The Business of Fashion Podcast - Jens Grede on Building Skims, Frame and the Future of Fashion

Jens Grede on Building Skims, Frame and the Future of Fashion

07/01/22 • 45 min

2 Listeners

The multitasking entrepreneur joins BoF founder and chief executive Imran Amed to discuss the personal and professional journey that led him to co-create the category-disrupting brand Skims with Kim Kardashian.

Background:

Jens Grede has built some of the most successful direct-to-consumer brands in American fashion. Alongside his wife Emma, he launched Brady with Tom Brady, Good American with Khloe Kardashian, and, of course, Kim Kardashian’s category-disrupting Skims. This week on the BoF Podcast, the Swedish-born former ad man joins BoF founder and editor-in-chief Imran Amed to discuss his journey through the fashion industry — from realising one of his early dreams of creating an ad for Calvin Klein to to elevating Skims into a once-in-a generation brand in the vein of Lululemon or Nike’s Jordan brand.

“I've waited my whole career to be part of a moment like this, and I'm very scared of messing it up,” says Grede. “At the same time, I know that if we stop experimenting, if we stop innovating, that is the fastest way to mess it up.”

Key Insights:

Cultivating a sense of community is one of the only ways to scale a brand now, according to Grede. Great community starts with creating for yourself: products you like, want to buy and can afford.
Grede describes one of his biggest mistakes — attempting to trademark the brand name “Kimono” with Kardashian — as one of the most important moments of his career because of what he learned about community and partnership. He said the Skims team listened, owned the mistake and pivoted.
Fashion is at the cusp of a huge change in distribution due to pivots in culture, algorithms and the outsized role of social media. Grede thinks every major fashion brand that has scaled successfully was born in the cracks of a major distribution change.

Additional Resources:

Skims Plots Its Next Moves: ‘We Don’t Have the Luxury of Failing.’ Skims recently raised funding at a $3.2 billion valuation. Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede, in an exclusive interview with BoF, explain how the ‘solution wear’ empire plans to prove it’s more than a pandemic fad. First up: swimwear.
The BoF Podcast: Building Disruptive Direct-to-Consumer Brands. The entrepreneurs behind Allbirds, Hims and Hers and Good American outline the keys to their brands’ success.
Building a DTC Challenger Brand | Download the Case Study. Fashion entrepreneurs need a new playbook to launch, scale and differentiate their companies, as regulations and rising costs mean performance marketing can no longer serve the critical role it once did for DTC brands.

Join BoF Professional today using the link here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Background:

Key Insights:

Cultivating a sense of community is one of the only ways to scale a brand now, according to Grede. Great community starts with creating for yourself: products you like, want to buy and can afford.
Grede describes one of his biggest mistakes — attempting to trademark the brand name “Kimono” with Kardashian — as one of the most important moments of his career because of what he learned about community and partnership. He said the Skims team listened, owned the mistake and pivoted.
Fashion is at the cusp of a huge change in distribution due to pivots in culture, algorithms and the outsized role of social media. Grede thinks every major fashion brand that has scaled successfully was born in the cracks of a major distribution change.

Additional Resources:

Skims Plots Its Next Moves: ‘We Don’t Have the Luxury of Failing.’ Skims recently raised funding at a $3.2 billion valuation. Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede, in an exclusive interview with BoF, explain how the ‘solution wear’ empire plans to prove it’s more than a pandemic fad. First up: swimwear.
The BoF Podcast: Building Disruptive Direct-to-Consumer Brands. The entrepreneurs behind Allbirds, Hims and Hers and Good American outline the keys to their brands’ success.
Building a DTC Challenger Brand | Download the Case Study. Fashion entrepreneurs need a new playbook to launch, scale and differentiate their companies, as regulations and rising costs mean performance marketing can no longer serve the critical role it once did for DTC brands.

Join BoF Professional today using the link here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

The Debrief: The Decline of the Skinny Jean

After years of analyst anticipation that the leg-squeezing silhouette would soon go out of style, market research firm NPD Group found sales for the skinny jeans fell behind straight leg jeans in 2021. Skinny jeans are far from dead though — still accounting for 30 percent of sales. Retailers have already felt the effects of the shift: Pacsun pulled the style from its stores because no one was buying it.

“It really just speaks to the changing of the times and how styles are evolving within fashion,” said BoF correspondent Chavie Leiber.

Key Insights:

Skinny jeans are no longer the most popular denim silhouette, according to data from NPD Group. But, that doesn’t mean no one is buying them.
As consumers come out of the pandemic, they don’t just want comfort. Shoppers are either skewing toward raw denim with no stretch or athleisure and leggings — but jegging and stretch denim styles occupying the in-between have started to fall to the wayside.
The world is in the midst of a “denim Renaissance,” says Marie Pearson, senior vice president of denim at Madewell, who added she’s never seen so many different types of fits and shapes selling.

Additional Resources:

Join BoF Professional today with our exclusive podcast listener discount of 25% off an annual membership, follow the link here and enter the coupon code ‘debrief’ at checkout.

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Next Episode

Ian Rogers on the Inevitability of Virtual Fashion

Ian Rogers moved from Silicon Valley to Paris in 2015 when he was appointed chief digital officer of LVMH. There, Rogers, a veteran of Apple Music and Beats, was tasked with building out the luxury conglomerate’s e-commerce and data strategy and serving as a digital whisperer to executives.

Background:

Now, he’s chief experience officer of Ledger, a security system that provides protection for digital currencies. Given his experience at the cutting edge of both tech and fashion, he is uniquely positioned to speak to the opportunities being created as crypto technologies, gaming and fashion converge. In his mind, one day, virtual fashion will be ubiquitous.

His insights were originally featured in the fourth episode of The BoF Show, “Dematerialisation: Why the Metaverse Is Fashion’s Next Goldmine,” streaming on Bloomberg Quicktake.

Key Insights

Rogers’ background in the music industry has helped inform the way he perceives’ luxury’s need to take control of digital channels. Record labels lost out big on recorded music because they were in denial of consumers' desire to listen to music online.
Having goods that are both digital and physical, or, “phygital” is the gateway to the existence of purely virtual goods. In order for virtual goods to have real value and meaning, there need to be marketplaces and venues for using them.
People have a desire to collect things. With the rise of NFTs, there’s a way to create scarcity digitally — which gives fashion brands an opportunity to create virtual goods based on the principles and hype and rarity that drive the industry today.
The biggest misconceptions people have is that there’s a distinction between the physical and digital worlds, according to Rogers. The blurring of realities in the metaverse will ultimately change our perceptions of what’s real — and valuable.
Most technology surrounding digital goods, NFTs, crypto and the metaverse is still nascent, and storytelling about its potential has been ahead of reality.

Additional Resources

Dematerialisation: Why the Metaverse Is Fashion’s Next Goldmine. Physical and digital worlds merge in the Metaverse. Can the luxury world dematerialise into the virtual space fast enough to attract eager customers — and their avatars?
What the NFT Gold Rush Means for Fashion. The market for digital collectibles is booming. Opportunity or passing fad?
Why Streetwear and NFTs Are a Perfect Match. Both trade in heavily hyped, limited-edition products that offer a sense of community. Fashion brands aiming to tap digital art take note.

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