Jens Grede如何破解流行文化，打造十亿美元品牌

Technology, disruption in the supply chain, distribution—those things are what make brands happen.

What is behind changes like that?

Once she showed me aesthetically what she wanted to create, I couldn't get that out of my head. I just couldn't. I have to really watch it so we don't become a victim of our own success. It's not the whole cake, but it's the biggest part of the cake.

I have to start with the name of your holding company, which is Popular Culture, which I think is the coolest name for a holding company I've encountered. It demands the opening question: What trends in popular culture do you think are the most interesting today?

Well, first of all, thank you. I have always wanted to have a really cool name. Mission accomplished. You're probably the first person who's commented on it, so 15 years later, I finally got the recognition I was looking for. I appreciate it.

I named my company Popular Culture because I'm a real child of ’90s pop culture. Growing up in Sweden—and you partly grew up in Minnesota, so you know the feeling of what it's like in January to ride your bike to your friend's house—I would ride my bike to my friend's house to watch Beverly Hills, 90210 and Baywatch. We would sit there and eat chips. Could you imagine yourself living like that? Could you imagine yourself being at the Peach Pit?

1. The Power of Pop Culture & Commerce

I was a real child of ’90s pop culture, the skateboard scene, and music. I've always been obsessed with it. As I got older, I would say the red thread in my career has been the ability to work at the intersection of pop culture and commerce—first through my first chapter on behalf of my clients, and later in life as an entrepreneur and as an investor. I have believed that pop culture today is really the only hack to the consumer economy that we have. For me, it was the obvious name because that's what I do.

When you say “hack to the consumer,” does that mean the means through which to reach them, build something for them, and make sure that they know about it?

It's really hard to reach a critical mass of consumers today. If someone gave you and me $1 billion to start a vodka company, we could call it Winter Warmth and spend that money on TV, billboards, and Meta. We wouldn't have half the brand recognition that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has for his tequila company, Tamana. So you tell me: What's the value of Dwayne Johnson? Is it $1 billion, or is it $5 billion?

It's really the only way today that you can reach a critical mass of U.S. consumers. It's not just building awareness, but building a sense of knowing what the company stands for and what the brand's trying to do. It's for personality, and it is for culture.

I think today, as we're living through a fragmentation of media, my social media feed looks entirely different from yours and entirely different from my wife's. We are consuming different news from each other and often very different opinions from one another. If I'm into fly-fishing, I can live in a fly-fishing world where fly-fishing is the most important thing in the world. I can watch fly-fishing shows and engage with other fly fishermen, and I truly believe that fly-fishing runs the universe.

The only 2 things that really cut across are pop culture and sport. I put sport in the culture bracket. Sport and culture are the only 2 things that generally tend to cross all those boundaries in society today—political, racial, and religious boundaries that society has drawn up and that, in many cases, the algorithms have strengthened.

2. The Role of Individuals vs. Institutions

Can you talk about the difference between the role of individuals versus institutions today, versus, say, the ’90s, when you developed your interest in pop culture? It seems like that change has been seismic and really important for businesses. I don't know if the consumer makes as much of a distinction today as we used to.

When we grew up, a singer was a singer, an actor was an actor, a brand was a brand, a soda maker was a soda maker, and a clothing company was a clothing company. Brands and individuals had very little agency to move past the box the consumer had put them in, or that they had themselves worked within. There was just very little room.

I think we made a very clear distinction between a corporation and an individual. My sense is, if you ask a 20-year-old today, they make very few of those distinctions. Not only can you be a wrestler who becomes the world's biggest movie star and a phenomenal entrepreneur, but the lines between these disciplines have been entirely blurred.

Ryan Reynolds is a movie star and also the founder of a mobile phone network. That's bizarre. I don't think that would have been the case 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. The consumer doesn't really mind.

In fact, I think in a world where we generally have a distrust of authority, and in a world where truth is somewhat debatable, the importance of an individual and the voice of an individual has probably never been higher. I think we see that from the business I'm in all the way to the Oval Office. Having a strong voice in culture today translates into a strong voice in consumer, but also a strong voice in politics.

3. Cultural Shifts and Their Drivers

I want to stick with culture for a moment and ask what you think drives major changes. You and I have talked before about the change from hip-hop to country as a big theme of changing culture in the U.S. and around the world. What is behind changes like that? Is it people that drive it? Is it a confluence of forces? What is the input data that you watch to figure out how things are changing and why?

Everything we have around us is a reaction and a counterreaction. I don't think that just goes for music. I think the current political climate is a clear counterreaction to the previous 4 years. That was a reaction to the previous 4 years.

I think the same thing is true for pop culture. What I'm seeing, quite interestingly, is that pop culture used to be more contrarian to the establishment. The ’90s were about being contrarian to the establishment. It wouldn't matter if it was Nirvana or Public Enemy.

Okay—the establishment in the name.

4. Nostalgia vs. Futurism in Pop Culture

The establishment was somewhat the enemy of the young. Today, we live in a time where I see pop culture moving more in lockstep with the establishment and, let's say, where the kind of wind is blowing—dare I say politically, but just in terms of what we put first—in a world that most people really consider quite threatening, scary, and uncertain.

I just watched the movie Mountainhead.

I heard about it. I haven't watched it yet.

It's worth a watch. It's a good satire, and it's clear he spent some time with the stereotypical billionaire masters of the universe, the gods of tech. I think that movie, however exaggerated it is and however much it preys on our fear about the future, captures how people feel. But that's nothing new.

I go back to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, which was about, of course, the prospect of a nuclear war, which really, if you ask your grandparents, defined their lives.

Yeah, their whole life. These kinds of consequential moments that we are now experiencing, they experienced, and I would say they were probably more intense. I mean, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a highly intense moment, and the struggle between the political philosophies of Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

That's a long-winded way to say that today I see culture moving with politics. In an America First agenda, we're seeing—and in a time of technological disruption and uncertainty—we are clamoring for those things that make us feel good.

What makes us feel good? Olive Garden, country music. Applebee's is booming. Banana Republic is having the best year in probably decades. Abercrombie & Fitch—somehow back from the dead.

Exactly. Right.

We recently did a diner in L.A. We called it the SKIMS Diner. We took over a classic drive-in diner and transformed it into a SKIMS experience, but it was big root beer floats and waffle stacks, piled high. In 5 minutes, I think we booked this place out for 10 days, from morning to 3 in the morning. From 8 a.m. to 3 a.m., every table went in 4 or 5 minutes.

People were lining up for any spare seats all around the block. It's just that feeling of comfort. You ask any 12- or 14-year-old today, “What's your favorite TV show?” You'd be surprised how many people say Friends. They're just clamoring for that less threatening, warm nostalgia that those shows and those experiences give you.

I really think that the technological changes and the uncertainty about the future are driving this pop culture moment. If you think about it, it has moved more from futurism to nostalgia. Futurism we haven't really seen for quite some time. We're not hopeful about the future quite as much as we used to be.

But I'll make a reference to diners right now. I'm obsessed with diners because, again, I'm a disciple of popular culture. I'm listening to country myself. I've had Morgan Wallen in the car on my way here.

But I love diners because diners are one of the few things that are now retro, right? They weren't a restaurant concept that was born out of nostalgia, like Italian food. Diners were hypermodern, modernist structures. They were all about the future. They were from an era where cars were inspired by the space race and by rockets. It was all about this promise of what tomorrow had for us.

And we were certain that this generation was going to be so much better off than the generation that had lived through the Second World War. I think today, generally, we are fearful of the future rather than optimistic. I think we should be optimistic about the future.

Winston Churchill, talking about people who lived through the war, once said, “I'm an optimist because I see little use to being anything else.” And I'm definitely an optimist. How do we flip back into that mode? I'm one who wishes the pervasive cultural vibe were optimism about the future and futurism.

We're in a time right now when, compared with 5 years ago, there's way more interesting technological-platform explosion happening than there was even 5 years ago. So it would seem like there's more to imagine that we might be able to build and do that's good for everybody. But at the same time, this shift is happening. What do you think of that?

Well, you are a beneficiary of it. This podcast, the people that you speak to, and the community that you are a part of—you’re on the tip of the spear, right? You’re the beneficiary of it. This format that I have the pleasure today to take part in didn’t exist in its form a decade ago. It certainly wouldn’t have provided a fantastic living.

Sure. Right.

Today, you’re a beneficiary of the creator economy. You’re a beneficiary of the insight that you probably have as a result of your network and your community, and can position yourself for it. So for you, the future is exciting, but for a large part of our country, it is not. Perhaps we need to do a better job at bringing them along, or at helping them really see the benefits.

I'm not so sure the benefit is an app with a new feature. The benefit needs to be more profound than that.

In what ways, if the transition in music has been from hip-hop to country, what else goes in that bundle of cultural touchstones associated with hip-hop, and why have those—like the comfort and nostalgia you touched on—worked? What about the ones we've transitioned away from? Why did they work less well?

Well, I think it's reflected in sports, too. I remember—was it 8 years ago, 10 years ago? I'm freestyling a little bit—but remember when there was a lot of talk about CTE?

Yeah.

Parents were doomed. I'm not so sure all parents still want their kids to play football, but it was really a conversation, and there was this feeling that the NFL was somewhat in trouble. Was the NFL going to go the way of boxing? Today, that feels laughable because the NFL owns sports in this country.

The NFL is the biggest sports league in the country, and college football is the second-largest sport in viewership numbers in this country, far ahead of basketball, for example. To me, it seems pretty consistent, right? Football, Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, Olive Garden—Chili's has been in the news recently; they're killing it. We all want sliders.

To me, that's a very consistent cultural movement that's lining up with the overarching feeling of society, which is, of course, more protectionist than it's been in the past. And it's probably a counterreaction to globalism, which, much like technology, did not work for everybody.

5. The Resurgence of Classic Brands

Speaking of cyclicality, the Abercrombie & Fitch story, for some reason, is just fascinating to me. This was a very fallen brand that defined your and my kind of upbringing, but then went the wrong way and somehow has been resurgent. Tell me what you think about learning about that story—or watching that story—and I'm curious, in general, what other sort of fallen brands might be able to make a comeback, and how, through learning from a story like that one, or Banana Republic or others.

Oh, I love this question. I love it because it will lead me into something I really want to talk about: why big wins? I really must have told anybody who wanted to listen 5 years ago to buy Abercrombie. I think it was worth $700 million or $800 million at the time.

I think there's a big difference between what consumers care about—a consumer story—and what is a Wall Street financial press story. Ironically, they don't seem to impact one another very much. If you asked consumers about Abercrombie, I think Abercrombie was going through a very tough time. Abercrombie's founder was in all sorts of trouble. But if you asked a 20-something consumer if that would have impacted their purchasing behavior, common sense would say it would, but I never see it do.

Victoria's Secret is right up there, too. They had an Epstein connection because the founder, Les Wexner, had one. They had totally lost that kind of connectivity with the customer. Their fashion shows felt outdated. The way that they portrayed women felt outdated. The whole concept in the early 2020s felt just really out of step with our times.

And everybody said, “It's over.” It's not over. They're doing just fine. Now, the Street is still working on the thesis of that story from 2020. Nothing has shifted Wall Street's views of Victoria's Secret. But the consumers—go to any mall in America and you see early-20-somethings with a Sephora bag, which is a darling from a financial press point of view, and a Victoria's Secret bag. They are unaffected by it.

Sometimes I think we tend to overanalyze a little bit and think that things really matter to customers that don't really matter to customers. We know that Coke isn't great for us to drink with every meal, but Coca-Cola seems to be doing just fine.

If you think about this idea of why big wins, what do these brands and these trends teach you, and what's the core idea?

I think big wins—and I think big will increasingly win. This is the time for so many different reasons. One, going back to what we spoke about, which is popular culture being one of the only hacks in the consumer economy, it's because to do business today—

First, going back, we have been in an era of brand creation where Shopify and other tools make it incredibly easy to start a business, and through Meta and other platforms, very easy to find an audience that cared about what you were doing.

Today, the algorithm is not favoring loyalty. It's not necessarily favoring who you followed 2 years ago or 5 years ago. It favors who you recently followed. It favors what you're talking about over breakfast with your partner. It favors things that you have engaged with, that you clicked on. Maybe something a friend sent to you and you watched it 3 times, and now you're getting served tons of lookalike content.

It does not favor brands making content. It's not putting that in front of its followers. I mean, I don't know how many people you follow. Maybe I follow 1,200. Do I see content from more than 200 of those? Never. I don't. Sometimes I think, “Oh my God, I haven't seen something for so long. Did they stop posting?” Of course they didn't. It just moved past me. It just didn't favor it.

As we went from social media to really an interest-based algorithm, let's say, that was pretty devastating for young brands. It was very hard all of a sudden to build a community on social in the way that 5 years ago, 6 years ago, or even—I would say—8 or 9 years ago, was very possible. SKIMS was one of the few larger brands that was able to build a community through social and get to a critical scale where we could pay our way. But today you have to pay to play if you want to be seen.

The other part is distribution. I've seen that post-COVID shopping has really returned to 2019 levels. In the end, it's 80% a physical-store business and 20% an e-commerce business today, generally in America.

People ask me, “Why do you want to open so many stores?” And I say, “I don't want to be the 20% business. I want to be in the 80% business.” But opening stores is incredibly expensive. It's very capital-intensive; it consumes a lot of capital to build stores.

So again, if you and I were trying to start a retailer, we would really struggle to find the financing and be able to open a good location, a nice store in a good location. It's just unaffordable. Big wins, especially large retailers and large restaurant chains with a big footprint, are almost impossible to recreate today.

6. The SKIMS Origin Story

It's the perfect time to talk about how you broke through. So how SKIMS—which is what, 5 years old? It's not terribly—

Yeah, coming up to 6 in September.

Yes, almost 6. But you're an extremely young business. Kindergarten age.

Kindergarten age.

And yet you've broken through this difficult landscape. So just tell us the entire origin story of how SKIMS broke through, and whether or not that's the model for—if you were an entrepreneur sitting here today with a blank sheet of paper—what from the SKIMS story could be borrowed and applied again productively to break through.

I have a distinct feeling that if I tried to do it again, I wouldn't be successful today. When it comes to, for lack of a better word, disruption in consumer, and especially retail, it's more connected to changes in supply chain and consumer taste than the brand itself.

It's not that a brand comes along and then the world shifts or mobilizes around the brand. It's far more common that the changes are happening and the brand is in the right place at the right time. They say luck is when opportunity meets preparation, and I think that's true. Timing is just one of those things that are beyond our control, somewhat.

I ultimately have to believe that—and I'm going to go into it—the way we make product, the strength of what we do, the value proposition that we offer, our way to market, would ultimately have had the same result, but I very much doubt it would have been on the same timeline. And going back through history, I'll get into why this was the right moment.

I hope I'm not too long-winded.

No, bring it about this. I like the long versions.

Les Wexner, who is one of the godfathers of American retail, created, for those who don't know—and why would they—Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, Express, Abercrombie, Hollister, and more and more.

Was it the brands he created, or was it—

No, it was the fact that it coincided with malls being built in the '80s all across America.

And all these great malls in Minnesota. You have Mall of America.

The Mall of America, for example, the very biggest one. There were a lot of storefronts. These malls needed fresh concepts for their customers, and Les Wexner understood this opportunity. He created and bought companies and developed these concepts that he could replicate over and over again, with favorable economics, in all of the malls that were built in America. He's a genius of retail.

I'm just saying none of those retailers would be around if it hadn't been for the expansion of the American mall.

If you're into luxury, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, Versace, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana—I can go on. All happened within the same 5 years. Some of them might have been started slightly earlier, but it was a distinct period of time where they grew and expanded. That's directly linked to Saks and Neiman Marcus and Barneys, because these designers were able to sell their goods and finance the goods through something called factoring, where you get the money before you sell, before you get your invoice paid, creating positive cash flow.

That's why someone like Giorgio Armani still owns 100% of his business. That could not be replicated today. It was a unique situation and a unique financing model that led them to be able to retain full ownership and scale their companies to a critical size.

After the aftermath of the financial crisis, people wanted designer values, but they wanted to pay less for them. Well, enter Michael Kors, Tory Burch, likely “Dragon Bone”, the expansion of Coach, and all of these companies that today make $5 billion, $10 billion, $15 billion businesses. There was a change in consumer taste, and that's kind of well documented.

What no one talks about is—and maybe you remember this—do you remember all the diffusion lines? D&G?

Not really.

Designers used to make Armani Exchange.

Oh, yeah, sure. I remember that one.

All these kinds of diffusion lines. It was like only a couple of companies behind them, and they went bust. So, all of a sudden, all over the world, there was all this floor space for these lower-price designer goods. Again, the growth of those businesses and this change in distribution all coincided.

In America, we had the JCPenney and The Gap, and they were disrupted by the Europeans, like Inditex, which owns Zara, and H&M. They had a better supply chain. They were able to get trends at a lower price to the American customer faster.

Faster. Yeah. What is likely Shein?

It's an even more efficient model. It's a supply chain and software company masquerading as a retailer. They found an even more efficient way to make and supply trends at an even lower price.

Technology disruption in supply chain and distribution—those things are what make brands happen. With SKIMS, it was a combination of a few things.

First, I saw this very large gap in retail in underwear and lounge. I saw that people were changing the way that they dressed, not just on weekends, but life was becoming two distinct wardrobes. One that is very soft. I'm not sure if you wear likely Vuori.

Of course. It's a great brand. Great brand.

I'm sure when you come home tonight, you're going to change into it.

There you go.

So, you have 2 wardrobes, right? You have 1 at home, and you had 1 out, or 1 at work. The one at home started spilling into the rest of your life. So, that's 1 thing that's happening: consumer taste is changing.

Incumbents had gotten stale and discount-driven. They weren't leading with innovation anymore. It was multipacks, and even though it was cheap, we were paying a lot for not very much. So, I saw the opportunity to really lead through innovation in the supply chain and build a business based on fabrication, because what you love about likely Vuori is the way you feel. It's the feel as you're wearing the product, right? The way the fabric feels against your skin.

I'm getting a little scientific on this.

Please do. But I'm getting to a point. That is just as powerful as the difference in taste between Coke and Pepsi, because if you buy something that's not likely Vuori, I promise you, you'll feel the difference, because you know exactly how likely Vuori is meant to feel.

Well, that's the Coke and Pepsi challenge.

It's a distinct sensory experience, like the first sip of Starbucks feels a certain way. So, I saw the opportunity to create that in this category, in the beginning primarily for women and now, of course, for everybody, and really bring out a company that was a better alternative. It might have been slightly more expensive, but still affordable.

I think about Starbucks a lot when I do these things. To me, Starbucks is just a phenomenal innovation company. Many of the things we take for granted, like a Frappuccino or a Pumpkin Spice Latte, are Starbucks inventions, and they're incredible at building these franchises. What they've done in the last couple of years with Refreshers is incredibly powerful.

I took that same analogy to my company and said, “I want to be the Starbucks.” The lesson there is the adaptability—the driving of franchises within the bigger brand.

What specifically?

It's about doing something that is worth the extra bit of money it costs. I'm sure you have coffee here. Maybe if I really asked, “Could I have a cup of coffee?” you might have coffee here. I would get that for free. In fact, every office building in America has free coffee. My office has free coffee.

Pretty good ones, too.

Yeah, but I still think Starbucks is worth my $5.50 or $6, right? It's at a premium, but it's still available to me. It's still affordable, and I believe that the quality difference is worth the difference in price.

That's a philosophy that runs like a red thread through all of my thinking: How do I make just a phenomenal experience for what you're paying? I'm less focused on the price. I'm more focused on what you get for your money.

Can you talk about this concept of house taste, how it is developed over time, and how that relates to the first-sip feeling, the feeling on the skin of the Vuori—the distinctive sensory experience that a consumer brand allows for—and how that relates to taste? I'm fascinated by this topic.

House taste is a dangerous thing. I collect wine. I love wine. Every winery I go to, they truly believe that their wine is the best in the world. Of course, why do they believe that? They often have worked there for 10 or 20 years, so they drink a lot of their own wine. It's safe to say they've developed the wine that is perfect for their palate. Therefore, they truly believe their wine is the best in the world, because every other wine they try will not taste as good as the one they make.

House taste is therefore a dangerous concept for any company. You shouldn't get high on your own supply, and you certainly shouldn't get too in love with what you're doing. It happens pretty easily, and I see it with a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of founders. They're really in love with their own product, and they spend a lot of time convincing—or wanting to convince—everyone they meet why their product is the best in the world, rather than letting people tell them what they think about what they make.

I was aware of this, so what we did out of the gate was create a very strong feedback loop with our own community and not lose ourselves, necessarily, in our own house taste. The consumer is always right.

What was the mechanism for that? How did you actually build that feedback loop?

Really, through social. Some of it you can do through process, and that's good, but culture eats process. The culture of a company that is open to outside feedback has to come from the top. If I'm open to feedback, you will be open to feedback, and down the reporting line it will go.

You have to assume that if a customer feels a certain way, it's warranted, because they feel a certain way.

We talked a little bit about the conditions that made SKIMS possible: the supply chain, the technology. You mentioned Shein, which has, I think, 10 times better unsold-inventory performance than the next most relevant company, so the business is much better at not getting sucked into house taste through this positive feedback.

I'd love to talk about the other side of the equation, which is the brilliant partnership with Kim: how it was established. The phrase I've heard before is “the king that became a kingmaker,” or queen that became a queen-maker. I want to talk about the origins of this relationship, maybe even going back to the first conversation you can remember having about this idea. Just tell us that story to begin.

The whole process was very organic. I've had the pleasure of being part of a few startups through my life, and when it's at its best, it happens organically. When it's too contrived, or you're trying to force a good idea—“What should we do?”—it tends not to work out quite so well.

She really had a point of view, an aesthetic point of view, on what she wanted to make. I had a point of view of what was missing from this category—from a price position and innovation perspective. From her point of view, there were certain aesthetically driven solutions and things that just weren't available in the market that she wanted to bring to market.

And through a series of conversations, we just ended up in a place where we were doing it. I don't know if there was ever a “Let's do this thing.” It was more like, “Oh, we're definitely doing this thing.”

When you're an entrepreneur, it's not that you want to do something; it's that you cannot not do something. You can't leave it alone. You wake up and you just cannot leave it alone. Once she showed me aesthetically what she wanted to create, I couldn't get that out of my head. I just couldn't.

So, I had kind of finished the previous chapter. I had sold my businesses. I was in my late 30s, semi-retired, and I had been walking around for maybe 1 or 2 years. I was still the chairman of a group within Omnicom at the time, and I was really trying to search for it. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

Once I saw what she had in mind, there was no question about what I was going to do. This is what I had to do.

What was it? A specific feature? Was it a look?

It was a world. It was just stepping into a world that no one else owned aesthetically.

I spent my whole life talking in these terms, so I understand it might seem very clear to me when I say that expression and less clear to others what I mean by stepping into a world. When you go into Ralph Lauren, you're in Ralph Lauren's world. It's very clear where you are, right? You could take all the signs off the walls and you would know where you are.

When I saw aesthetically what she wanted to do, it was just instantly identifiable and distinctive—so distinctive. The look was so distinctive: the world, the color world, the architecture, the attitude toward women, how to lift people up. It was inclusive without ever having to say the word inclusive. It wasn't a decision; it just was natural. It was so distinctive.

I just felt I had to help bring that to life.

So what was step 1? You step into a world, and then you have to go make products and start to distribute them. What was that first chapter defined by?

I think there are 2 distinct steps to starting a company. One is a hell of a lot more fun than the second. Dreaming. The first is the visualizing, right? It's gratifying, it's fast, and you start putting together this mood and design. All of that is incredibly gratifying and fast.

Then comes the second step, where most good ideas go to die, which is the execution—the execution of bringing that to life at the right cost. I've been in this world my whole life. It's what I do.

You have interviewed some of the most unbelievable investors, and I'm sure founders. If Sam Altman wanted to build another product, he knows how to do it. This is what he does: exceptional talent to build an exceptional product.

The world is full of communities, and I have mine. I can build an exceptional team. That's kind of second nature. We're all good at something, and I've been relatively good in my career at starting with a blank piece of paper and figuring it out.

In my head, I can make sense of the scramble. I can articulate the mess into a step 1, a step 2, and a step 3.

What is that process? What is literally going on in your head, or what are you literally doing in those early days to bring some order to the messy chaos of possibility that hasn't been executed yet?

Part of it is probably intuitive. Part of it is that I'm a very objective person. I can remove myself emotionally from pretty much any situation and just really look at it very matter-of-factly, and that's incredibly helpful.

When you start something, you need to have a healthy dose of naivety. That's important in my business. Experience helps. Experience helps.

It's very physical, and for me it all starts with a product. I was trained as a marketeteer. My whole first chapter of my life was as a marketer, and if you ask me who I am today, I probably still identify as a marketeteer first and foremost.

But I know its role. It's lipstick. At the end of the day, it's only there to accelerate.

You need good lips.

Yeah. Yeah. It's only there to accelerate or to accentuate something that is already there. I always say that you have to create a product so great that you will still get to the same place with or without marketing, just on the strength of the product alone.

Sometimes, when I've hired people into marketing functions, the trick question is for them to tell me the last ad campaign they saw from Tesla, and they struggle with that question because Tesla doesn't make advertising.

It certainly hasn't stopped them.

I think the product is omnipotent. It's number 1, 2, and 3. Everything else we do is just to aid awareness and the selling of that product. But product is everything.

Years before we launched the company, we started product development, really going all the way down to raw material. I was really thinking about how I could bring a product at an exceptional quality and feel at an affordable price, and that was my whole focus.

The companies that do solve it—I mean, I'm talking a lot about The Row today, but that's probably because it has such a distinctive feel. It's more comfortable sometimes to make an example using others, and I think they've done a good job. They're kind of the anti-SKIMS because they're not so marketing-led. They were just really leading through fabrication.

Yeah.

Your experience of it was probably that someone told you about it, or you walked past a store, or a friend of yours wore it, and they have gotten to a similar place just through the strength of their product, having been around longer.

At the end of the day, product really is omnipotent. For me, any venture that I'm involved in, as a founder or as an investor, I'm just laser-focused on the strength of the product. I don't care about anything else. The product is everything.

What was the biggest breakthrough that you remember in the product-development days for the early SKIMS products? Was it a specific material? Was it something else?

Again, I come back to culture, and the whole company was built on product franchises. You don't really know what people would be gravitating to right out of the box. I felt incredibly strongly about what we had done.

But when we came to market, there was this moment maybe a couple of months in, or a month in. I think we had 2 million customers on a waitlist for product, and we had no product left at all and no product coming.

There was this moment for sure when I realized that it had hit—that it really had hit the nerve, that our timing had lined up, that people genuinely loved the product, and that the world we had built was highly desirable.

It was like 1 plus 1 plus 1 wasn't 3; it was like 100 all of a sudden. It was just asymmetric, the amount of interest that customers had in the brand.

6 years in, I think SKIMS is a far more important company culturally than it is in terms of the size of its business. We're still a small company for what I believe is a very big brand today.

I like this phrase that you've told me before, which is that, by nature, you're the sort of person who likes to take yards, not inches.

Founder energy. You had this incredible opportunity early on to make a huge splash through Kim and others, for a lot of people to know about this. How did you orchestrate that? Talk a little bit about her and your idea to not just have it be about her, but have it be a platform for other people like her to spread the brand around the world. I think that's such a cool idea.

Kim is incredibly clever, and she doesn't get enough credit for what a great executive she is. She's very smart. She's a public person. She's also a private person. She's a celebrity, probably one of the most famous people in this world. She's also a creative director.

I think we share some of that objectiveness that I spoke about. She can very much compartmentalize the different roles that she plays and draw lines between the different areas of her life.

We were both very aware that if you want to build something with longevity, if you want to make something that really matters, it has to be a platform. It can't be about one person.

I remember showing her a picture of this kid—I don't know, going to school, I'm speculating here, in an American city—wearing a pair of Beats headphones and a pair of Jordans, way before we launched. I said to her, “You know, that kid has never watched Michael Jordan play basketball, nor did they listen to Dr. Dre. Yet both of those companies would have been impossible without their founders.”

The work to make SKIMS a pop-culture platform really started on day 1 because we knew it took time. What made Beats Beats was LeBron wearing it between the bus and the locker room, right?

7. The Jordan Brand Legacy

What made Jordan—people say, “Oh, Jordan,” or they called SKIMS a celebrity brand in the early days. And I said, “That's fine. Is Jordan a celebrity brand?” It is. It's just 40 years old at this point.

The Jordan platform allowed other athletes who shared his competitive spirit and athletes who were connected to culture. You kind of know what the Jordan athlete is about. The Jordan brand is inspired and built upon Michael Jordan's importance in popular culture in that era, and it has become a platform in pop culture for 40 years as a result of it.

Kim is for an influencer generation, and I'll give you a—I'm paraphrasing slightly—but I believe that 20 years ago, about 14–15% of American teenagers wanted to be a professional athlete.

Today, that number is more like 3%. But almost 20% of American teenagers today want to be a creator or an influencer. Well, you tell me: isn’t Kim Kardashian the Michael Jordan of the influencer generation? I would say she is.

So she deserves to have a brand that is inspired by that and a brand that will live on in 30, 40, and 50 years as a platform in popular culture, just like Jordan is in sport.

8. Transferring Brand Essence

What have you learned about that transference from the original source—Jordan or Dr. Dre or Kim, in this case—to others that share some set of common features, like the competitive spirit for Jordan? Teach me about what you’ve learned about doing that effectively and how to borrow the original source and transfer it to other fantastic athletes, musicians, and people that you work with.

I’ve got to put that to Kim because she’s a participant in popular culture, not an analyst or someone who is trying to figure it out. She is it, naturally. Our disposition is different.

I think corporate America looks at what they do, and they overanalyze it. They invest time and money in research and decision-making, and to build consensus about who to endorse and what to do. Then they try to create content that everybody can be happy with and sign off on, and then they put it out in the world. No one cares. No one really cares.

But it’s also one year later. It’s like if my wife asks me what I want for dinner on Thursday on a Monday. I don’t know what I want for dinner on Thursday. It’s Monday. Popular culture is dairy; it goes off.

9. The Importance of Immediacy in Popular Culture

So the first thing we did was go at it. Not everything we do is going to be successful. Not everything is going to track. We don’t optimize for what is going to work and not work. That sounds simple, maybe counterintuitive, but if you want to be in the zeitgeist, it’s about doing rather than not doing. It’s about action rather than inaction. So you do more rather than do less.

The second thing we knew is just the decision-making process. You can’t operate 6 months in advance, a year in advance. It’s impossible. But imagine if we operated 6 weeks in advance. Well, 6 weeks in advance, I know who’s going to be nominated for the Oscars. I know who’s likely going to be up at the Grammys. I know that the next season of The White Lotus is coming out. I know when the season finale is going to be.

10. SKIMS' Strategic Decisions

So when you’re operating much more in the immediacy of popular culture, your chance of being effective again increases exponentially. If you think about some of the stuff that we’ve done at SKIMS, last year for the NBA, the face of SKIMS was likely Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. That was his breakout year.

Last year we featured Patrick Mahomes and family over the holidays. We didn’t know he would win the Super Bowl. He was on a roll every year. You couldn’t know that a year in advance.

Exactly.

But when we featured Usher, we knew he was doing the halftime show. When we had the Italian girls that played a pivotal role in the last season, or the season before last, I guess, of The White Lotus, it was clear that they were the breakouts.

So, what’s the decision-making process? It’s very simple: I love The White Lotus. Wouldn’t it be cool if the 2 girls that we’re all a little bit quietly excited about were our Valentine’s couple, and we took them out of the show?

I think going by what we’re interested in, what we want to see, what we’re excited about—yeah, you can ask me right now, this afternoon, what I want for dinner, and I will have a pretty good idea of what I fancy. It’s the same thing. Popular culture is the same thing. I know right now what I want to see.

Then the only thing stopping us is our ability to attract the talent or the opportunity to do it for us in that moment. Then you have to take a lot of chances. Not everything is going to hit. We had Sabrina Carpenter 1 week before she went number one with “Espresso.” I wish I was 1 week later, but it was pretty good.

This is kind of how we work. We’re really working, as a team, as a company, as a culture: What do we want to see right now? Then we try to make it happen. We’re not trying to hit it out of the park every single time.

If you like baseball, likely Shohei Ohtani is probably the greatest baseball player ever lived, even though I’m sure that’s debatable. He doesn’t hit the home run every time he steps up to bat. That’s us. We don’t hit the home run every time we step up to bat, but we hit them often enough.

I love the simple device of “Wouldn’t it be cool?” It is as good a process to determine what to do as anything else. It’s just that our culture, and especially when we are responsible founders and executives, loves the idea that we can control an unpredictable outcome, and we can’t. If we could, every LTV-to-CAC model that you ever saw over the past 15 years would have worked out. Let me tell you, I haven’t seen one.

What does it require on the operational side to be able to deliver against the “Wouldn’t it be cool?” strategy, whether that’s supply chain, marketing, operations, or distribution? It seems like the system needs to be able to accommodate that fast turn.

You build that muscle. You build it over time. It’s not hard in the beginning. Small companies can do remarkable things. Every founder would tell you that what the first 12–20 people can accomplish is unbelievable.

And what the next 1,000 can accomplish is disappointing. Why? What is it? You’ve done this a number of times. What happens in that transition that makes that true?

As a company grows, there needs to be discipline. There needs to be a sense of structure. It needs to have a sense of process. They’re necessary, but if you’re not very, very careful, they’ll kill what made you special to begin with. I think that’s true for any sector.

What about the pricing of distribution represented by these great partnerships? You mentioned Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. What’s he worth? $5 billion? Is this asset well priced, or is there still enough arbitrage for brands? You see where I’m getting at? How does Donovan Mitchell, who I’m a huge fan of, know his own price? How do you think about that dynamic and how it evolves?

I have never spent too much time worrying about the ROI of one singular opportunity. I think if you do, 2 things can happen. You can be right and positively surprised, and next time you make a mistake. Or you can be disappointed, leading you to think that you’ve overspent and therefore pull back and not do the next one.

So, again, I come back a little bit to “Wouldn’t it be cool?” Do we think it represented the brand well? I think those things are more important. And again, just the pace—just the pace of output—and constantly being in the conversation.

The hard thing with building an e-commerce company is that we don’t own any real estate. The real estate is mindshare, and keeping customers’ attention is incredibly hard.

We take in an enormous amount of messages in our daily lives. When we were kids, we took in a fraction—not even a percent—of what we’re taking in today. When I say the Coke-Pepsi Challenge, you know what I’m talking about.

Of course. Have you seen a Coke-Pepsi Challenge? They might not have done it for 30 years. I have no idea when the Coke-Pepsi Challenge even happened.

Yeah, it’s stuck in my mind. If I say the album cover of Nirvana, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You can close your eyes and see it. I have no idea what an album cover is of any artist, really, in the last 5 years.

So things can be incredibly important for an hour in our culture today. I can’t change that. The only thing I can do is increase the output. I can increase the output.

I’ve heard you use the phrase “post-truth media” before. What does that mean, and what are the implications of it?

There are 2 parts. One, you don’t necessarily trust what you read, even from a trusted news source. That could be misguided, but that’s how people feel. I’m not talking about what is fact and what is not fact. I’m talking about how most Americans feel about what they read. They’re skeptical.

So we have gravitated to individual voices as a source of information, but also as a source of a singular truth. You can be a disciple of Elon Musk, or you can be a disciple of AOC, and you’re far more likely to believe either of those 2 than the Washington Post.

What do you think the implications of AI are on that whole trend? I’m assuming you think maybe it makes that even more true—that we align ourselves with people and a coherent perspective, which, whether or not it’s correct truth, is still continuous and coherent.

Absolutely. It’s the only way to go. The power of the individual is only going to strengthen in this current culture. There’s no doubt about it.

However, we probably have to ready ourselves for a time when, if Elon Musk says it, we will be debating whether he actually did say it. Unfortunately, as a result of deepfakes, we’re probably going to be skeptical of everything we see soon enough.

So I believe in close networks. We follow individuals, and we’ll make sure that they are saying it, and we’ll take their words as gospel. I think it’s kind of heading that way. If it’s not, it’s already there.

I’ve long wanted to invest in a company that made it possible for Elon to digitally sign and verify some piece of content. So, if anyone listening, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I would love to back something like that.

Of course it’s going to happen. And then, ironically, the way we watch television now is we watch it over a period of time.

Yeah. The whole premise of the movie Mountain Head is—and I'm not going to give away any spoilers, don't worry—the premise is about 4 tech founders in a remote hilltop house. One has just made these AI tools available where we cannot tell what's real and what's not, and the other person has exactly what you're saying: He has the technology that can validate or invalidate content.

What a premise.

11. The Power of Networks and Micro-Communities

That is essentially the premise of the movie. It's a satire, just like Dr. Strangelove was a satire. It's a satire of a dark future. However, it's hard not to think that it's incredibly important to validate the information that we're getting increasingly more of.

Say a little bit more about the power of networks and what you believe is powerful, especially in today's environment or the near-term future. I see it in chat groups. WhatsApp has emerged as a much more powerful tool for information sharing.

One chat group that likely Dan Sundheim has—D1, which is a famous one, I would think—is one of my more trusted sources of information about what's going on in our economy today. When there are critical events happening, I turn to that chat group, and I find it highly informative. I respect the voices—ultimately, the individuals—in that group.

So, yeah, that's the power of a micro-network, but it's incredibly important. Obviously, we've always had micro-networks: our community, our church, our basketball team, and our friend-group networks have always existed. But these larger, closed networks with 1,000 members or 1 million members—they're closed, and they have a lot of power. I think Reddit is emerging as a platform with a tremendous amount of power today.

If, let's say, I snap my fingers and SKIMS disappeared and you had to go build another company in a vertical where you could apply some of these same ideas and models—a place that's stale or has gotten stagnant—where would your instinct pull you today?

12. The Future of the Creator Economy

I'm very excited about the creator economy. I think we're in the early innings of the creator economy. I'm an investor in several companies, but one that I've been a little bit more involved with is one called Passes, which was founded by Lucy Guo, who was a co-founder of likely Scale AI. She's built a platform for creators to directly monetize their audience, their fan base.

I think that's incredibly powerful. I think we're at the beginning, really the beginning, of talent building and monetizing their own networks. It could be a network around fly-fishing, it could be a great chef, it could be an athlete, it could be a pop star. It can be 1,000 members, it can be millions of members.

But I really believe in the power of that close and more intimate network where we engage directly with someone we admire, a voice of authority, someone who inspires us. There's a real need for it today because, going back to the social algorithms, they're really not about following as much as they're about entertainment today.

I think creators have realized on the social platforms that they don't really own their audience anymore. You don't really own your following. I'll give you a challenge. You can do it after this: Go and look at 3 different artists. Let's say one has 5 million followers, one has 20 million, and I'll give you the name of someone who has, let's say, 300 or 400 million.

You'll find the exact same amount of engagement. How's that statistically possible? Well, it is because engagement is being spread. So, the size of the following doesn't matter so much anymore. That audience someone has built—maybe spent 10 years building the size of that following—but now they're actually unable to communicate with that following. They're not getting through.

If you have 400 million followers and you say something, 400 million people are not going to see it. Only a fraction will. I have no opinion if that's good or if it's bad. It's clearly good; otherwise, we wouldn't have moved away from it, right? It is what it is.

13. Challenges for Traditional Media

I'm sufficiently entertained, so I'm a very happy customer of Instagram. It's a fantastic product, so I'm excited about it. Having said that, of course, it creates this opportunity to build these networks where you have your own captive audience and then can monetize that audience.

I'm trying to think of places that had the equivalent of the 400 million and are in a hard spot or might be in a hard spot. If you were The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, or something like this, what would you do against this reality where it was about the brand, not about the individual writer?

I can't name you an Economist writer—the Economist doesn't publish bylines—but I can't name you a Wall Street Journal author anymore. I used to be able to name lots of them, right? What would you do if you were The Economist or something like that?

I think you started in magazines, actually, way back in the day in Sweden.

Several in the UK.

Yeah, several. I'd love to hear a little bit about that—what, if anything, is left from that era that might still be applicable today, and what you would do if you were The Economist or something like that.

I don't have all the answers. This is a tricky question. It's a very tricky question because I believe that news organizations have an incredibly important role within society, and I think it's a shame. Some of it they did to themselves, partly because of what we're talking about. They had to create journalism that was clickbait, and they had to build incentive structures.

It's like that saying, right? Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result. They had to create incentive structures for the people working there to get eyeballs on what they were doing. I think that changed things.

This is just my personal opinion. I'm not a highly political person. This is not me making a political statement in any shape, way, or form. I'm just objectively observing that, during the first Trump administration, what he often refers to as the mainstream media saw it as an existential threat. They took action that, over time and in many cases, undermined some of their editorial integrity—or at least that's what a large part of America believes today, rightfully or wrongfully so.

As we went into COVID, they just were not able to put the genie back in the bottle. I was listening to the All-In Podcast, and I can't remember which one of the guys said it, but I thought it was very insightful. I'm paraphrasing again, but he said that journalism became activism. I think maybe it did for a period of time, and it's been pretty hard to put that back in the bottle today.

What do you remember most fondly from your magazine days?

It was just a wonderful thing to do because it's the storytelling.

Yeah, that's it.

It's the storytelling. It's the sense of discovery and then storytelling.

I used to work for GQ, and the editor of GQ in the UK was a guy called Dylan Jones. I think he probably was one of the greatest magazine editors of all time. Everybody who worked at GQ was frustrated with him at times because he said, "I knew Arctic Monkeys were going to blow," and he wouldn't write about it, or, "I knew this was going to happen, and I was so excited about this, that, and the other," and he said no.

He knew that he was the top 2% of readers, but he was a customer of his own journalism. There was a moment in time when he got it. It was never first, but it wasn't supposed to be. It was supposed to be in GQ when he knew about it.

He taught me this idea of aspiring not to break things. You didn't have to be first. You needed to be at the forefront for your own customer base. That thinking has really been reflected in most things I've been involved with.

I'm not so worried about always being first, a product being first, or first-mover advantage. I think it's sometimes phenomenal to be number 2 or 3. That can be a much better place to be. In fact, I'm more focused on when I think it's right, where it resonates with me, and I'm not necessarily on the cutting edge. I'm probably the tip of the spear of mainstream, if that makes any sense.

The other thing, working for a magazine called Wallpaper in the UK under the guy who founded that magazine, Tyler Brûlé, I learned 2 things. One is that a magazine can be a reflection of your own interests and your own life. Wallpaper was a total reflection of what we as a team were living through in that moment in time, and I think that's what made it so powerful.

It also taught me that you can't hold on to a good idea. Meaning, when you're early on something, when you've found a different way to communicate or speak or create a product, everybody's going to pile in. You have to continue to transform on your way up because, once you plateau, it's already too late.

A guy who made a big impression on me was a guy called Pierre-Yves Roussel. He was the chairman of LVMH Fashion Group, and he said, "Jens, the secret to our success is that we always transform on the way up."

There's a truth to that because you think how we operate is, as long as it's good, we don't want to change, right? Then, when things plateau or trail off, human nature is optimistic, so we go, "It's a moment. We'll be back. We were first. We did this first. They'll remember it. It's going to come back."

Then it doesn't come back. Then we start thinking about changing, and by the time we've actually implemented any change, things are already going down.

Who fires a CEO when a company is growing? Almost nobody. Sometimes, maybe we should. The Knicks just fired Thibs after the conference finals. There you go. Same question.

14. Lessons from Working with Top Brands

I’m so glad I asked about magazines—about your work in an agency, working with brands like H&M and others. I would love the same set of reflections, just what you take from that time of your life.

Well, I was unsatisfied working on behalf of everybody else. There comes a moment in your life where you want to be the guy, not working for the guy. And I knew in my early 30s that, however much I would build this group, at the end of the day, I was figuring out ways to sell time. At the end of it, there’s not that much emotional ownership of the work that you create. You’re a hired gun.

Yeah.

You go home at the end of the day, and when something goes wrong, it’s your fault. When it goes well, it wasn’t you. It’s a pretty thankless place to have a full career.

Yeah.

I’m very grateful because I had the opportunity to work with some of the greatest to ever do it, like Bernard at LVMH or Remo Ruffini at Moncler, and becoming inspired to the point where I wanted to be like them, not work for them. So I’m very grateful for that.

What did those two teach you? What was the bar of excellence that they showed you?

Remo taught me about the power and the role of art in commerce, and letting go. He took something that was a small company called likely Moncler—it was a small ski company—and attached it to fashion, popular culture, and sport. He was able to build an unbelievable brand and company by borrowing all the cues while staying true to the core of the product, which was performance ski.

Sure sounds familiar.

Yeah. If it wasn’t for that experience, I wouldn’t have started SKIMS. I wouldn’t have started FRAME.

The thing with underwear that people don’t really think of, and I don’t blame them, is that it has a lot more in common with a sneaker than it does with a T-shirt. They’re all performance products, highly complicated from a construction and fit perspective. It has to do a job, especially in women’s, more so than in men’s. It has to offer support and comfort for 12 hours in a row, 14 hours. That’s a performance product.

There’s a much higher moat. It’s much harder to compete. It’s much harder to innovate products in it. Once you have a customer’s trust, they’re very loyal; it’s super-high retention. Underwear and performance wear have a lot in common. The same thing, if you think about performance ski, it’s highly complex, highly technical, and has to do a job for you. So I looked at taking a category like that and attaching it to culture. If I hadn’t had the opportunity to observe Remo at likely Moncler, I don’t know if I would have gone about building SKIMS the way that Kim and I went about building SKIMS.

What about Bernard?

At the end of the day, he works to inspire and excite his customer. For all of his unbelievable success, he’s highly in tune with what his customers will give him agency to do or not to do. And that level of—I come back to this notion of being objective—he has that in spades.

What do you think is going to fill the role of status in the future, when machines are smarter than we are and do a lot of the tasks, and a lot of the things that might have earned us status in the past might be different in the future?

I don’t think status is going anywhere. It’s such a basic human want. I don’t think our physical lives are going anywhere. But let’s assume that it is going somewhere. What is status to my 11-year-old?

Well, he has status in what he has achieved in Roblox. He feels a great sense of status in what he’s built. So I don’t think that status is limited to physical objects. Humankind will always find ways to display status. If you interact in social gaming, from what I’m seeing, all of our cues of status here in our physical world are in their digital world. It’s a direct transference. There’s really no difference.

I don’t know what the future looks like in 20 years, but as far as my children go, they combine physical and digital status. What teenager or 20-something doesn’t have status in the number of followers they have? Status exists in so many different ways. I don’t think that’s going anywhere.

It’s right up there with hunger. It’s a basic, basic human drive, a very basic human need.

15. Investing Insights & Long-Term Views

I’d love to talk about investing for just a minute. You’re an investor, too, and have been for a long time. You also get to work with them. I talked to Neil and Josh ahead of this, two of the great investors of our era who have been big partners of yours. I’m curious about what you’ve learned makes for great investors from working with them, and also just how you think about your own investing and the broader trends happening in the investing world.

We’ve talked about private equity before and the implications of that evolving landscape. Tell us your thinking on the world of investors and investing.

Josh and Neil are both really, really special people and, dare I say, atypical in many ways. They’re both guys of really high conviction who take a long-term view, and they take a lot fewer bets than many other people that I know in the venture space. They really do believe in doubling down behind their winners and staying engaged.

They seem really unfazed by a news cycle, a month, or a quarter. They tend to have really long-term views on everything, and they invest into that worldview. They’re already incredibly successful. I’m scared for how successful those two are going to be. I’m afraid—you give these guys another—

They’re young, too. They’re 40.

Yeah. Oh my God. Give them 20 years of compounding this, 20 years of compounding into this worldview.

Most people are overly optimistic, don’t have the stomach for the long term, and are influenced by market trends. When something is good, there’s no end to how good it can get. When something is bad, there’s no end to how bad it can get. In 2021, you could give away retail real estate. Now it’s the hottest part of the market. A couple of years ago, you couldn’t give away offices. Now occupancy in the right places is at capacity. There’s no end to demand.

Very few people dare to have their own long-term view, and I think both of them do. Honestly, I’ve learned from that. I don’t know where the world is going within the next year, but I think we can be relatively confident where the world is going in 5 years. It shouldn’t be impossible if you have the stomach for it. If you invest with that perspective, you’re going to be right more times than you’re wrong.

How would you summarize where the world is going, where you think the world’s going in 5 or 10 years?

We touched on some of it today. If you go with my theory—which, by the way, is not my theory—I think it’s wildly established that we’re living in a kind of post-truth society. That’s been written endlessly about. As a result, an individual voice can cut through and really control a narrative, and what they say is taken as truth over what you refer to as an anonymous journalist. An individual is going to be only more important, not less important.

Okay.

If the algorithm is going toward a place of entertainment, not following, one has to assume that the person that has a higher degree of influence will have the opportunity to forge their own network. Those are 2 basic things that I don’t think I’m going to be very wrong about.

16. Future Plans for SKIMS

Which product will work? I couldn’t tell you which founder is going to be successful. I don’t know, but I know where it’s going. If I had their expertise, as many others do, with enough of a sample and enough of a nose for great founders, you want to back people who are creating the companies that fit this worldview, and hopefully you’re going to be right.

Say a bit about the future for SKIMS, both from the perspective of maybe an IPO on the horizon, maybe new product lines, things that you’re doing to transform on the way up, as you said before. What’s next for SKIMS?

What I’m working on is: How do I scale the business at pace to meet the global demand for the brand? Right now, it’s a big global brand, but we’re yet to do business the way that customers like to do business, which is highly in-person. So I’m very focused on the global physical distribution of SKIMS. That’s one. That’s important.

Again, I’m now starting to tie some of these things we talked about together, which is: if social media is a less effective way for me to communicate with my community, what really matters is the community that I’m building through my app and loyalty. Today, about a year after we launched our own app, we do over 20% of our business through it.

Building our app and loyalty—which is a nice way to say trying to expand that direct community in a closed network where I can have my customers’ attention—that’s going to be the difference-maker, I think, over the next 5 years or so. So that’s incredibly important: to continue to evolve the way we do business, to continue to be surprising.

When we started, we did a lot of things that no one else did, at the pace no one did it. I have to really watch it so we don’t become a victim of our own success. We have to continue to innovate, not just on the product side but also on the marketing side.

When Luka got traded to the Lakers, just to bring it back to basketball again—

Clearly, I watch too much basketball. No such thing in my opinion. The Pacers and OKC feel like I can miss the whole series, so I get some time back. If it were the Knicks, I would have to watch it.

When Luka got traded to the Lakers, I was watching, I think it was First Take or something on ESPN, and they said, “We’re now waiting for Luka to show up in the SKIMS campaign.” First of all, whenever they talk about SKIMS on ESPN, I’m excited. So I was very happy. However, if there’s an expectation, there’s also not a surprise.

17. The Public vs. Private Debate

Yeah. Right. So interesting. To me, that’s a signal that we have to take a step further and continue to do the unexpected. And I love Luka, so the door is open if he wants to do it. Having said that, it’s to do what you’re not expecting me to do next. If anything keeps me up at night, it’s probably that idea.

We’ve talked about all the money, assets, and companies that are in private markets. I’m curious, as an entrepreneur who’s thought a lot about investing, how you think about being private versus being public and the trade-offs associated with both.

What are we doing this for? I think it’s a fair question, and I ask other founders that. As a founder of a company that receives a lot of public attention, like SKIMS, I have the opportunity to meet other founders who have created unbelievable businesses that are also in the public eye. And we talk about it: What are we doing it for?

Because money, in my view, is the result of doing something great. I think money by itself is a poor purpose. It shouldn’t be the reason we get up in the morning. It should be the result of us doing something we love, doing a great job, and exciting our customers, and that should be rewarded.

Right? But that’s me as a founder. Not if you’re an investor—the money is the purpose in many ways, right? Not for everybody. It’s not the whole cake, but it’s important. It’s the biggest part of the cake. It’s 90%, okay? It should be. If not, they weren’t doing their jobs.

But as a founder, you don’t sit and think, “I’m going to start this company because I’m going to make so much money with it for my investors.” That’s why I’m going to go through this pain and give up my life to make sure that in 5 to 10 years’ time I’m giving an excellent return to those that invested in my company. That’s just not how you think. You wake up and say, “I have to do it. I cannot live with not doing this thing.”

And then you’ve got to love it. You’re going to love it through the great times because there are enough hard times in any entrepreneurial journey that you need a lot of love to carry you through.

I think likely Jensen Huang said the other day something along the lines of that he would never be an entrepreneur if he knew how hard it was. I had to be an entrepreneur to do what I love to do, the way I want to do it, and I had to be an entrepreneur to realize the creative vision that I think entrepreneurship is. But I had no choice. This is what I had to do.

As you bring something to life and bring capital partners on board, you have a duty and a responsibility. I treat everybody’s money like my own, and I understand that my motivation and their motivation are, at times, not going to be completely aligned. I’m going to be in this company for a very long time. I’m probably going to go public one day. My cap table in 5 years is going to look nothing like the cap table today, and that’s okay. I’m aware. I know how the game goes.

My responsibility at this point is actually to deliver an excellent return for my shareholders and, in the process, hopefully have a good time doing it. For me, the most important thing is to do a great job and have fun, and if I’m doing great work and having a good time doing it, money normally follows.

Public or private, it’s really a matter of taste. You used to have to go public; today, there’s this semiliquid market that has emerged that gives a lot of early shareholders at least a great deal of optionality. You look at companies like Stripe or SpaceX; there’s been a lot of optionality and liquidity for early shareholders, and people can trade in and trade out even in these companies privately. So maybe it’s less important today than it was for me.

I made a choice to have institutional shareholders, and I’ve got to respect their timeline and what matters to them. They have entrusted me with their capital, and I will do everything within my power to make sure I give them what they require in return. That’s the deal. And to do that, the most likely outcome—not to say it is the outcome—the most likely outcome is to be a public company.

I do think, though, that it’s healthy for a company to have outside shareholders. At some point, it’s healthy for a company to be public. It does foster good governance. But a company, as it scales and as it grows and matures, it’s not just about a founder. It’s about everyone. It’s about all the stakeholders, your employees. You have a greater responsibility. And I think it’s easier to take that responsibility as a public company.

So I’m pro the public route personally, but that’s not to say it’s for everyone. If I owned this company 100% myself, maybe I would have taken a different view.

Josh said something to me earlier today as I was thinking about how to structure our conversation, which was really nice: that you’re an incredibly unique combination of creative and commercial, and that the fact that you can do both so well probably leads to more interesting outcomes on both sides of the equation—product, marketing, business, et cetera. I feel like our conversation today has been so chock-full of things that I’m scribbling down constant notes here that I want to remind myself to go back to and learn from and apply to what I’m trying to do, because that’s what I want to do, too. That’s what everyone wants to do: be creative and commercial. They want both sides of the equation.

18. The Kindest Thing

I’m so thankful for your time and an amazing conversation. The same question I ask everyone at the end of these is: What is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?

I’m very grateful that I was able to move to the United States in my late 30s and have had the ability to reinvent myself in this country and have another chapter in this country—a country and a community that has, and I’m speaking in the broadest sense of the word here, welcomed me, my wife, and my family, and allowed us to be both successful, but also members of our more direct community in a way that couldn’t happen in any other place on Earth.

I don’t know if it’s an act of kindness. I pay a lot of taxes in return, but I’m incredibly grateful for that opportunity, and that’s why I’m optimistic about the future. I’m optimistic about this country. I am not fearful, even though I understand why many people are. And personally, I’m just excited to be a part of and live through this time in human history, which is arguably the greatest time in history to be alive.

I think you’re the first person to say America as your answer, ever, which is so cool. I have to ask 1 follow-up: Can you describe Emma’s superpower?

She has an ability to bring everybody with her. Myself included, I go along with everything she says. Now, that’s not that unique in a marriage. Most of us go along with what we’re told. But she has this unbelievable ability to inspire people and bring people with her, and it’s exciting to be around her. I think everybody who’s around her has that feeling. It’s intoxicating. So it’s a remarkable quality. I wish I had a fraction of it.

But they say you marry someone who complements you. So she’s the charm.

Yes. This has been amazing. Such a cool conversation. Thanks so much for your time.

Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.