What Kim Kardashian’s Olympics Coup Says About American Fashion
The mega-influencer’s digital-first shapewear brand Skims has not only succeeded in selling millions of units, but in quickly earning the sort of cultural credibility once reserved for the likes of Ralph Lauren.
It was a tale of two brands (and two business models) in American fashion this week.
On Monday evening, veteran designer Marc Jacobs thrilled fashion industry insiders with a show of striking silhouettes, staged IRL at the New York Public Library: a commitment to high design and the power of the runway. It was a crowd-pleasing comeback, however fragile, for a home-town hero who hadn’t shown since Covid-19 ripped through New York City early last year, for a business that has finally crossed back into profitability after five years of losses, and for the traditional American fashion system that underlies it.
Only hours earlier, however, another American fashion business made waves of its own when mega-influencer Kim Kardashian West announced in a flurry of social media posts that her Los Angeles-based shape-wear brand Skims would outfit Team USA’s female athletes with underwear, loungewear and pyjamas for this summer’s Tokyo Olympics and Paralympic Games.
The two businesses couldn’t be more different. Marc Jacobs, a designer ready-to-wear label founded by Jacobs and Robert Duffy in 1984, was born into a fashion system where success was built on glossy magazines and department stores. Meanwhile, Kardashian West’s Skims, a two-year-old shapewear brand developed with business partner Jens Grede, was conceived for a digital world with a strategy built on social media and e-commerce.
And though the fashion industry cheered for Jacobs, when Skims was named an official Olympics outfitter, the symbolism of the moment was unmistakable: a digital-first fashion business rooted in category-specific innovation had succeeded, not only in selling millions of units, but in earning the sort of cultural credibility once reserved for the likes of Ralph Lauren — all in the space of two years.
To be sure, Skims is still tiny compared to Ralph Lauren. In April, the shapewear brand raised $154 million in a new round of venture funding which lifted its valuation to $1.6 billion, a big number for a young label. But Ralph Lauren’s market capitalisation is more than five times that. Still, while Ralph Lauren took decades to become one of the most successful American fashion brands in history with a model largely based on wholesale and licensing, Skims has harnessed direct-to-consumer digital distribution to grow fast. The label reported $145 million in 2020 sales and is aiming to more than double that number this year.
It’s far easier to quickly scale a young brand online than in the physical world. Retail expansion brings friction and is expensive. And although building a direct-to-consumer e-commerce channel requires greater upfront investment than simply wholesaling to third-parties, it offers better margins and far greater control over everything from customer data to pricing, making it much easier to rapidly test and optimise a strategy. In a noisy market, going direct-to-consumer also allows young labels to send a much clearer brand signal.
Of course, you still need something to say. Skims has harnessed inclusivity and empowerment, offering a wide range of sizes and skin-tone shades, to not only target a broad customer base, but to stand for something that increasingly resonates with young consumers and imbues the brand with the kind of powerful story that can conceivably stand side-by-side on the world stage with American powerhouses like Ralph Lauren and Nike.
“Skims is size-inclusive and race-inclusive. It’s authentically consistent with the Olympics and that universalism [of sport],” said Nick Brown, co-founder of Imaginary Ventures, an early investor in Skims. “This can be a generationally-defining global brand that has real longevity.”
Of course, it helps to have the star power of Kim Kardashian.