Mogul has learned restraint with Skims
Kardashian West could build $1-billion company with new shapewear line
When Kim Kardashian West says it, she’s not being funny. She doesn’t smile. She is professional and sincere, and that sincerity is worth millions of dollars.
Had she made any mistakes when introducing Skims, her line of shapewear, last September?
“I wouldn’t say a ‘mistake,’” she said. Then she listed a few mistakes, concluding with “the pee hole thing.”
“I wish we launched shapewear with a pee hole,” Kardashian West said. “For the people who don’t want to take it off and on all the time.”
It wasn’t the first time she had brought it up. Five months ago, she talked about it on “The Tonight Show” during a bit in which she revealed her most recent Google search: “Is shapewear with pee hole better?”
“This is so embarrassing,” she said, while Jimmy Fallon giggled and his audience cheered. Kardashian West gamely grinned, gave an entertaining and half-relatable example of urinating on herself at the Emmys and then seemed to get a little defensive: “No, this is such a legit question.”
Shapewear is compressive; its main function is to make bodies look smaller and feel tighter. It’s supposed to mould limbs to mannequin-like smoothness, paving over cracks, flattening any bloat and restraining all bounce.
It is most commonly sold as highrise shorts and underwear, though it also takes form as slips, sleeves, leggings and almost anything else short of a full-body skin suit (though there are bodysuits). It usually comes in black, beige or a slightly warmer raw-noodle shade of beige.
For the uninitiated, removing shapewear — to use the bathroom, for example — can be laborious, requiring some yanking and rolling and a base level of forearm strength.
While she only recently monetized her interest in shapewear, Kardashian West, 39, has been a designer of it all of her adult life. According to personal legend, she was forced to dye, slice and sew her store-bought shapewear for years in order to meet the unique needs of her unique body. Now she is taking on Spanx, an industry giant as synonymous to shapewear as Kleenex is to tissue. Skims, she said, is a modern alternative.
But more important, it’s a comfortable alternative — “really comfortable,” Kardashian West said. Comfortable enough to wear every day, not just special days. Comfortable enough to want to wear at home, which she does, under sweats. Because Kardashian West, one of the most famous, wealthy and watched women in the world, is at her most comfortable when she’s in shapewear.
For all the products and concepts she has sold to the world over the years, this is the one she is most confident in: restraint will bring you comfort.
Weaving $1 billion “I am really big on fabrics,” Kardashian West said.
She was sitting on a couch, wearing a plush white robe that was, regrettably, not made by Skims. (Before the holidays, Skims released robes and pyjamas made from soft boucle. Kardashian West said she wanted to make sleepwear after a “disgusting” realization that she wore only the same three pairs of pyjamas, which all had holes in them.
The company has a growing inventory — a full line of regular bras and underwear, along with nipple pasties and a mystifyingly flexible hoisting breast tape inspired by gaffer’s tape — but its core product is its shapewear fabric. Made from nylon and spandex or elastane and formulated depending on the intensity of the shapewear’s squeeze (medium, high or superhigh), it took more than two years to develop.
“I knew exactly what I wanted,” Kardashian West said. “Like the right amount of hold, where it’s not too tight and not too hard to get on.”
Weaving fabrication takes a long time, though, which is why Skims has struggled to restock after consistently selling out of products, Jens Grede, Kardashian West’s business partner, said in a phone call.
In November, TMZ reported via “sources with direct knowledge” that Kardashian West believed Skims would be her billion-dollar company. Her husband, Kanye West, had already built one (Yeezy). So had her little sister Kylie Jenner (Kylie Cosmetics). But Kardashian West, the family’s original money tree, had not made it there with her pre-Skims businesses, including KKW Beauty and KKW Fragrance.
“I mean, I think everyone would hope to have a billiondollar business,” she said when asked about the report. ‘Let’s try it and see’ “I credit every business venture that I’ve been in until this point to really understand what it takes and how involved you really have to be if you want it to be the best,” she said.
Before Skims was introduced to the public, people told Kardashian West that one of her signature products, shapewear shorts with one leg cut off — to wear underneath a dress or skirt with a high leg slit — wouldn’t translate, she said. No one would get it. But she had been cutting off one leg of her shapewear for years.
Kardashian West said, “Let’s try it and see.”
“It’s a good feeling to really be confident in something because a lot of the time, sometimes, I’m not,” she said.
This is how Kardashian West will get to $1 billion, if she does indeed get to $1 billion: by convincing people of the radical idea that shapewear is casualwear and loungewear, too, when its domain has previously been first dates and party outfits.
Kardashian West said it makes her happy to FaceTime with her sisters when they’re at home and to see they’re wearing Skims, “you know, not for a photo,” she said. “It’s genuinely the most comfortable thing for them.
“I feel better when I’m wearing shapewear,” she said. “That’s just me.”