How Much Money Does New York And Company Make A Year
Kim Kardashian's Billion-Dollar Brand Defies the Pandemic
Her shapewear company, Skims, is now valued at $1.6 billion, fifty-fifty as shoppers shifted to looser-fitting dress during lockdowns.
Kim Kardashian West in her Skims pop-upward store in Los Angeles this week. Credit... Greg Swales for The New York Times
Not long after Kim Kardashian West launched her shapewear brand Skims in 2019, pandemic lockdowns consigned its torso-fitting product line to the dorsum of consumers' closets.
But Skims survived. Moreover, it has become a billion-dollar business.
The visitor has raised $154 1000000 in new funding, which Ms. Kardashian Westward said had lifted its valuation to $ane.vi billion. It is a heady amount for a not-quite two-year-old clothing brand, fifty-fifty one led past someone with her star power.
It also cements Ms. Kardashian W's condition as a billionaire in her own right. In announcing her entry into that order this week, Forbes estimated Skims' value at much less than that. She will remain Skims' biggest shareholder after the deal, and she and her business partner, Jens Grede, will control a majority stake.
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Skims benefited from a well-timed introduction of pajamas and loungewear, with product lines such equally the "cozy collection" bolstering sales every bit women take traded class-plumbing equipment styles for sweatpants. Only shapewear made Skims famous, and it remains the company's key product line.
"Nosotros're your basics go-to," Ms. Kardashian W said in a Zoom interview equally she prepared for a photo shoot, even as "nosotros're still able to keep that shapewear cadre."
To justify its valuation, she is counting on a return to normal — or, at to the lowest degree, to squeezing into tightfitting clothing again — to go on up the momentum.
Skims is not the first billion-dollar business organization associated with the Kardashian empire, or with Ms. Kardashian W. She sold a minority stake in her cosmetics line to the makeup giant Coty, valuing it at $1 billion. Her sister Kylie Jenner sold a majority stake in her ain cosmetics line, also to Coty, in a deal that valued information technology at $1.two billion.
Skims too isn't Ms. Kardashian Westward's first foray into wear. She and her sisters Khloé and Kourtney had a line with Sears that essentially served as a licensing bargain over which she had little control.
Ms. Kardashian West said she was deeply involved in Skims, from helping to pattern fabrics and collections to picking photographers for product shoots to studying sales data. (And like nearly things Kardashian, Skims has at times been a family thing: Kanye West, Ms. Kardashian West's at present-estranged husband, was "super involved" in the beginning, giving frank criticism of early on designs for Skims packaging, she said.)
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Skims is i of several new e-commerce-first wear brands — a group that also includes Heist Studios and Honeylove — to spot an opportunity in the shapewear business organization, which has for decades been dominated primarily by one company, Spanx. Earlier 2020, when sales of shapewear dropped thirty percent, the category consistently generated merely over $500 million in sales a year, or 3 percent of total dress sales, co-ordinate to NPD. Similar other shapewear start-ups, Skims was aiming for the younger end of the marketplace.
Skims divers itself with an emphasis on inclusivity, offering nine sizes, up to 5X, in as many skin-tone shades. Inside its outset 9 weeks, it had racked upward 2 million names on its wait lists, Mr. Grede said. To engagement, Skims has sold more than four meg units, with a customer retention rate of over 30 per centum. Skims products are also sold at the high-end department stores Nordstrom and United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland's Selfridges and several online retailers.
Skims faced challenges even before the pandemic. 1 was of Ms. Kardashian West's ain making: The visitor was initially chosen Kimono, until accusations of cultural cribbing prompted her to alter the moniker. ("Even when it seemed innocent to me," she said, "people didn't come across it that way.")
Then, in add-on to declining shapewear sales during the pandemic, the company suffered delays in sourcing raw material for its fabrics, which hampered its ability to develop, produce and ultimately sell new products.
"We had to effigy out different factories and had to get creative," Ms. Kardashian Due west said. Even so, Skims reported $145 one thousand thousand in sales last year, and expects to roughly double sales to $300 million this year.
By final fall, the company was beingness courted by potential investors. Ms. Kardashian West and Mr. Grede somewhen homed in on Thrive Capital, the venture capital business firm that has backed consumer businesses like the eyewear brand Warby Parker and the cosmetics company Glossier. (Ms. Kardashian Due west'southward social circle includes Thrive'due south founder, Joshua Kushner, and his wife, the model Karlie Kloss.)
The circular likewise includes funding from ii existing investors, Imaginary Ventures and Alliance Consumer Growth.
"Nosotros have been continuously impressed by Skims' power to connect with consumers on a personal level and keep them coming back for more," Nabil Mallick, a partner at Thrive, said in a argument.
Epitome
What'south next for Skims depends on how the pandemic has reshaped the vesture market place. "Shapewear, which is really bought for an occasion, has been downtrending during the pandemic, and downtrending substantially," Mr. Grede said. He expects an eventual "rebalancing" of sales across product categories, with demand returning. The signs from retailers such as Anthropologie, which said concluding month that seven of its top 10 acknowledged items online were dresses, suggest that shoppers may be planning to resume dressing more than formally.
Kristen Classi-Zummo, an analyst at NPD, offered a more than cautious take, reckoning that the category would rebound, though customers who have grown used to comfort volition insist on piece of cake-fitting apparel fifty-fifty every bit they re-embrace some aspects of shapewear.
"I practise retrieve nosotros'll get dressed up again," Ms. Classi-Zummo said, "but I practice think it will await and feel different."
Ms. Kardashian West said she hoped to build Skims into a "multigenerational brand that will be around for a very long time."
But she did non rule out eventually selling the business organisation — and then long as she retained a role in its operations. "I call back I'chiliad open to the chat, for sure," she said. But "I would never want to give up my process. I would promise that whoever we partner with in a sale ane day would believe in that, as well."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/business/dealbook/kardashian-skims.html
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