Ask who owns SKIMS and the reflexive answer is Kim Kardashian. It is the most-searched question about the company, and the answer people expect is the one the branding implies: famous woman, famous woman’s brand.
The actual cap table is more interesting, and more instructive about how celebrity businesses are built at this scale. Kardashian is the largest individual shareholder in SKIMS. She does not hold a majority of it, she is not its chief executive, and she did not build it alone.
The three founders
SKIMS launched in 2019 as a partnership between Kardashian and Jens and Emma Grede — a husband-and-wife team who had already built Good American with Khloé Kardashian and who have investments across a string of other fashion businesses. Jens Grede is SKIMS’ chief executive. Emma Grede is its chief product officer.
That division of labour is not incidental to how the company works. Kardashian supplies the audience, the product instinct and the cultural positioning; the Gredes supply the operating company underneath it. The brands in this category that collapse are almost always the ones where the celebrity is the only person in the room who has ever built anything.
What each side actually holds
When SKIMS raised $225 million in November 2025 — a round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives with participation from Byron Trott’s BDT & MSD Partners — Forbes reported the ownership picture in unusual detail. Kardashian holds just under one-third of the company. The Gredes together hold just under 14%.
The rest of the register belongs to outside investors. Reported founder percentages are approximate — SKIMS is private and does not publish a share register — so treat them as the best figures on record rather than exact ones.
That is a meaningfully different structure from the celebrity-ownership stories that get told as triumphs of retained equity. George Clooney and his two Casamigos co-founders owned their company outright until Diageo bought it. Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty is a clean 50/50 joint venture with LVMH’s Kendo. SKIMS took the venture route instead: repeated outside rounds, a widening shareholder base, and founder stakes that get diluted every time the valuation goes up.
The trade is explicit. A smaller percentage of a much larger number. The November round added roughly $200 million to Kardashian’s net worth without her selling a share.
Why the valuation is a negotiated number, not a price
SKIMS was valued at $4 billion in 2023 and $5 billion in November 2025. Both figures get reported as though they were market prices. They are not.
A private funding-round valuation is what one set of investors agreed to pay for a specific slice of the company, on specific terms, on one particular day. It is a real signal — Goldman Sachs Alternatives is not writing a $225 million cheque on vibes — but it is not the same thing as a public market continuously repricing a stock, and it is not what the company would fetch in a sale. Every celebrity brand valuation you read is this kind of number. It is worth remembering that when the headline says a founder is now worth X.
The two deals that made the number defensible
Two things separate SKIMS from the long list of celebrity apparel brands that raised at a big number and then quietly stopped growing.
The first is the October 2023 deal making SKIMS the official underwear partner of the NBA, the WNBA and USA Basketball. Leagues do not hand that designation to a brand they think is a fad, and it moved SKIMS into men’s product with an institutional endorsement rather than a marketing campaign.
The second is NikeSKIMS — a joint brand with Nike announced in February 2025, whose debut collection landed on September 26, 2025 after a production delay pushed it out of the original spring window. Nike does not own SKIMS and did not buy it; the two companies built a third thing together. For SKIMS, the value is Nike’s manufacturing and performance-fabric expertise plus the legitimacy of the partner. For Nike, it is access to a women’s-fitness customer it has spent years being criticised for underserving.
Both deals do the same job: they move SKIMS out of the category of “brand attached to a celebrity” and into the category of “company other institutions sign contracts with.”
The takeaway
The honest answer to “who owns SKIMS” is that Kim Kardashian owns the largest single piece of it and nothing close to all of it — and that this is the point rather than the caveat. She traded majority control for capital, operators and distribution, and the resulting company is worth more than a wholly-owned brand of the same age almost certainly would have been.
It is a different playbook from Clooney’s or Reynolds’ — both of whom kept ownership tight and sold into a strategic buyer — and it comes with a different set of obligations. Venture money expects an exit. At $5 billion, the buyer list is short and the IPO bar is high. The interesting question about SKIMS is no longer whether the brand works. It is what the investors now sitting alongside the founders on the register eventually want.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns SKIMS? SKIMS is privately held by its three co-founders and a group of outside investors. Kim Kardashian is the largest individual shareholder, holding just under one-third of the company as of the November 2025 funding round, per Forbes. Co-founders Jens Grede — the company’s chief executive — and Emma Grede, its chief product officer, together hold just under 14%. The remainder sits with investors including Goldman Sachs Alternatives, which led the 2025 round, and Byron Trott’s BDT & MSD Partners.
How much is SKIMS worth? SKIMS was valued at $5 billion in November 2025, when it raised $225 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives. That is up from a $4 billion valuation in 2023. Because SKIMS is private, that number is a negotiated funding-round valuation rather than a market price.
Did Kim Kardashian start SKIMS by herself? No. SKIMS was founded in 2019 by Kardashian together with Jens and Emma Grede, the husband-and-wife team who also built Khloé Kardashian’s Good American. Jens Grede runs the company as chief executive and Emma Grede is chief product officer.
Is SKIMS owned by Nike? No. Nike and SKIMS launched a joint brand called NikeSKIMS — announced in February 2025, with the debut collection released September 26, 2025 — but that is a partnership between two separate companies, not an acquisition. Nike does not own SKIMS.
