Skims' $5 Billion Playbook: Emma Grede on Trusting Intuition

Emma Grede co-founded a $5 billion shapewear company, and she says the decisive asset wasn't a spreadsheet — it was refusing to second-guess herself.

"I don't second guess myself," Grede said at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, California, on Tuesday. "I think a lot of us have that skill, but we talk ourselves out of it, and we second guess ourselves a lot. One of the most expensive habits that we have as women is waiting until we're ready."

Grede, 44, is co-founder and chief product officer of Skims. She told Most Powerful Women editorial director Ellie Austin that she has failed so many times that failure "stopped mattering" and no longer holds her back. Her track record extends beyond shapewear: she's an investor and fashion designer, and most recently founded Off Season, a luxury sports-fashion brand, alongside designer Kristin Juszczyk.

Her resume defies the conventional founder template. Raised by a single mother in East London, Grede never went to college. Skims' $5 billion valuation puts her in the top tier of self-built fashion fortunes — no degree required.

What does intuition actually buy a product company?

For Skims, it has bought a pipeline of products nobody asked for — until they sold. Grede pointed to a push-up bra with a raised nipple detail. Critics initially read it as provocative. Grede said it actually affirms women who have had breast reconstruction surgery after a mastectomy.

The product logic splits into two lanes. Some items, like black thongs, meet existing demand — many women simply don't own one. Others, like a face sculpt wrap, aim to create, occupy, and own a market that didn't exist before launch.

"One of my special sauces is to go in and say, 'Well, how do you take a problem that exists within this and make it make sense for a new generation of customers?'" Grede said.

She framed the method in deliberately unglamorous terms. "So much of what I do is not brain surgery," she said. "It's about making things 1% better. It's about taking existing markets, but really paying attention and really being focused on the excellence of products."

For operators, that's the real takeaway: Skims doesn't invent categories from scratch. It takes a known problem, redesigns the product for a new customer generation, and iterates in one-percent increments.

Why Grede wrote a book instead of a pep talk

Grede has packaged her approach in a book, Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life. She warned that too much advice aimed at women is feel-good fluff rather than practical, effective guidance.

"What I'm not doing is trying to make people feel comfortable," she said. "I'm talking about the reality of what I do, and so I actually think that so much of what's out there, specifically in women's media, is to make women feel better."

The distinction matters to her because she self-identifies as an operator, not a motivational voice. "I'm interested in that because I'm a results-oriented person. I'm an operator, and so I talk about the truth and the quality it is to operate in my life. I've never been shy about saying this is what I had to do. These are the sacrifices that I had to make. These are the trade-offs in my life. These are the things that I don't do."

That trade-off framing is the practical question for anyone building a brand or a career: what are you willing to stop doing? Grede's answer built a $5 billion company and, with Off Season now live, she's testing the same instinct in a category she doesn't yet dominate.