Working from home is career suicide. And we only talk about the upside of

working from home. And here we go.

We know that people don't really want to hear this.

Think about what's happening in the world.

Declining birthrates, declining marriage rates and loneliness epidemic.

And we think that none of that is linked to the number of people that like, don't

see people because they are like doing Zoom calls from the living room.

Like it's so crazy to not make that correlation.

I'm Francine Lacqua and this is Leaders, the podcast that explores what drives

the world's most influential people. This week I'm speaking to Emma Grede.

She's the chief executive and co-founder of Good American and founding partner of

Skims, the shapewear and loungewear brand, which was valued at $5 billion in

November 2025. Now, the last ten years have seen her

star rise, a lot of it down to her successful partnerships with a celebrity

family named the Kardashians. But now may be a pivotal time for her.

And I wanted to talk to her about one of the best and worst days of her career,

how she leads with radical honesty and why, as a self-styled behind the scenes

woman, she's now chosen to step out into the limelight.

Emma Grede, thank you so much for joining us.

It's exciting to speak to you again. It's so lovely to see you again.

Talk to me about the Good American. The day you launched was seen as one of

the biggest successes almost of all times in the world of denim.

A million write in sales. Hmm.

But then you write in your book that actually was it was quite stressful and

didn't go to plan. You know what?

That's an understatement, because it's really interesting when something from

the outside looks so perfect. And in one way, it was a total dream.

You know, it was the first time I'd done a business in apparel.

And for all intents and purposes, it was like this beautiful, amazing thing that

went so well, except from the inside where, you know, I had no inventory.

We'd had this beautiful dream, first million dollar day that kind of went

down in history. But behind the scenes, I was scrambling

like a waitlist kind of coming out of my ear holes and no way to satisfy the

demand. But more than that, I had like this kind

of doubt permeating through the company on the board with my shareholders that

perhaps because of that oversight, that I wasn't the right person to run the

company. And actually, looking back, it's kind of

interesting that I never felt any fear around that moment.

I just kind of looked at everyone and was like, Leave me alone.

I'm going to figure it out. But actually, there was not a moment where you

thought, actually, I, you know, I need to take a step back or I need to convince the

board or no. And it's so interesting because so many

people talk to me about, you know, imposter syndrome of being a first time

founder. I never had any of that.

I always think, like, if not me, then who?

You know, like in my head, it was my idea and I brought it to fruition and I

was going to figure out any of the problems.

And so much of being an entrepreneur is about figuring it out.

You never have the answers. And I think if you have the answers,

you're probably not moving fast enough. But the board told you off.

I got a bit of telling off. Yeah, well, I wouldn't say telling

off. There were just some dismissive tones.

So I think that's, you know, is that I was a genius at 9 a.m.

and by noon it was like perhaps you're not, you know, best suited for this

role. And I just completely dismissed that.

So how did you regroup? In a really tumultuous like way

I think, you know, I did what I know to do, which is when you don't know

something, you ask somebody who does. And so I started calling around.

I tried to like information gather. I was calling competitors, I was calling

retailers. I was like literally visiting factories.

And so in a way, you could literally get on the ground and say, like, how can I,

you know, how could I change this? How can you move this?

But the simple fact was the fabric wasn't available because I hadn't had

the foresight to get out in front of the calendar and know what I was, you know,

up against. But a new brand is a new brand.

There was no data, there was no history. There was nothing telling me that this

was going to be that successful. And so would I have

done anything different? No, I don't think so.

What did you learn about yourself? Because a lot of chief executives will

say, look, it's only by learning and failing that, finally you have the

posture to say, like, look, I got this. Yeah, but you think I got this right

from the start. I really did.

And perhaps that was naivete, but I knew I'd figure it out in my head.

I just thought, this is just another problem.

And my life is a series of problems as a leader and as somebody who starts

companies and builds things from scratch.

Did you tell the employees or did you celebrate with them and figure it out by

yourself? I do.

You know, I had no choice. The great thing about Good American,

it's that I chosen that initial team really well.

So I had veterans in my business, the person, and thank God she still works

for me now, but in a different company. But the woman that was really in charge

of products had been in the denim space for 20 years, and the guy that ran all

design really was, you know, like so ingratiated in the denim community in

L.A. that we were able to literally knock on

doors and ask favors. And so I thankfully surrounded myself

with people who knew better and could help me open doors.

You talk a lot about, you know, giving employees honest feedback.

Is that called radical honesty?

What how would you describe it? It is radical honesty, but that's also

so much about who I am. And so I've always thought to myself, I

can just be honest with myself. I don't need to walk around with some,

you know, guilt on my shoulder and carrying stuff that doesn't serve me.

So for me, it's just about honesty. Take the learning, move on.

What does that look like when you talk to employees?

It looks very straightforward. Here's the thing.

I don't think anybody in my organizations ever wondered what I'm

thinking. Nobody's like trying to

figure out how I am is feeling. It's like I am really firm and

I'm really fair. I have very, very, very high expectations for

myself and for everybody around me. I give very, very clear feedback on my

job as founder and as a CEO is to have the vision right, but it's to

communicate that vision downwards. And so I'm in a constant conversation

with everyone around me. I think I'm super repetitive.

I say the same three things over and over and over again, and everybody in

the organization should be able to know what our priorities are and know what

we're doing. And so I think I'm a little bit of a

broken record, but I think that there's an element of consistency that comes

with that. And I'm bloody consistent.

And you've talked before about needing different people around you to go from

1 million to 100 million to 5 billion, don't you just it's not the same people.

And, you know, I kind of raised myself in business having an enterprise

mentality. I learned that very, very often.

I'm not here to do people favors business is business.

And I do what's best for the company every single day.

And often that is what's best for the individual.

Nobody wants to be kept in a role that they're not best suited to because that

never works out for the individual or for the organization.

So I've learned over time that, you know, what is good for the company is

ultimately good for everybody. But what is that?

Ruthlessness? I don't know that it's ruthlessness.

I think that is just being able to delineate what is right at the time.

And, you know, here's the thing. I think specifically as a female leader,

you're judged on, you know, how empathetic are you?

And so I think the way that we work and the reason that I think directness is

always best, we all know where we stand all the time.

I'm not waiting for an assessment moment or six month mark or some kind of like

formal review. If you're failing, you probably know

you're failing because we've probably spoken about it.

It's not like a bolt out of the blue. So how do you how do you hire people

that you think can take the heat in the kitchen, or do you expect everyone to

just, you know, take it? Well, I hire differently for different

stages of the business, but I think in the beginning, you know, you want

generalists, you want people that are going to have a you know, I'll do that

hand up mentality, whatever it is. I think as businesses mature.

You're looking for more, you know, category and subject and departmental

expertise and typically hiring for an enormous amount of experience.

But for me, what I place so much value on is flexibility.

You have to be willing to look and take your experience and do things a little

bit differently. So I'm always trying to hire for people

that are seriously experienced but seriously flexible.

Is there a concern with loyalty? I mean, is are employees still loyal if

they feel that you can cut them off at any point?

I mean, I don't know about cutting them off at any point.

And I think that loyalty is something that you earn, you know, is a trust in a

business. It really is about people learning to

trust that what you say is what you mean and is what happens.

And when you do that, you can be trusted regardless.

Do you think a lot about incentives? Yeah.

I mean, I think that that is just the expectation that incentives have to be

built in for the best people. And that happens at all levels at the

organization. Everybody has to understand how the

incentives come to be right. The company has to perform well in order

that the incentives to be, you know, created.

But then for them to be paid out and to make sense. You can't mention Emma Grede

without the Kardashians, in a way, they were her

biggest supporters. She reportedly met matriarch Kris Jenner

first and pitched teaming up with Khloe Kardashian for Good American.

But was there actually a moment, a meeting of minds?

And how did she convince some of the most famous people in the world to go

into business with her? Can you talk to me about the pitch when

you pitched Good American to the Kardashians?

There was never such a like a pitch idea.

You know, specifically with Good American.

There was an idea that I had, and I really felt that the partnership would,

you know, make this thing just accelerate.

But it never is, you know, how people kind of see it in the movies.

There was a relationship that existed and a moment in time and the best things

and the best businesses always work when what's happening in the culture chimes

with whatever you're doing. And I think at that moment when you go

back nine years ago, the idea of body positivity and what it meant to do real

inclusivity in fashion just wasn't what it was today.

And so I think that whenever you're starting something, it's like this

melting pot and a smorgasbord of small decisions and the right thing in the

culture and the right moment in time and you being the right person and some

element of magic has to happen that there's never like this that bingo

moment where everyone goes, Yeah, let's go.

Don't you have to. I mean, you had to sell your idea,

right? At some point.

Yeah, but like, you need to sell an idea that is like that.

Good. You know, it's like there's an idea, and

then there are people that decide to jump on board.

But, you know, again, I think it like it feels more and more like a fantasy to be

like this, this moment of sale and this moment of.

Yes, because the best partnerships have happened over time and they come

together because everybody has something to bring to the table.

And I think that that was one of those magical moments.

A lot of people have ideas, but then they don't really.

Come to fruition. Difficult.

They have, you know, things that they want to do in their heads.

And an idea can live on a piece of paper or on your desktop for the longest time,

but you've got to get out. The hardest thing is to just get out of

the gate. But why?

What's holding people back? And I do see that a lot, actually.

People are either too afraid or do or say they don't know where to start or

they don't have the capital. You know, I don't come from a background

where I had either the capital or the network or like the educational

background or any of those things. I just tried a lot of stuff and

eventually one of those things happened to work out.

And at some point you've just got to take whatever it is that you have and

try. And again, I think that we're in such a

time where there's this idea that everything has to be like a billion dollar

brand, everything has to be a unicorn, but you've managed to do everything at

scale, right? So yeah,

I mean, everything they know about the failures.

There's a ton of failures. There's a ton of things that I've done

that didn't work. And when I think about my early

businesses, I opened offices that didn't quite work out.

I have, you know, grown companies and then had to downsize them.

And those things are really painful. Right now.

We only show the glossy side, the amazing things, the great headlines, the

stuff we want to put on our Instagram. And the reality is anyone who is an

entrepreneur that's done multiple things will have failed.

And you have to get comfortable with this idea of not everything working out.

It's not always that you did something wrong, that this thing in this time,

this situation didn't work for a myriad of reasons.

So long as you figure out what are those reasons and what did I learn from it and

what will I do different next time, then that has to be left behind.

And I think that if you look around in the culture, that is way harder for

women than it is for men, because women are held to an entirely different

standard when they start things and they fail.

And yet we have men that fail over and over again and close it down and go out

and race the next day and nobody mentions anything about it.

So once you have a failure, do you do a postmortem to see what went wrong?

Do you, with the whole team? I tell you, it's absolutely.

And you really have to understand, well, what did you do?

Right? Because I think it's easy to point to

the market and conditions. It's easy to look at all of the things

that were outside of your control. But often there's a pattern in these

things like that you are a huge part of. And so I really try to, you know, and I

hate to go, woo woo, you kind of have to go inside.

You have to understand like, what is there that I miss and what is it that I

didn't say and how can I change that for the next thing for a long time?

Emma Grede has been the brains behind growing other people's brands, but over

the last few years she's been making a visible effort to be front and center.

Whether it's launching a podcast, high profile TV appearances or now her debut

book, Start With Yourself. This new chapter appears firmly focused

on building her own brand. But I wanted to know why now and what

next. So in the past, you used to say you were

a behind the scenes woman. Yeah.

What's changed? You know, I still feel like a behind the

scenes woman. I still go into the office every single

day, you know, I'm not behind the scenes in, you know, behind the scenes in front

of the camera. I do a lot of things and wear a few

hats. I think what I've realized as I've

become more successful is that wherever I go, people ask me the same questions.

They always say, you know, how did you do this?

And I don't think people are that interested in me.

I think they want to understand how they can be successful for themselves.

I'm really trying to like lift the lid and demystify what it means to have a

successful career and to start a business and to scale a business and

what it means to sell or IPO a business and specifically through the lens of a

woman, because I believe that there is social conditioning that actually makes

women avoid the exact behaviors that lead to wealth creation, that lead to

success, that lead to leadership and opportunity for us.

What do you think actually doesn't serve female leaders because it starts from a

very young age. How long have you have a lot of time

that I need to get these girls, like when they're ten, 11, 12, you know,

because a lot of it is what we carry. I don't know that

The idea of imposter syndrome even exist when we talk about male founders, male

entrepreneurs. Why would we be talking about it so

frequently for women? I've heard.

Male Do you have? Yes, Yes, I had it, Yes.

Really? I've never heard one.

They say, Look, I looked around the room and I thought, actually, if they can do

it, I can do it, I can do it. But the same sentence set by women

carries a different way. And I have seen certainly in my own

career, this notion of imposter syndrome can be planted as a seed even when it

doesn't exist. And that's what I want to stop.

I want to stop. Stopping ourselves, getting out of the

gates before we've even given ourselves a chance.

Because my experience is that women are excellent at making money in business,

and they are excellent at just thinking about things in a really unique way.

And I hear so many women that are brilliant, especially when they come

back into the workplace after having children because their time and the way

they think about things and is so much more precious that they get really,

really good at how to run. Oh, they get so quickly, so much done

and they get it done so quickly with a different sense of urgency.

Do you see yourself as a retail mogul? No, that's a conglomerate.

You're all over the Internet and you're trying to build the next LVMH.

Does that feel good?

It's funny. I mean, that's such an interesting

headline. How flattering.

I don't I think that's a little. I think that's like Instagram headlines.

Oh, that's a good It's a good one. It is.

Yeah. But it's a good.

What do you want it What are you trying to build?

What's really interesting is that what I set out to do, I've kind of done I

wanted to create businesses that I could be really proud of and I wanted to be

part of businesses that I really enjoyed going in and working in every day.

Like I wake up on a Monday and I'm like, Let's go.

And that for me is winning because where I grew up and where I come from, people

dreaded work. They went to work to pay their bills and

that is not what I do. I do it and I do it for a lot less.

I mean, I'm glad it comes with what it does,

but I'll be honest, You see big. You dream big.

Yeah, I've always seen big and dream big.

I think that there comes, you know, there's a level of responsibility that

comes with that because I think that, you know, when I look at the landscape

specifically for women, specifically for women of colour, you know, I think that

talent is fairly evenly distributed, but opportunity isn't.

And so when I look at the ability that I have to create opportunity for other

people, that feels like a responsibility for me, not in a like super worthy way,

but in a way where it's like, Wow, there's a lot of great stuff out there

and I've done really well putting my money into other female founders.

So I actually think there's this whole part of what I'm doing that is part

lifting the lid, part giving opportunity, a part bringing in, you

know, like a bunch of people into a conversation and into the business

climate that might not otherwise be doing it.

And really, they should. Are you good?

I mean, you seem very good at identifying.

I'm really good at spotting things that what are you is is this I mean that's a

difficult challenge. It's it's it's it's like magic.

And listen, I think there's a part of me that says I would have thought that

sounds easy now because my deal flow is so good, but I was good at it even when

it wasn't. You know, I'm getting spot in

opportunities. I think.

I think like a customer, you know, I am my own customer in so much of what I do,

I have a terrific sense of value on what something is worth.

If you buy a pair of jeans from me for 149 bucks, they're going to be worth

like every 149 that you pay for them. Is a customer of today radically

different from the customer of ten years ago?

Customers are so much more informed and there are no barriers to what you can

get, where you can get it. And brands have more responsibility to

their customers than ever before. And that's fine.

That's healthy. You know, may the best brands win. Is it

more difficult? It's just harder to sell, harder to sell

because of tariffs and moving stuff around. And the the media landscape is so

much more fragmented, Right? Yeah.

I think if you go back to when I started Good American, you could find all of

these crazy unlocks and that shifted into Instagram and shifted into tick

tock and now it's totally fragmented and we're all like struggling.

And wondering where our customer is coming from the social media is that yes,

somewhat social media. But what channels in social media and

where are you spending and how does, you know, how does that shift and change on

a daily basis depending on the platform and the vertical even within those

channels? So I think there's a lot to consider.

The thing that I've learned is that good products will always win.

And so what I you know, I don't let that side of things keep me up at night.

What keeps me up at night is coming up with a new innovation, constantly

delighting and pleasing our customers and coming up with things that they

don't even know that they need. Is there a brand that you admire more

than others? Oh, my goodness.

There's so many brands that I admire. We just spoke about LVMH, but like Louis

Vuitton, you know, I always look at that brand because it's so hard to stay that

hot all the time. And, you know, even when I think about a

brand like Chanel, you know, it's like it's a brand that I have always wanted

since I was ten years old. And I want it even more now.

You know, I'm like constantly texting to figure out when I can get this latest

collection when they hit the store, how do I not miss it?

And I really admire brands that have that type of staying power coupled with

that type of heat. That's a really, really hard thing to

do. And of course I would say brands in

fashion. But, you know, I, I don't know enough

about like the other spaces I'm, of course, enthralled by what's happening

in AI At the moment, and I feel like I'm like

everybody else. I'm just trying to keep up and trying to

make sure I understand and trying to make sure that I'm using everything at

my disposal. Do you think it'll change?

Your business is changing our business. Yeah, undoubtedly.

In terms of hiring or I think mostly in terms of like how we how we are planning

the business. So when you think about inventory needs,

customer data, the way that AI is able to get into those systems and read quicker

than we've ever been able to. I think what's really interesting is

how. How to think about businesses in the age

of AI. You know, the way that I look at it is

that you have to safeguard everything that requires a human touch, creativity,

innovation, design, like all of those things should be done by people that

understand other people's needs and the rest ought to be AI.

Okay, I have rapid fire. You ready?

Right. Working from home, good or bad?

Working from home is career suicide. And we only talk about the upside of

working from home. And here we go.

We know that people don't really want to hear this.

Think about what's happening in the world.

Declining birth rates, declining marriage riates and loneliness epidemic.

And we think that none of that is linked to the number of people that like, don't

see people because they're like doing zoom calls from the living room.

Like, it's so crazy to not make that correlation.

The key to a long and happy life is your close relationships.

Should the unpaid internship be brought back?

Listen, I did a lot of unpaid internships and I did it while being

somebody that didn't have a lot of money.

And that was a real struggle for me. It was a huge unlock for me, the ability

to go into an organization and get under the hood without having any

qualifications or right to really be there.

I think that there have to be certain protections on it, but I'd like to like

lift the lid because there's so much like to be learned. MBA -- worth it or a

waste of money. It depends how much money you've got.

It wasn't my path. Listen, I.

I am a mother of four, and so the idea that any of my kids would go and do an

MBA would be an absolute dream. But what I force it on them, that's like

an individual decision. And if you can, then do it.

If you can't. Don't sweat it.

Emma, thank you so much.

Thank you so much. What a joy

That was so fun. Thank you.

I kind of like flew, but it's seven. Know what happened?

I'm like, Oh, it's all good. You.