The audacity of leading like a man.
When Emma Grede talks, we take a seat.
Even if the name doesn’t ring immediate bells, you’ve almost certainly worn, followed, or bookmarked the brands she’s engineered into juggernauts: SKIMS, Good American, Safely, Off Season. A billion-dollar brand architect with a steel spine and a sharper sense for what consumers want than most CMOs could dream of.
A curriculum in modern commerce, each brand she helps to build is a different expression of the same principle: design the operations as carefully as the product. And the results? A billion-dollar portfolio that proves the secret sauce lives in the system.
But first, a rewind. What maketh the woman? Emma grew up in east London, captivated early on by a fashion scene pulsing with the Gallianos and McQueens of the world. After landing early agency roles, she launched her first marketing company at the tender age of 26 and quickly signed Dior and Calvin Klein. That early momentum, along with her grit and willingness to pitch hard, led to a pivotal meeting with Kris Jenner at L’Avenue during Paris Fashion Week. It’s where the foundation of Good American began. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Her uncanny ability to tap into exactly what the modern day consumer wants springs from immersion. Weeks spent auditing competitor floors, notes scrawled from Reddit threads, razor-eyed observations of variegated lighting in fitting rooms. She traces where culture meets utility, coding every insight into warehouse workflows, and her products emerge from these layered feedback loops: size inclusion as SKU logic, tone diversity embedded at the root.
But Emma isn’t just building brands. She’s redefining what it looks like to lead them.
In an era obsessed with founder relatability — soft power, shared calendars, Slack-channel empathy — Emma plays a different game. She’s not positioning herself as your work mum, your friend, or your burnout buffer.
So when she dropped the now-viral line: “Work-life balance is not my responsibility as a CEO — it’s the employee’s”
you’d better believe the internet had something to say.
The backlash came in hot: Tone-deaf. Out-of-touch. Anti-wellness.
But what if she’s not cold, but rather, correct?
Continue reading on our Substack, Public Opinion.
