Emma Grede is a serial entrepreneur, a podcaster, the founding partner of Kim Kardashian’s Skims, and now, an author. Her new book, Start With Yourself, hit shelves earlier this month.
Just don’t call her a celebrity CEO.
“I’m a CEO that’s done so well that you know my name,” she said on stage at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week conference in New York on Tuesday.
Growing up in working class London, Grede began working at a young age, doing everything from interning to packing boxes. At one point, she sold Fendi bags that “fell off the back of trucks.”
“I have an appreciation for what everyone brings to the organization,” she said. “That understanding, that empathy, makes me a good leader, because my team knows that I know what it takes.”
Tenacity aside, Grede said the widely spread story that she cold-called Kris Jenner to pitch the idea for Skims is a myth. “I had a reputation,” she said. “That’s what enabled that cold call to happen, that meeting to happen.”
Though her book has been provocative—specifically her philosophies around parenting (three hours with her kids is enough) and going to the office in-person (yes, every day)—Grede doesn’t think perpetuating the narrative of women “doing it all” is helpful.
“That conversation is useless, untrue, and not helpful to anyone,” she said. “At the end of the day, my life is really hard. It’s not always glamorous, and it isn’t always easy. So I think the most important conversation to have, especially as it pertains to personal success, is about, ‘What do you have to give up in order to have what you want?’”
In addition to her career advice, Grede laid out four principles brands should follow to break through on social.
1. Trust is everything
Early to social media, Grede has watched the shift from sheer audience numbers and reach being the most important metric to trust and authenticity with followers.
She pointed to Real Housewives star and entrepreneur Bethenny Frankel, a recent guest on her Aspire podcast, as an example of someone who builds trust with her fans by being true to herself no matter what.
“It’s very clear to me why she has so many brand deals, and sometimes conflicting ones: Because we know what Bethenny says is what she thinks, and we believe her, and it’s the truth,” Grede said. “If you have an audience’s trust right now, I believe you have everything.”
2. Product over marketing
Though she describes herself as a “marketeer at heart,” Grede believes that no product will succeed if it’s not quality—even if it’s backed by the best creative in the world.
“We do ourselves a little bit of disservice when we think that the whole idea of what it means to be an entrepreneur and founder is about the forward-facing part,” she said. “You will be better off obsessing with distribution and logistics and product excellence than social media and influencer strategy and digital marketing.”
At the end of the day, if you have a product that works and can get it into a customer’s hands quickly, “everything else sorts itself out,” she added.
“You can get obsessed with what it looks like on the outside, and it’s just the wrong focus. It’s not that it doesn’t matter. It just isn’t the first thing. It’s the cherry on the icing, not the cake, and you focus on the cake.”
3. Don’t over-rely on the metrics
Grede doesn’t view virality as a signal of long-term success. “From an investor standpoint, I would never look at a brand that is tracking on social and invest off of that basis,” she said.
While social virality is a “signal that something could be interesting,” marketers are also at the whims of platforms and algorithm changes that could flip things on a dime. “That is not something that you can control,” she said.
Instead, when investing, Grede looks for different signs: “product excellence and a founder with a level of insatiable tenacity that can’t be dampened.”
4. The cues are in the comments
The comments can be a scary place, but it’s necessary to engage if you want to really understand and respond to your audience. Grede spends time in the comments sections of her various business accounts every Sunday, “sometimes happily, sometimes very tender-hearted, because you better be ready,” she said.
She views taking cues from the comments as critical, because “there’s no point in taking it back into your organization and making excuses for the things that you found.”
“What we do in our businesses is really look at what is the sentiment and what decisions are we making within the business based on what we’re hearing, not the stories that we want to tell ourselves,” she said.
