In the summer of 2019, Kim Kardashian stood in front of the biggest mistake of her business life. She had just announced a shapewear line called Kimono. Within hours, the mayor of Kyoto had written her an open letter. The hashtag KimOhNo was everywhere. Accusations of cultural appropriation were arriving from every direction, and every one of them was fair.
Most founders would have gone quiet and waited for the storm to pass. Kardashian did something harder. She admitted it, killed the name, and started over. Three months later, on September 10, 2019, the rebranded company opened its website for the first time. It was called SKIMS now. The first drop sold two million dollars of product almost instantly and cleared the shelves in ten minutes.
That opening week tells you everything you need to know about the company SKIMS would become. It listens. It moves fast. And it does not waste a crisis.
Six years on, SKIMS has raised roughly nine hundred million dollars from Lone Pine, Thrive Capital, Wellington Management and Goldman Sachs. It crossed a billion dollars in annual sales in 2025. It turned profitable in 2023 with an estimated net profit of one hundred and ninety million dollars, a milestone most celebrity brands never reach at any valuation. And in November 2025, Goldman Sachs Alternatives led a two hundred and twenty five million dollar round that priced the whole business at five billion dollars.
Here is how a shapewear company got there, number by number.
The Product Fixed What The Giants Refused To
To understand why SKIMS won, you have to understand what it was competing against.
Spanx owned the category for two decades. It was a fine business and a lazy one. Limited sizes. One beige shade it called nude, as if nude meant a single skin tone. A customer base getting older every year with no plan to replace it. When Blackstone bought into Spanx in 2021, the deal valued the entire company at 1.2 billion dollars.
Kardashian and her co-founders, Jens Grede and Emma Grede, walked straight into that gap. SKIMS launched with sizes from XXS to 5XL. Nine nude shades on every style. And a price that undercut the incumbent: a sculpting bodysuit at sixty two dollars against Spanx at seventy eight. We put the hero piece through its paces in our SKIMS bodysuit review, and the quality holds up at that price.
The customer noticed immediately. Three million products sold in the first year. And here is the number that should worry every legacy apparel executive: seventy percent of SKIMS customers are millennials or Gen Z. The brand did not just take market share. It captured the next thirty years of it.
The rebrand that made all of this possible deserves its place among the great successful rebrands in modern fashion. The team changed the name in weeks, kept the product exactly as designed, and converted global outrage into a global launch audience.
Follow The Money, Because This Time You Can
Most celebrity brands are black boxes. They announce valuations through friendly press and never show the work. SKIMS is different. It raised venture capital four times, which means its growth is stamped round by round, in other people’s money.
| Date | Round | Raised | Valuation | Lead Investor | Revenue Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| April 2021 | Series A | $154M | $1.6B | Imaginary Ventures | Not disclosed |
| January 2022 | Series B | $240M | $3.2B | Lone Pine Capital | 11.6x |
| July 2023 | Series C | $270M | $4.0B | Wellington Management | 5.3x |
| November 2025 | Series D | $225M | $5.0B | Goldman Sachs Alternatives | 5.0x |
Look at the last column. That is the whole story.
The multiple investors’ pay keeps falling while the valuation keeps rising. In plain terms, revenue is growing into the price tag instead of the price tag running away from reality. That is what a hype premium looks like when it slowly converts into a real business.
The underlying numbers earn it. Roughly one hundred and forty five million dollars in 2020. Two seventy five in 2021. Five hundred in 2022. Around seven fifty in 2023, the year the business turned profitable. More than a billion in 2025. That is a 37 percent compound growth rate held across five straight years, at apparel margins, with profit attached.
Then Nike Called
In February 2025, Nike made a confession disguised as a press release. It announced it would build an entirely new brand with SKIMS.
Read that sentence again. Nike, a fifty billion dollar company, did not sponsor SKIMS. It did not license SKIMS. It looked at the women’s activewear market it was losing to Lululemon and Alo, and decided the fastest way back in was to attach itself to a six year old shapewear company.
NikeSKIMS launched on September 26, 2025. The first 48 hours were violent. SKIMS direct to consumer sales more than doubled year over year. New customer counts jumped fifty percent. Average order values rose thirty percent, because NikeSKIMS pieces priced above the core line and sold anyway. The announcement alone generated 6.1 million dollars in media impact value and twelve million TikTok views in two days.
The strategic logic runs both directions. Nike borrows cultural relevance from the brand that owns the under forty female consumer. SKIMS gets something money cannot easily buy: Nike’s global distribution muscle, performance credibility, and an instant seat in a hundred billion dollar category, without building a single factory.
It is the same trade Fenty Beauty made with LVMH. Celebrity audience meets institutional machine. The difference is that SKIMS arrived at the table already profitable. Nobody was rescuing anything.
The Quiet Build Nobody Priced In
The Goldman money is going to three places, and together they reveal what SKIMS actually wants to become.
First, stores. SKIMS had no permanent retail before 2024. By late 2025 it had eighteen stores in the United States plus two franchises in Mexico, including flagships on Fifth Avenue and the Sunset Strip. Regent Street in London and a Dubai location are slated for mid 2026. Management has said it wants to become a predominantly physical business. For a brand born on Instagram, that is a remarkable sentence.
Second, sports. SKIMS is the official underwear partner of the NBA, the WNBA and USA Basketball. It dressed Team USA at the Olympics. A shapewear company now carries the cultural footprint of a sportswear giant, and it got there in three years.
Third, beauty. SKIMS has acquired SKKN by Kim, including the twenty percent stake Coty held, folding Kardashian’s skincare ventures into the SKIMS corporate structure. A beauty and fragrance launch lands in 2026, which would put SKIMS in direct competition with the celebrity beauty field we track in our celebrity makeup brands ranking. The shapewear company is quietly assembling a conglomerate.
The Honest Risks
A confident read of this company includes the ways it could go wrong, so here they are.
The valuation now assumes flawless execution on three simultaneous expansions. Retail, international and beauty have each, on their own, sunk stronger companies. Kardashian holds roughly thirty five percent of the business, which means the key person risk is not metaphorical. Her relevance is the flywheel, and flywheels slow down. And NikeSKIMS has not yet faced its real test, which is not launch week but month eighteen, when the novelty is gone and the product must sell on replenishment alone.
These are real risks. They are also the risks of a company being judged as a company. Which is exactly the point.
The Verdict
Every celebrity brand claims to be bigger than the celebrity. SKIMS is the first one with the paperwork to prove it. Institutional money at shrinking multiples. Profitability that survived outside scrutiny. Partnerships with the NBA and Nike that no follower count can purchase.
Six years ago this was a naming scandal with a ten minute sellout attached. Today it sits alongside the empires we have profiled in Fenty Beauty and Rare Beauty in our ranking of the biggest celebrity fortunes, and by most measures it now sets the standard they are judged against.
The apology worked. The business behind it worked harder.
Frequently asked questions
How much is SKIMS worth?
SKIMS is valued at $5 billion. A $225 million round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives set that price in November 2025. The brand expects to pass $1 billion in net sales for 2025, up from roughly $145 million in 2020.
Who owns SKIMS?
Kim Kardashian owns roughly 35% of SKIMS. She co-founded it with Jens Grede and Emma Grede. Outside investors such as Lone Pine, Thrive Capital, Wellington Management and Goldman Sachs also hold stakes. The company has raised about $900 million across 4 funding rounds since 2021.
Is SKIMS profitable?
Yes. SKIMS turned profitable in 2023 with an estimated net profit of $190 million on roughly $750 million in sales. Most celebrity brands never get there. Revenue has grown at about 37% a year over 5 years.
What is NikeSKIMS?
NikeSKIMS is a women’s activewear brand that Nike and SKIMS built together. Nike announced it in February 2025 and the line launched on September 26, 2025. In the first 48 hours, SKIMS direct to consumer sales more than doubled year over year and new customer counts rose 50%.
How does SKIMS compare to Spanx?
SKIMS offers sizes from XXS to 5XL and 9 nude shades on every style. Spanx was known for limited sizes and a single beige “nude”. The SKIMS sculpting bodysuit costs $62 against $78 for Spanx. About 70% of SKIMS customers are millennials or Gen Z.
