: All of that, yes, yes and yes. And here’s the thing, this is not about blaming women in any, in any way. I think what we have to realize is there’s a lot of social conditioning that happens to us from, you know, kids, right? It’s like, we don’t say, you know, he’s a good boy. We’re like she’s a good girl, and it teaches you to be smaller and be quiet and to be a pleaser. And when you take those things into the workplace, you have to understand that those emotions have such huge effects on your ability to make the right decisions for yourself. And so if you sit in fear about sticking out or doing something wrong, it’s going to be really hard for you to start something new because you’re so fearful. And if you’re a people pleaser, you’re probably not going to say what you really mean that could be super valuable, because you’re more interested in pleasing everybody. And if your ambition to make a lot of money only lives inside of you, and you haven’t really vocalized it, then why should anybody pay you more? So what I’m saying is that a lot of this stuff lives within us without us being really clear about it, without us being, you know, having the intellectual honesty to notice it. And so, I’m saying, why don’t we just get honest about some of this stuff and recognize what in our emotional lives is holding us back? Because once you understand it, you can start to correct it.
GREDE ON THE RULE OF THIRDS
BOORSTIN: You seem fearless. You’re very honest about your low moments. You talk about feelings of depression, you talk about your struggles, you talk about all the work you’ve done on yourself, and it is so inspiring. But I have to wonder, do you ever get scared?
GREDE: So this is the truth, you know, I do still experience fear. I do still have niggling feelings of self-doubt. I never really had what I would call imposter syndrome, but every now and again, I’m like, oh my god. I can’t believe this has happened. My expectation is that I probably shouldn’t be happy all the time. So when I am I really value it, and I have this thing, like, the rule of thirds, a third of the time you’re probably going to be feeling really good and really happy, and the other third of the time you’ll probably feel like, yeah, like, all right, and the other third of the time you’re going to feel like crap. And that’s okay, because when you have those days, and you know that you’re like, they’re coming, those days are there and it’s all right, it helps you just like, live a little bit more in sync. I don’t have an expectation that I should be happy, fulfilled and looking amazing all the time. You know, it’s just like, that way, like, some days the hair is good and some days the hair is bad, like, I’m not gonna let it ruin my whole day. It’s like, it’s fine. Sit in the bad days, take the learnings and move on. What I don’t like is this thought that everything is so finite, that as women, you have a failure, and that failure should then live with you forever because we don’t apply those same rules to men. When a man has a terrible failure in business and loses a ton of money, and his thing goes under, he goes, well, you know, that was a disaster, on to the next one. Whereas a woman, she’s like, I did this terrible thing, and it sits with me. I’m like, no, no, enough of that, right? So for me, it’s like, things happen. You learn from them, you live with them, you move on. Life happens in chapters. I’m in my 40s now, and it’s like all that stuff that I did in my 20s and all those things that didn’t work in my 30s, I just took them as learnings. I never let it be a judgment, and I don’t let it weigh me down. So maybe that’s what you see, but I think I just learned to live with failure as a part of success.
