Yahoo Finance Emma Grede on building a fashion empire with the Kardashians: ‘Ask questions, work really hard and don’t be an a***hole’
If you head to the third floor of Selfridges, on Oxford Street, the first brand you’ll see is Good American.
It’s right in front of the escalator; so within minutes you’re transported from the chaos of the city centre to the calm sophistication of the body-positive label created by founder and CEO, Emma Grede, whom I’m here to meet today. She didn’t do it alone. For her first line, the 37-year-old entrepreneur from Plaistow, east London, managed to convince one of the most famous people on the planet to be her business partner: Khloé Kardashian.
It’s impossible to be a Kardashian and not be completely inundated with collaboration offers, and yet it’s easy to see why Grede’s pitch cut through the noise. Good American’s pieces are innovative and beautiful, but its biggest sell is inclusivity; the range goes from a size zero to 24, and each piece is shot on three different sized models. The campaigns feature diverse women mostly found through open casting. The messaging is clear; Good American is for every woman. Bringing in a million dollars on its first day, it was the most successful denim launch in history.
Five years on from that historic launch, she is still full of vivacious energy. Grede is wearing head-to-toe Good American; a sleeveless white tank top with vintage-looking jeans that are just the right level of baggy, while also fitting perfectly around her waist. That, she says, is due to their ‘four-piece waistband’, something she learnt from tailors of Savile Row before asking her own designers to apply it to jeans that fit the curve of women’s bodies. Both Grede’s and Kardashian’s shopping experiences informed the brand’s DNA. ‘I spent all my time getting everything tailored. Khloé [who is taller and curvier] found a lot of designers had things to fit her sisters but not her. If we have those experiences, the chances are everybody else does. From a business point of view, it just made sense.’
‘Khloé and I come from different places and have had vastly different upbringings, but what we have in common is confidence,’ explains Grede. ‘We asked ourselves where it comes from. How can you give other women that same feeling?’ The answer was clothes designed to make women of all sizes feel great, with advertising that reflects them. ‘We wanted to make it a true reflection of real women in real life. I grew up with a white mum, a black dad and friends who were from everywhere, in all shapes and sizes. It goes without saying that diversity is important to me.’
There’s something disarmingly simple about Good American. It’s full of classic pieces: oversized blazers that mean business, jersey bodies to partner with sculpting denim. Everything is designed with a woman’s confidence in mind. ‘To me, it wasn’t about plus-size, it was about treating women how they want to be treated. Women don’t wake up in the morning and think, “I really want a lovely pair of plus-size trousers” — you just want a pair of trousers! It’s that simple.’
When Good American launched, Grede and her family (she has two children with her husband, the fellow entrepreneur Jens Grede, founder of Frame denim) relocated from her native London to Los Angeles. It made sense for her business but Grede maintains she will always be a London girl at heart. ‘I credit so much of who I am to my upbringing,’ she says. ‘I was raised with three sisters in Plaistow by a single mum. We knew our neighbours and there was a real sense of community. You could trust people, you were as good as your word and I’ve taken that mentality with me.’ Grede’s mother worked a high-powered job at Morgan Stanley. ‘I was under no illusion that it wasn’t hard bringing us up. She was gone a lot, but I always understood that she went to work to put a roof over our heads. That set the way I think; you get up each day and you graft.’
Fashion was Grede’s first love. ‘As a kid I used to save my pocket money to buy Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire; I was always scraping around to find £7.50 for all three. I’d cut out every advert and file them by designer.’ She always knew she wanted to work in fashion. At 16 she enrolled in business studies at London College of Fashion, while landing placements at a concierge company and interning for designers such as Gucci. She connected with a lot of people in the industry although she’s hesitant to call it ‘networking’ (‘I thought of it as making friends and being nice to people — it makes good business sense’). With her career blossoming, Grede dropped out of LCF. ‘It was the right decision for me. I learnt that I got more out of a couple of months work than I could from a college.’
She continued to move through her career at lightning pace. She worked at a fashion production company for a few years before launching ITB, a marketing agency connecting brands with talent. ‘I was 24, my job was to make friends with managers, agents, publicists — that’s how you get a deal done. London was amazing at that point,’ she reminisces. ‘You had Christopher Kane, Erdem, Mary Katrantzou first-season shows and I was out there doing sponsorships with people I admired. It was scrappy; I’d meet someone in marketing and say, “I have an idea for you!” It was about getting in however I could.’ After 10 years she had gone from working with emerging names to connecting the likes of Dior, Calvin Klein and Net-a-Porter with huge talent such as Natalie Portman, Kendall Jenner and more.
Khloé Kardashian taught us the idea of asking our audience what they’d like next
In launching Good American, Grede effectively took centre stage by owning the brand and working directly with talent. She set her sights on Kardashian from the start. ‘To me, Khloé has always embodied this idea of being gorgeous and confident at any size. She’s been smaller, she’s been bigger and it didn’t matter; she was always out there with her sisters looking amazing.’
Grede was no stranger to the Kardashians. She is the woman behind Kendall Jenner’s #MyCalvins campaign, and she would regularly meet Kendall’s mother, Kris Jenner, at fashion week. ‘I worked in entertainment marketing and Kris is one of the greatest talent managers there is,’ Grede explains. It was Kris who connected her with Khloé. ‘Kris didn’t grill me or anything, I guess I was pre-vetted from the work I’d done before. She thought Khloé might like my idea, and so I went to LA to meet her the following week.’ Khloé said ‘yes’ straight away. ‘We’re a great partnership. We really understand how to create an incredible product. We wear-tested everything; we decided from the start every stockist had to carry all sizes.’ Grede says she has learnt a lot from Kardashian. ‘Khloé taught us the idea of asking our audience. I’d say, “What do we do next?” She would say, “Why don’t we just ask?” and so we used our community of customers to see how we were doing and what they wanted.’
Grede’s favourite thing to do on a Sunday evening is read customer reviews. What might sound like a mundane activity led to the creation of an entirely new size; a UK 15. ‘I looked at the percentages and found you were twice as likely to return jeans if you were a size 14 or a 16,’ she says. ‘It seemed so simple, of course we’ll put a size in the middle. I was told no one would get it; it turned out to be our fourth most popular-selling size. There must be 20 million women in America who are right in the middle; they’re not quite plus size, they’re not quite “regular” size. My mum and my best friend both wear our size 15.’
As Good American’s popularity soared, Grede launched more businesses. She is a co-founder of Kim Kardashian’s shapewear line, Skims, and of Safely, a plant-based cleaning brand she founded with Chrissy Teigen and Kris Jenner. Despite her success, Grede is eager to point out that she’s not some kind of poster girl for women who have it all. ‘I don’t do everything brilliantly and I don’t profess to. I have an enormous amount of help, I have nannies for my kids, I don’t clean my house; something has to give.’ For Grede, it’s her social life that has taken the hit. ‘I have a limited number of friends, I’m not out having cocktails. There have been stages of my life which were more about being social, now I’m focused on the businesses.
I have nannies for my kids, I don’t clean my house; something has to give
‘I don’t try to find a great balance,’ she continues. ‘If I have a sick kid, I have a sick kid. If I have a deal to close, I have a deal to close; I don’t believe I’m here to just fulfil the needs of my children. I’m trying to show them self-fulfillment. I want them to see me doing what makes me happy, so that they learn the importance of finding that thing that you love.’ With our interview coming to an end, it’s time for Grede to head east to spend time with her own mum, the one who instilled her work ethic and gave her the keys to success long before Grede became the pioneering businesswoman she is today. ‘It really is much simpler than people think,’ she says. ‘Ask questions, work really hard... and don’t be an a***hole.’
