EXCLUSIVE: Kim Kardashian and Skims CEO Jens Grede Discuss Retail Strategy and IPO, Open Fifth Avenue Flagship
Booth Moore
14 min read
Kim Kardashian is ending the year on a high note, opening the first flagship in New York City for her rapidly expanding Skims brand, on Fifth Avenue in the heart of midtown.
The building is in an auspicious location at 647 Fifth Avenue near 52nd Street, home of the Versace brand for two decades and next door to the Cartier Fifth Avenue Mansion.
With 6,570 square feet of selling space over four floors, a dedicated room devoted to collaborations, a showroom/VIP area, office space and 175 employees, it’s the brand’s sixth and largest store yet — and a milestone for the company that earned a $4 billion valuation last year.
Skims cofounder and chief creative officer Kardashian and cofounder and chief executive officer Jens Grede sat down with WWD to discuss their love of brick-and-mortar stores (Kardashian’s first job was in retail), their slow-and-steady approach to retail expansion, the success of the North Face collaboration that sold out online in five minutes, Skims’ evolution into an apparel brand, their plans for 2025 and that rumored IPO.
“It really is such a proud moment,” Kardashian said of the flagship during an interview Friday at the Skims offices in Calabasas, Calif. “When we started Skims, we obviously had high hopes, but I never thought of retail and how that would look.…We were very focused on direct-to-consumer and everything online. So a Fifth Avenue store exceeds all of the expectations that I had.”
The Rafael de Cárdenas, Ltd.-designed store has had lines around the block since its soft opening Friday, and the 15-foot Vanessa Beecroft nude sculpture in the front window has been attracting gawkers — in a good way.
“She’s an important part of our DNA. We started with her doing our first photo shoot and coming up with a lot of the concepts. And even this office, having a big sculpture of hers here that we look at is super inspiring,” Kardashian said of the contemporary multimedia artist, who has shot many Skims campaigns over the Los Angeles brand’s five-year history, including the one with The North Face.
Vanessa Beecroft sculpture inside the new Skims store on Fifth Avenue.
“The store has this high gloss mixed with monochromatic colors and materials and different textures, and everything is embossed like our logos,” she continued, describing the immersive experience, and sharing an anecdote to illustrate her obsession with every detail. “Two nights ago, I was up in the middle of the night on FaceTime, and the girls were in the store…and we were reorganizing everything,” she said of chiming in to give her opinions on the displays ahead of seeing the finished store. “I started off my first job in retail. So my favorite thing to do, I would always steam all the merchandise in the back. So I asked them to save some pieces for me to steam.”
Collaboration Learnings
Located in a nondescript business park, Kardashian’s office space is pure Skims with its luxe minimalist interiors, neutral palette, Donald Judd-like furniture and refrigerators full of every kind of expensive bottled water imaginable.
“I’m supposed to go skiing in two weeks and I may just wrap my foot. One doctor said I could so we’ll see. There is no way I can go through a season without wearing these North Face Skims clothes,” she said, hobbling into the conference room on crutches after breaking her foot because “I’m clumsy.”
“I got my box yesterday,” she said of The North Face haute cold weather wear, which even found favor with her 11-year-old daughter North West. “There’s no better feeling than my daughter and all of her friends coming in my room when I was opening it and then begging to wear all the suits.”
“It’s one of our highest waitlisted drops,” said Grede, adding that more than 180,000 people signed up the day it was announced. “What it really has shown is that Skims has a lot of opportunity for new categories in the future, and even more price elasticity. Customers really want Skims and not just exactly what we’re selling today.”
Following a leopard print-heavy Dolce & Gabbana collaboration that dropped in November, and previous capsules with Fendi and Swarovski, the body-hugging North Face lineup, which ranges from $60 to $1,200, is designed to go from the mountains to après-ski and beyond and features a down jacket, one-piece, shells and base layers, along with accessories.
The Skims x The North Face
Generating $5.4 million in media impact value in the first 48 hours after Thursday’s announcement, according to Launchmetrics, it is the latest example of Skims’ ability to create viral pop culture moments with luxury brands that resonate with the Hollywood set headed to Aspen for the holidays, and aspirational customers alike.
“We learned that when we launched our Fendi collab,” Kardashian said of the customer range. “We were nervous about leather dresses that were a couple thousand dollars, but those sold out immediately. That really surprised us, and really showed us what we can do, that there is a wider demographic, price-wise, than we really anticipated.”
Marketing Savvy
Their ability to harness the spotlight — Kardashian’s 364 million Instagram followers helps — and spot talent has also translated into news-making advertising campaigns, which this year alone have starred Lana del Rey and Sabrina Carpenter, ahead of their headlining performances at the Coachella Music Festival; Sunisa Lee, Fred Kerley, Gabby Thomas, Jessica Long, Caeleb Dressel and Nick Mayhugh for the Skims USA merch launch ahead of the Paris Summer Olympics; WNBA players as the new faces of the brand’s Fits Everybody collection; breast cancer survivor Olivia Munn showing her double mastectomy scars and modeling a nipple illusion bra to raise money for the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation, and the entire Goldie Hawn-Kate Hudson clad modeling jammies for the annual “famous family” holiday Skims campaign.
“There is a whole marketing group chat that we have going on. We send ideas all day, all night, and that’s the fun part…having a feeling that we love an artist or maybe an athlete, and coming up with a really great campaign,” Kardashian said of the brand’s talent-spotting savvy. “I think the Internet culture always is wondering, ‘What’s the next campaign?’ ‘Who’s it going to be?’ ‘What have they thought of now?’ and it’s always surprising.”
Sabriana Carpenter models for Skims.
“I think we have seen our talent campaigns become a little bit like a new generation magazine cover,” Grede said.
Throughout the interview, Kardashian spoke of her fondness for brick-and-mortar retail. Her first job at age 16 was in a now-defunct boutique called Body in the San Fernando Valley where she worked for four years.
“It was, like, the cool store in the Valley. And so I would pretty much work just to shop,” said Kardashian, noting that some of the stretchy D&G pieces she bought way back then were references for the Skims x Dolce & Gabbana campaign.
She also likes the community that physical stores foster. “When I opened up a Body store in Calabasas, or even at our Dash store, you get to know your neighbors,” she said, referencing the now-defunct Dash stores she and her sisters opened in three locations starting in 2006, which even spawned a spin-off TV series about Dash employees.
“You get to know who everyone is and all the people that work next door, and you become friends, and then you have your lunch breaks with them. So I want to go to Cartier and be like, ‘Hi guys…what time’s your coffee break?'” she laughed.
A look inside the new Skims store on Fifth Avenue.
Retail Strategy
Opening more brick-and-mortar is key to growth, Grede said, noting that 11 new leases have been signed, including for an L.A. flagship on Sunset Boulevard, as well as stores in San Diego and Palo Alto, Calif., and Charlotte.
“We’ve tried to have a great representation of the brand in the most important stores in the most important cities,” Grede said of Skims’ wholesale accounts, which include Selfridges, Le Bon Marche and Lane Crawford among others. “Now going into physical retail, with 85 percent of our sales coming from e-commerce, we are under-penetrated, and there’s a tremendous amount of growth opportunities for us here in the United States.…We’re hoping to open a lot more stores,” he said.
Not only did Skims make shapewear cool, the brand also made intimates inclusive with the range of shades it offers and bodies it represents. At the Fifth Avenue boutique, one of Kardashian’s favorite features is a display of busts that speak to that. “It’s a row of all different skin tones and sizes, maybe 50 …and it’s a huge wall…with all the different bras, and then the trunks with different men’s underwear. It just looks so visual,” she said.
A look inside the new Skims store on Fifth Avenue.
“I also picked the hangers and the metal on the hangers, and every material you could imagine from the stopper on the door to the floors. Materials and architecture and design is just my thing,” she said.
“Kim has a whole lifestyle and articulation of creative vision. You can only take it so far through digital media,” Grede said.
Victoria’s Secret may have grabbed headlines this year with the arrival of a new CEO determined to elevate the flagging brand, and a splashy fashion show, but Skims’ business has been “on fire,” Grede said, declining to share specific numbers, which he has done in the past “for various reasons.” The brand reportedly did $1 billion in net sales last year.
“I will say we are enjoying another year of very strong growth, and we’re seeing that especially in very strong results in same door sales, both in wholesale and our early retail doors,” he said. “I don’t want to give per square foot productivity, partly because they are incredibly strong. And things will moderate, of course, a little bit over time, but they are by far best in category, best in class, and rival the top of luxury. Now, it’s really about shifting the business from being such a dominant e-commerce company to building an omnichannel global brand presence.”
Grede thinks Skims has the opportunity to grow in-store to 50 percent of overall sales. “You know, 80 percent of purchases are done in physical stores, and we have a business where 80 percent of our purchases are done online. So clearly, we want to do the business the way the customers want to do business. We’re just in the very beginning of that journey.…Next year, there’s a big focus on putting inventory in Europe and really servicing Europe and the Middle East, because we’re seeing such a large share of our traffic interest there.”
A look inside the new Skims store on Fifth Avenue.
In 2024, Skims launched its own app and loyalty program, which has close to 1 million members now. “More than 15 percent of our business today is through our own app, and that’s in the span of nine months,” Grede said.
“We’ve had close to 10 million customers,” he said of the brand’s overall reach. “We know where they are, and we’re able to talk to them. And one of the amazing learnings is in terms of new customer acquisition, and just how much more productive a city becomes once we have a physical store,” he said. “It’s not a one plus one is one. It’s like a one plus one is three or four.”
“And that’s why the locations of our retail stores are so important. They’re all so visible that even if we didn’t market it, you’d see it,” Kardashian said. “Like our Washington, D.C., store, it’s right on the corner, and it’s this big, beautiful brick building, and all my friends that live in D.C. really didn’t know that we had a store, but they’d drive by there all the time and called me, asking, ‘Is this real?'”
Kardashian’s Role
While Skims was built to soar independently of Kardashian and her appeal, she likes to remain visible. “I will always love it,” she said of getting in front of the camera for campaigns or her own social media followers.
“I know every single product that we have, I have fit every single product that we have coming out. And I know if there is something that slid by me, that I didn’t get the final approval on from the detail on the stitching,” Kardashian said of her role. “And while I don’t design everything for me…if I can, I try to at some point, even if I’m just in my closet, show people how I would wear it versus how it was styled on someone else,” she said. “I love always showing our hosiery and shapewear. I think it’s really important, because I wear shapewear with everything, and I think before [Skims] — it’s not that it wasn’t accepted — it just wasn’t cool,” she said.
“Even if you think this sheer dress you need to go get it lined, no you don’t. Just wear shapewear underneath and it’ll do the job.,” she said as an example. “We have this one-legged shapewear, where one leg was cut out. You know, some people just didn’t understand what it was. To me, I would cut it and tape it on me so it wouldn’t roll up and I needed that leg out, but I needed the shapewear on the inside,” she said of the genesis of the Skims Solution shapewear designed for outfits with an exposed leg. “So I like showing people how product is worn.”
Dolce & Gabbana Skims campaign with Kim Kardashian.
New Categories
While shapewear will always be at the core, Skims is quickly evolving into a full apparel brand.
“Skims is a new category that sits between lounge and intimate and close to the body. That’s what we’re defining. That’s what the store is helping to define. That’s what the customer is responding to,” Grede said of the assortment, which includes women’s, men’s and childrenswear.
Could Skims one day be on the runway?
“I can absolutely see us doing a show, not like a regularly on the fashion schedule show, but maybe something a little bit more unique,” Kardashian said. “It would have to be an experience more than a regular show, but I would never rule anything out.”
“The beauty of making collaborations is that it allows us to creatively go outside of what we do and our safe space and try new things. So you never know,” Grede added.
As for the company’s much-discussed initial public offering following a $270 million raise last July from institutional backers, it seems to be on the back burner.
“The only ones who have never spoken about our IPO is us. All I do is respond to people asking about it. We have never made a decision to go public,” Grede said. “All I’ve ever said and maybe that was a mistake, was I said at some point we deserve to be a public company. And we have institutional investors, so of course, at some point we need to offer them optionality,” he said. “But we have long-term investors. They’re incredibly supportive of our journey. And I think as people, both of us would say we are enjoying our time right now. We might make that position in the future, but that’s not what I’m thinking about.”
While apparel sales have been mixed in recent months, Grede’s outlook for Skims is strong for the holiday season, following a slower start after the U.S. election. “Coming back to the point that 85 percent of our business is direct…we have tremendous opportunity — physical, retail, wholesale, international markets, product category extensions. Now we have a lot of levers to pull, and I think we’re just in the first or second inning of building this company.”
