Millionaire self-made behind 4 billion dollars skims, Emma Grede says that it all started with a cold call

It was in 2015, and Greede built its own entertainment and talent agency, independent Talent Brand, which saw it broadcast between London and the. “I knew each manager, agent, publicist, lawyer in Hollywood, it was my job,” recalls Grede in an exclusive interview with Fortune.

And that placed it in the perfect position to present its new idea: a radically inclusive denim brand adapted to women who had been neglected by dominant fashion. In her mind, she had already chosen the perfect partner for the brand: Khloe Kardashian, who “embodied this idea from the start”. The star had often been honest about her experience as a winding sister.

But here is the catch: Grede had not managed a fashion company before, and the two had never worked together. Instead of waiting for an introduction, she boldly called the family matriarch and “Momager”, Jenner herself.

“I had an idea and I trained the partnership in my mind,” explains the 42 -year -old millionaire, 42 years old. “The difference between me and someone else is that I made the phone call, I took the meeting and I did it.”

“I have no impostor syndrome and no illusion of who can manage a business,” adds Grede. “I was just thinking, if not me, so who?”

Jenner asked Grede when she then flies towards the to discuss the face -to -face partnership. At the time, Grede only stole this way once per quarter, but she quickly lied and said she was going there the following week. So that’s exactly what she did – and the rest is history.

When Good American Denim fell a year later, he won $ 1 million on the first day, making it the biggest denim launch in clothing history. And since then, she has gone to sit on the board of directors for the Obama Foundation and has become the first black investor on Shark tank. More recently, she joined forces with the tennis champion Coco Gauff during a mentoring campaign with UPS.

Now, Grede says that she always advises the founders to copy her, to be more daring and to put himself on a member: “An idea in your head is only one idea in your head – many people talk and talk a lot of things, sometimes you just have to do.”

Emme Grede says that she has always been “daring”

Grede’s confidence is not lucky – or even something that she has developed alongside the success of a billion dollars of her businesses. It is a line with which she had just been born. “I have a lot of audacity and I think you need it to get to where you want to go,” explains the London East Fortune.

At the end of her adolescence, for example, Grede had aspirations to work in the equivalent of Broadway in Great Britain. When the theater bosses ignored her handwritten notes asking for work experience, she took it in person.

“I remember beating the sidewalk in the West End,” she recalls. “I was just thinking, because I did not get answers, that they may not get my letters. So I took the hand to deliver letters. ”

Even when she held a day job, she boldly asked customers with enviable careers for a work experience – and it would work.

“When I worked in a clothing store, I would talk to everyone, I said to myself:” Where do you work? ” What would you do? If a stylist came on a Friday and was filming on weekends, I would help them on weekends. I did it several times.

She says that she had actively put herself in “situations”, against passively the opportunities to come to her. After discovering where customers were working, she would follow up: “Do you need help? Can I come?”

Grede’s advice for unemployment Gen Z: Kill Your Darlings

Millions of genres are currently unemployed – or rather Neet, not in employment, education or training.

Grede, on the other hand, has been working since the start of high school.

“I have had a job since the age of 12,” she says. “I started to deliver newspapers, then I worked in a cold cut, then I worked in about four different clothing stores, then I spent a year and a half having work experience in each little designer and public relations agency in London. Then, I worked for a quintesential production company, then I went from my own service.

Essentially, each experience led to the next. It has treated each role – it doesn’t matter how little it is – a means of collecting skills, contacts and credibility that stack it in its next move. Thanks to the habit of speaking and standing out, she tightened a real experience and worthy of Curriculum Vitae among the most modest jobs.

Of course, even Grede knew its just part of NO along the way: “I am very, very, very comfortable with the rejection. If I think how many things did not work for me, there are much more than the things that apparently on paper worked.”

But she dusted herself and tried again. This is why his advice for those who are fighting to break down is to consider each experience as a step forward – even if it is not yet the role of dreams.

“I would think of the idea of ​​transferable skills,” she advises job seekers at generation Z. “We have all set ourselves to think exactly about what we might want to do. And the reality is that you can acquire fairly interchangeable skills anywhere. ”

Great, Grede was fixed on the idea of ​​working in fashion. “I could have obtained many of these skills in an advertising agency or work in another creative industry,” she explains. Winning experience in an art gallery or a shop, then getting on the scale, is much easier than hoping for a job in a fashion house straight out of the university. You just need to put aside your ego and give priority to the momentum of the building, above perfection.

“I would do anything to advance the movement to you,” explains Grede.

“In England, we have this pretty saying,” kill your darlings “and sometimes you just have to kill your cherish.

Find out more: Multimillionaire self -taught behind $ 4 billion Empire Skims says that she was using AI like a 42 -year -old woman ” – until Mark Cuban gave her alarm clock.