Brick by Brick, Deal by Deal.

Emma Grede

Emma Grede will tell you plainly that none of this was the plan. “I never, ever had an ambition to start my own company,” she has said. What she had instead was a fascination with fashion, a front row seat to how brands get built and an unusual gift for people.

That gift has made her one of the most influential operators in modern fashion. She is the CEO and co-founder of Good American, a founding partner of Skims, an investor on “Shark Tank,” the chairwoman of the 15 Percent Pledge and, by 2023, one of Forbes’ richest self made women in America. She has done all of it while insisting that the most important asset in business is not capital. It is relationships.

An East London Start

Grede was born in London in 1982 and grew up in Plaistow, in East London, the eldest of four sisters. Work started early. She delivered newspapers at 13 and later worked a deli counter, long before she was old enough for anything that looked like glamour.

Fashion arrived as an escape. “I was drawn to that world and those people, [but] it was more a means of escapism,” she has said. “That glamour was very far from how I was being raised.”

Her work ethic came from home. Her mother worked at Morgan Stanley, and Grede watched her leave for the office every day. “I had an incredible role model in my mother who went out to work every day,” she has said. “I was very aware of that from very young.”

Leaving School, Finding a Path

At 16 she enrolled at the London College of Fashion to study business, and she interned at Gucci along the way. She left at 18, with two semesters still to go. She is honest about the tradeoff. “I would have benefited from finishing college, but that wasn’t my path,” she has said. “It just wasn’t right for me at the time.”

What she lacked in credentials she made up for in proximity. She worked for the concierge company Quintessentially, then for Inca Productions, a fashion show and events producer. Each job taught her how the industry actually ran: who made decisions, who had influence and how deals came together.

The Relationship Business

In 2008, at 26, Grede co-founded ITB Worldwide, an entertainment marketing agency that paired brands with talent. It was the right business at the right moment. Celebrity and brand were converging, and Grede understood both sides of the table.

In 2009 she arranged a partnership between Natalie Portman and Dior that raised the agency’s profile. In 2015 ITB recruited 60 influencers for Kendall Jenner’s #MyCalvins campaign for Calvin Klein. The agency grew to offices in London, New York and Los Angeles and more than 150 staff.

The agency years sharpened the skill she calls her core advantage, and they taught her how to show up in rooms full of powerful people. Her rule for doing that is simple: “You have to park your ego at the door and be humble.” In 2018 Rogers & Cowan acquired ITB, and Grede stepped away to focus on the company she had started on the side.

The Pitch That Built Good American

Around 2015, Grede pitched an idea for a denim company to Kris Jenner. It led to a partnership with Khloé Kardashian and to a brand built around a simple, overdue idea: women of every size deserve clothes designed for them from the start, not adapted for them later.

Good American launched in October 2016 and sold $1 million of denim on its first day. The following year Grede moved her family from London to Los Angeles. In 2018 the brand expanded into activewear.

The growth kept coming. In 2020 Good American’s revenue rose 78 percent, and in 2021 it was on pace for about $155 million in sales, an 85 percent jump. Grede, who serves as CEO, has been clear that inclusivity was never a marketing layer added after the fact. “I never set out to create a company that was rooted in principles of diversity,” she has said. “That’s just what happens when a Black woman is at the helm of a company.”

Skims, Safely and a Portfolio of Firsts

When Skims launched in 2019 with Kim Kardashian, Grede came on as a founding partner and chief product officer. In 2022 Skims won the first Innovation Award from Amazon Fashion at the CFDA Awards,.

In March 2021 she co-founded Safely, a cleaning products company, with Kris Jenner and Chrissy Teigen. In January 2025 she co-launched Off Season with designer Kristin Juszczyk, in collaboration with the NFL and Fanatics. Few executives move this easily between categories. Grede’s through line is not a product. It is a method: find the right partner, understand the customer and build fast.

Listening as Strategy

For all the scale, Grede describes her approach in small, human terms. The humility she preaches has deep roots. “Growing up, I learned to listen more than I speak.”

Listening is also how she sizes up people and ideas. Curiosity, for her, is not a soft skill. It is the job. “I’m an interested person. I actually care about your story.” It is the quality that made her a great agent, and it is the one that makes founders want to work with her now.

She is equally direct about the myth of balance. “I don’t believe in ‘having it all,’” she has said. Married to entrepreneur Jens Grede since 2012 and a mother of four, she has chosen candor over a polished narrative about how the pieces fit together.

Opening Doors for Others

Grede’s influence extends well beyond her own companies. She became the first Black woman investor on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” appearing as a guest shark in seasons 13 and 14, and in 2024 she joined the BBC’s “Dragons’ Den” as a guest dragon. On both shows she sits on the side of the table she spent years learning to win over.

She also chairs the 15 Percent Pledge, the nonprofit urging retailers to dedicate at least 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses. By 2022 the initiative had helped Black business owners generate $10 billion in revenue. Her commitment is personal and plainly stated: “I’ll support as many Black women as I can afford to.”

Sharing the Playbook

In recent years Grede has turned her attention to teaching what she knows. Her podcast, “Aspire,” features long conversations with founders, including guests such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Bobbi Brown. In April 2026 she published her book, “Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life.”

The message across all of it is consistent: you do not need a perfect résumé or a clear plan to build something meaningful. You need curiosity, people who believe in you and the nerve to keep going when the next step feels too big.

What Makes Her Different

Plenty of executives are good at one thing. What sets Grede apart is how many different rooms she has learned to win. She has been an agent, a marketer, a founder, a CEO, a product chief, an investor, a nonprofit chair, an author and a host. Each role required a different set of skills, and each one built on the relationships she formed in the last.

Her career also challenges a common assumption about who gets to build at scale. She did not finish college. She did not start with family money or a famous name. She started with a job delivering newspapers and an unusually sharp read on people. The lesson is not that credentials do not matter. It is that they are not the only way in.

It also says something about the kind of leadership that lasts. Grede’s partners are some of the most recognizable people in the world, yet she has never relied on fame to carry a business. She has relied on execution: understanding the customer, building the product right and earning the trust of the people around her.

The Grede Playbook

Strip away the headlines and her path offers a set of habits any founder can borrow, whatever she is building.

The first two lessons come straight from the agency years, when her ability to bring brands and talent together was the entire business. The third comes from her childhood, and it remains the quality colleagues describe first. The fourth is Good American’s founding idea, proof that inclusion can be a growth strategy rather than a slogan.

The fifth is the one she returns to most often. Every major move in her career, from leaving school to launching a denim brand to stepping onto a television set as an investor, involved a moment of real uncertainty. She went anyway.

Why Her Story Resonates

Part of what makes Grede so compelling to other women is that her story does not depend on a single lucky break. It is a long series of deliberate moves, each one slightly bigger than the last. A newspaper round became a deli job. An internship became an industry education. An agency became a launchpad. A pitch became a brand that sold a million dollars of denim in a day.

At every stage, she was willing to be the person in the room who did not have the conventional résumé, and she made up for it with preparation, curiosity and nerve. For anyone who has ever felt like an outsider in her own industry, that is a powerful model.

It is also why her advocacy carries weight. When Grede talks about opening doors for Black founders or women entrepreneurs, she is describing a path she has walked herself.

The Rule

Beneath every chapter of Grede’s career sits one discipline she holds herself to, whatever the stakes. She has stated it simply: “I have a rule: You have to do things that scare you.”

It explains the agency she started at 26 without a business degree, the denim brand she pitched to one of the most famous families in the world and the television seat she now occupies across from nervous founders. For Grede, fear is not a stop sign. It is the signal that the next level is close.

For every woman who has talked herself out of the bigger move, that may be the most useful lesson of all.