Summary

Grede’s core thesis: pop culture is “really the only hack to the consumer economy that we have.” Give him and Patrick $1B to launch a vodka brand and spend it on TV, billboards and Meta — “we wouldn’t have half the brand recognition that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson has for his tequila company, Tamana.” In a fragmented, algorithm-siloed media world, only pop culture and sport still cut across political, racial and religious boundaries — and the power of the individual voice “has probably never been higher, from the business I’m in all the way to the Oval Office.”
“Big wins” is the era’s structural call. The algorithm shifted from social graph to interest-based, so brands must “pay to play” — SKIMS was one of the few larger brands able to build a social community to critical scale, where it could pay its way. Meanwhile retail has reverted to “80% a physical store business and 20% e-commerce” and stores are brutally capital-intensive, making large retailers and restaurant chains “almost impossible to recreate.” His conclusion about his own success: “I have a distinct feeling that if I tried to do it again, I wouldn’t be successful today.”
Brand history reframed: disruption in supply chain and distribution makes brands, not the reverse. Wexner’s empire rode the 80s mall build-out; American luxury scaled on department stores plus factoring (“which is why someone like Giorgio Armani still owns 100% of his business”); Zara/H&M out-supply-chained the Gap; and “What is Shein? It’s a supply chain and software company that is masquerading as a retailer.”
The consumer story and the Wall Street story barely touch — a tradeable disconnect. He told anyone who’d listen to buy Abercrombie five years ago at ~$700–800M; Victoria’s Secret survived the Wexner–Epstein taint and “outdated” positioning because 20-something customers simply didn’t care: “Go to any mall in America and you see early-20-somethings with a Sephora bag and a Victoria’s Secret bag.”
Culture has swung from futurism to nostalgia and now moves in lockstep with the establishment rather than against it: Olive Garden, country music, Applebee’s, Banana Republic’s best year in decades, Abercrombie “back from the dead,” the NFL’s total dominance after CTE-era doom talk, and a SKIMS Diner pop-up that booked out 8am–3am for 10 days in four or five minutes. He reads it as “a counter-reaction to globalism, which much like technology did not work for everybody.”
The Kim partnership was built as a platform, not a celebrity brand: 20 years ago ~14–15% of US teens wanted to be pro athletes (now ~3%) while ~20% now want to be creators — so “isn’t Kim Kardashian the Michael Jordan of the influencer generation?” The Jordan/Beats proof: the kid wearing both “never watched Michael Jordan play basketball, nor did they listen to Dr. Dre.”
The operating system is “wouldn’t it be cool,” run six weeks out, volume over per-deal ROI: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in his breakout year, Usher before the halftime show, Sabrina Carpenter one week before “Espresso” hit #1. “Popular culture is dairy — it goes off,” and on ROI discipline, Patrick’s pushback was: “every LTV-to-CAC model that you ever saw over the past 15 years would have worked out. I haven’t seen one.”
Forward calls: the individual only gets more important in a post-truth, deepfake era (he trusts Dan Sheim’s D1 WhatsApp group as one of his more trusted sources of information, backs Passes in an “early innings” creator economy); for SKIMS, the priorities are global physical stores plus an app already doing over 20% of business a year after launch — and “I’m probably going to go public one day.”

Deep dive

1. Pop culture is the only consumer hack

The vodka thought experiment carries the whole argument: a billion dollars spent on TV, billboards and Meta for a hypothetical “Winter Warmth” vodka “wouldn’t have half the brand recognition that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson has for his tequila company, Tamana. So you tell me, what’s the value of Dwayne Johnson — is it a billion dollars or is it five?” Reaching critical mass of US consumers any other way is nearly impossible.
The mechanism is media fragmentation: everyone’s feed is different, and an obsessive can live entirely inside a fly-fishing universe. “The only two things that cut across” the political, racial and religious boundaries the algorithms have strengthened are pop culture and sport.
The old boxes — singer, actor, brand, soda maker — have dissolved. Ryan Reynolds is a movie star and the founder of a mobile phone network: “That’s bizarre. I don’t think that would have been the case 20 years ago.” In a world of distrust for authority where truth is debatable, “the importance of an individual and the voice of an individual has probably never been higher — from the business I’m in all the way to the Oval Office.”

2. Culture flipped from contrarian futurism to establishment nostalgia

The 90s establishment “was somewhat the enemy of the young,” whether Nirvana or Public Enemy. Today pop culture moves “in lockstep with the establishment” and with politics — in a time most people find threatening and uncertain, we clamor for comfort: Olive Garden, country music, a booming Applebee’s, Banana Republic’s best year “in probably decades,” Abercrombie “back from the dead.”
His own data point: the SKIMS Diner takeover in LA sold out every table from 8am to 3am for 10 days in four or five minutes. Ask a 12-year-old their favorite show and “you’d be surprised how many say Friends.” The irony he savors: diners weren’t born nostalgic — they were hyper-modernist, rocket-age structures from an era certain the future would be better. “Today we are fearful of the future rather than optimistic — I think we should be optimistic.”
Sport tells the same story: eight or ten years ago the CTE conversation had people asking whether the NFL would “go the way of boxing. Today that feels laughable” — the NFL owns American sport and college football is second in viewership, far ahead of basketball. Football, Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, Chili’s: one consistent movement, “a counter-reaction to globalism, which much like technology did not work for everybody.”
Patrick’s pushback — why pessimism amid the biggest platform explosion in years? Grede’s answer cuts: “You are a beneficiary of it” — the creator economy works for podcasters, not for a large part of the country, and the benefits on offer “need to be more profound than an app with a new feature.”

3. The consumer story and the Wall Street story don’t touch each other

“I must have told anybody who wanted to listen five years ago to buy Abercrombie — I think it was worth $700 or $800 million at the time.” His frame: “There’s a big difference between a consumer story and a Wall Street financial-press story. Ironically, they don’t seem to impact one another very much.”
Victoria’s Secret is the sharper case: an Epstein connection through founder Les Wexner, outdated fashion shows, a portrayal of women out of step with the early 2020s — “everybody said it’s over. It’s not over. They’re doing just fine.” Wall Street is “still working on the thesis of that story from 2020,” while any American mall shows early-20-somethings carrying a Sephora bag and a Victoria’s Secret bag side by side. Grede says 20-something customers’ purchasing behavior was not visibly affected.
The generalization: we overanalyze what actually matters to customers. “We know that Coke isn’t great for us to drink with every meal, but Coca-Cola seems to be doing just fine.”

4. Why big wins now — the algorithm and the store base both favor incumbents

The Shopify/Meta era made brand creation easy; then the feed went from social to interest-based, favoring what you clicked and recently followed over who you followed five years ago. He follows ~1,200 accounts and sees content from maybe 200. “It does not favor brands making content… it was very, very hard all of a sudden to build a community on social.” SKIMS got to critical scale in time; “today you have to pay to play” if you want to be seen.
Distribution is the second wall: post-Covid shopping has returned to 2019 levels — “it’s 80% a physical store business and 20% an e-commerce business… I don’t want to be the 20% business.” But stores consume enormous capital, and a new retailer couldn’t finance good locations. Hence: “big wins — large retailers, large restaurant chains with a big footprint — it’s almost impossible today to recreate.”

5. Brands are downstream of supply-chain and distribution shifts — SKIMS included

His revisionist retail history: “disruption in consumer is more connected to changes in supply chain and distribution than the brand itself.” Les Wexner’s genius (Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body, Express, Abercrombie, Hollister) was replicating concepts across the 80s American mall build-out; American and European luxury — Ralph Lauren, likely Giorgio Armani, Versace, Gucci — all scaled “within the same five years” on Saks/Neiman Marcus distribution plus factoring, cash before invoices, “which is why someone like Giorgio Armani still owns 100% of his business. That could not be replicated today.”
The pattern repeats: post-GFC accessible luxury (Michael Kors, Tory Burch, likely “Dragon Bone,” Coach’s expansion) filled floor space vacated by collapsed diffusion lines; Inditex and H&M out-supply-chained JCPenney and Gap; and what is likely Shein is “a supply chain and software company masquerading as a retailer.” Patrick adds the number: Shein’s unsold-inventory performance is roughly 10x better than the next most relevant player.
SKIMS’ wedge was the same kind of timing: life was splitting into two wardrobes — one soft, one out — and the soft one was spilling over; incumbents had gone stale, discount-driven, “we were paying a lot for not very much.” He led through fabrication, building a sensory signature as distinct as Coke vs. Pepsi or “the first sip of Starbucks” — the likely Vuori effect, where you know exactly how it’s meant to feel.
The category moat, learned from watching Remo Ruffini attach likely Moncler’s performance-ski core to fashion and pop culture: underwear has “a lot more in common with a sneaker than a T-shirt” — a performance product doing a job for 12–14 hours, harder to innovate, and “once you have a customer’s trust, they’re very loyal — super high retention.” Without observing likely Moncler, “I don’t know if I would have gone about building SKIMS the way Kim and I did.”

6. Product is omnipotent; house taste is the poison

Marketing, from a man who still identifies “as a marketeteer first and foremost”: “It’s lipstick… only there to accelerate or accentuate something that is already there.” His trick question for marketing hires — name the last Tesla ad campaign. “The product is omnipotent. It’s number one, two and three.” SKIMS spent years before launch on product development “all the way down to raw material.”
The pricing philosophy comes from Starbucks, which he calls a phenomenal innovation company (Frappuccino, pumpkin spice latte, refreshers are franchises): every office in America has free coffee, “but I still think the Starbucks is worth my $5.50 or $6” — premium but affordable, focused on what you get for the money rather than the price.
His warning on “house taste”: every winery believes its wine is the world’s best because they’ve spent 10 or 20 years perfecting it for their own palate. “You shouldn’t get high on your own supply” — founders spend their time convincing people the product is great instead of listening. The fix is a strong community feedback loop and a culture, set from the top, that assumes the customer’s feeling is always warranted. Bernard’s edge, from working with him: “highly in tune with what his customers will give him agency to do or not to do.”
The moment he knew: a month or two after launch, “we had 2 million customers on a waitlist and no product left at all, and no product coming… 1+1+1 wasn’t 3, it was 100.” Six years in, “SKIMS is a far more important company culturally than it is the size of a business.”

7. Kim as platform: the Michael Jordan of the influencer generation

The origin was compulsion, not a pitch: “I don’t know if there was ever a ’let’s do this thing.’ It was more like, oh, we’re definitely doing this thing… When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s not that you want to do something. It’s that you cannot not do something.” Once Kim showed him the aesthetic, “I couldn’t get that out of my head. I just couldn’t.”
What he saw was “stepping into a world that no one else owned aesthetically” — the Ralph Lauren test, where you could take all the signs off the walls and still know where you are. It was “inclusive without ever having to say the word inclusive. It wasn’t a decision. It just was.”
The platform logic was there from day one. He showed Kim a photo of a kid in Beats headphones and Jordans: “That kid never watched Michael Jordan play basketball, nor did they listen to Dr. Dre. Yet both of those companies would have been impossible without their founders.” To the “celebrity brand” jab: “Is Jordan a celebrity brand? It is. It’s just 40 years old.”
The demographic underneath the bet: ~20 years ago 14–15% of American teenagers wanted to be professional athletes; today it’s more like 3% — while almost 20% want to be a creator or influencer. “Isn’t Kim Kardashian the Michael Jordan of the influencer generation? She deserves a brand that will live on in 30, 40 and 50 years as a platform in popular culture.” He also insists Kim “doesn’t get enough credit for what a great executive she is.”

8. “Wouldn’t it be cool” — operate six weeks out, volume over ROI

Corporate America researches, consensus-approves, and ships content a year later — “and no one cares.” His line: “Popular culture is dairy. It goes off.” The fix is compressing the decision cycle to six weeks, where the future is knowable: Oscar nominees, Grammy lineups, the White Lotus finale date.
The track record of the method: likely Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as the NBA face of SKIMS in his breakout year, then Donovan Mitchell; Usher just before his halftime show; the White Lotus “Italian girls” as the Valentine’s couple; Sabrina Carpenter “one week before she went number one with Espresso. I wish I was one week later, but it was pretty good.”
He refuses per-deal ROI math: either you’re right and blunder next time, or you’re disappointed and pull back. Patrick’s pushback was: “We love the idea that we can control an unpredictable outcome, and we can’t. If we could, every LTV-to-CAC model that you ever saw over the past 15 years would have worked out. And let me tell you, I haven’t seen one.” The Ohtani principle: don’t hit the home run every at-bat, “but we hit them often enough” — and since attention is the only real estate and “things can be incredibly important for an hour,” the one controllable lever is to increase the output.
The scaling risk he names unprompted: “what the first 12, 20 people can accomplish is unbelievable. And what the next thousand can accomplish is disappointing.” Discipline and process become necessary, “but if you’re not very, very careful, they’ll kill what made you special to begin with.”

9. Post-truth media, closed networks, and the creator economy’s early innings

The post-truth mechanics: Americans are skeptical even of trusted news sources, so individuals become the source of “a singular truth” — “you can be a disciple of Elon Musk or a disciple of AOC, and you’re far more likely to believe either of those two than the Washington Post.” Deepfakes push it further: content-verification technology “of course is going to happen” (Patrick has long wanted to back one — and notes it’s literally the premise of Mountain Head).
His trusted sources have already migrated: Dan Sheim’s D1 WhatsApp group is “one of my more trusted sources of information on what’s going on in our economy today,” and Reddit “is emerging as a platform with a tremendous amount of power.”
Where he’d build next: the creator economy, “early innings” — he’s an investor in Passes, founded by likely Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, letting creators directly monetize their fan base. The reason it works: compare artists with 5M, 20M and 400M followers and “you’ll find the exact same amount of engagement… the size of the following doesn’t matter so much anymore — they don’t really own their audience.”
The magazine-era lessons that still govern him: GQ editor Dylan Jones taught him you don’t have to break news first, just be “at the forefront of your own customer” — Grede’s self-placement: “the tip of the spear of mainstream.” And from the chairman of LVMH fashion: “the secret to our success is that we always transform on the way up” — by the time a plateaued company implements change, it’s already going down. “Who fires a CEO when a company is growing? Almost nobody. Maybe we should.” (On legacy media itself he’s less sure, citing the All-In line that “journalism became activism” — “it’s been pretty hard to put that back in the bottle.”)

10. The five-year view: stores, the app, and a likely IPO

From his investors Josh and Neil he takes the template: high conviction, few bets, double down on winners, unfazed by the news cycle. Markets extrapolate both ways — “when something is good, there’s no end to how good it can get; when something is bad, no end to how bad” — in 2021 “you could give away retail real estate; now it’s the hottest part of the market.” His planning horizon: “I don’t know where the world is going within the next year, but I think we can be relatively confident where the world is going in five.”
His two five-year views that he says he is unlikely to be very wrong about: the individual voice gets more important, not less, and as algorithms optimize for entertainment over following, influential people will forge their own captive networks — so back founders building companies that fit that worldview.
For SKIMS: scale global physical distribution at pace (“I don’t want to be the 20% business”), and grow the app — a year after launch it already does “over 20% of our business” — into a closed, direct community “where I can have my customers’ attention. That’s going to be the difference maker over the next five years.” What keeps him up is expectedness: when ESPN anticipated Luka Dončić appearing in a SKIMS campaign, “if there’s an expectation, there’s also not a surprise” — the mandate is to keep doing the unexpected.
On going public: money “is the result of doing something great… a poor purpose” for founders — though for investors “it’s the biggest part of the cake. It should be.” He accepts the deal he made taking institutional capital: “my cap table in 5 years is going to look nothing like the cap table today, and that’s okay… I’m probably going to go public one day,” and he’s “pro the public route” for governance and stakeholder responsibility — even as semi-liquid markets (Stripe, SpaceX) now give early shareholders optionality that makes IPOs less mandatory than they were. He quotes likely Jensen Huang’s recent line approvingly: he’d never have become an entrepreneur if he’d known how hard it was.

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