Emma Grede: The Woman That Makes Millionaires: They're Lying About Work Life Balance! I Built SKIMS Without Fashion Knowledge!
Guests: Emma Grede
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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Work-life balance is your problem. It is not the employer’s responsibility. Look, I have four kids and I had to figure out how I would think about my own ambition balanced with my parenting. That is true. And we have to have a level of honesty about what it takes to be really successful.
But is it possible to be number one but still have all of my evenings and weekends?
No. No. If it is possible, tell me who she is and I will show you a liar.
Emma Grede has rewritten the fashion business rulebook. As the co-founder of multi-billion dollar brands like Good American and Skims with the Kardashians, she is now revealing the secrets behind her unstoppable success.
Look at this Emma here. Where did you get these photos? How old are you here?
Fifteen.
And how do you feel about her?
I feel like this person was dying to escape her circumstances. I was raised by a single mom, one of four girls, and I had a very big hand in raising them to help my mom keep our family afloat.
But I thank God every day for the type of upbringing that I had because it was hammered into me that nothing is going to come easy. And that made me who I am: gritty.
Fast forward, and I am an apparel CEO, someone who goes out and raises hundreds of millions of dollars, somebody who starts an agency in multiple countries. I have zero qualifications to do any of that. I did not have talent as a designer, but I would just make it happen. [00:1:47] **Steven Bartlett:** There are a lot of things I want to go into. What are the three most important things in being successful in business? Do you think it is possible for someone to make themselves gritty? How do we not give so many... [00:1:56] **Emma Grede:** My speciality. [00:1:57] **Steven Bartlett:** And then you pitch Khloe? [00:1:58] **Emma Grede:** Mhm. [00:1:59] **Steven Bartlett:** What was that journey like? [00:2:01] **Emma Grede:** I will tell you the truth. [00:2:04] **Steven Bartlett:** I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the backend of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast have not yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you are listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. [00:2:19] **Steven Bartlett:** If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make this show better and better and better. I cannot tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. [00:2:32] **Steven Bartlett:** The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and continue to do this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you are listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.
Emma, what do I need to understand about your earliest context in order to understand the woman, the very unique woman, the very successful woman that is sat in front of me today? When I ask that question, I am looking for the characteristics that were most formative in creating the woman that is Emma.
What a great way to start. I think that is a great question for me because so much of who I am and how I feel about who I am comes from where I am from. I say it all the time, I am from East London. I like to make that distinction because I feel like such a Londoner and I feel like being from East London, coming from that place, is so much a part of my character.
It is so much a part of what is important to me, that idea of being someone who is reliable, someone who is honest—not just sometimes, but all the time. I am one of four girls. I was raised by a single mom. It was so much hammered into me that this is where you are from, but this is not where you need to stay.
The world is your oyster, you can do anything, but you are just going to have to work really, really hard. I think all around me I saw a lot of people that were working hard, I saw a lot of people that were hustling and doing what they needed to do just to get through the day.
But I had this feeling very much inside of me that if I wanted more for myself, it was all completely within reach. I think that really came from this East London mentality and all the people that were around me.
I did not need to do my research to realize that you are a big sister because you have got some serious big sister energy. Even with me, we have known each other for a little while now. You are the oldest of four sisters?
I am indeed.
How did that shape you?
I think in a really big way. I have a pretty interesting relationship with my mom. My dad left when we were much younger and our family dynamic is like she is the dad, I am the mom, and we have three kids together.
If you asked any of my sisters, they would say Emma had this very big hand in raising us, in being pretty formative in our childhood. I would get up as a kid, I would iron three school shirts, I would make three packed lunches. My mom would go off to work. I would get all the kids in school and half the time turn back around and come home to watch *This Morning*.
That was my life. There was the odd day I decided to stay there, but more often than not I was just about trying to help my mom keep our family afloat. I think that made me super responsible at an early age, but it also gave me a very early indication of how I did not want to live my life.
I knew that the milkman had not been paid. I knew that there were bills dropping on the doormat every day. I felt that at a very young age and I felt the heaviness of that. I knew it was all down to my mom to make ends meet and to figure that out so that we could all be okay.
I kind decided at a very, very young age that I did not want any of that anxiety and I did not want that heaviness to stay around and to weigh on me as I grew up.
I feel like children are not supposed to grow up with the heaviness of bills on the doormat.
Whether they are or they are not, I actually thank God every day for the type of upbringing that I had because, a, it has made me who I am. I guess there were parts of my childhood that essentially just did not exist because I did not have the ability to just play.
It is so interesting actually, the idea of just playing isn't part of who I am. But it gave me a lot of other things. It gave me a sense of being an extremely maternal person and it gave me this kind of empathetic root that is like I am here to look after a lot of other people and I know I do that very, very well.
My energy had to be about making sure my sisters were fed, making sure that the house was clean, and making sure we were safe. As wonderful as East London was, it was also a place where you needed to have your wits about you.
You needed to make sure that you had brought your bike in, you needed to make sure that you were safe. So my primary instinct was not "let me have a laugh right now, let me see what my friends are doing." My primary instinct was "how do I ensure everybody is safe and the door is locked and we are going to be good."
The absence of your father, in hindsight, do you notice an influence that had on you as a young woman?
I have had a lot of therapy. Starting from when I was 18 or 19, I started anger management because I felt like I was constantly in a rage. I have never had any issue with being able to express myself and express rage, which I know is something a lot of women struggle with, but not me.
And it is interesting, I am going to sound so unbelievably arrogant when I say this, I do not really have those "daddy issues." I have been so fortunate with the men that have been in my life. I have never had a bad boyfriend. I have never had experiences with men that have been really unfortunate in that way.
So I think the absence of my father in my life is one thing, but I had a lot of really important male influences around me. I had my granddad who was a big part of my life, my granddad Reg. It is actually his birthday today, which is so crazy that he is coming up in conversation because he does every day.
And then I had two uncles, Uncle Robbie and Uncle Joe. One uncle by marriage, one blood uncle. They were just such huge figures in my life and I had such amazing male role models that I knew exactly what I needed in my life. I just do not feel like I had that emptiness of not having my father around. It really just was not my experience.
Anger management? Where did those roots stem from?
It is really interesting because I really felt like I was raised in quite a blamey culture. Everything was somebody else’s fault. If you were not making enough money, if you could not make ends meet, whatever was happening, it was the government’s fault, it was that person’s fault.
It was never about this idea that I have accepted as a kind of a radical part of my life which is self-responsibility. I truly believe that everything I want, who I am, anything is within my reach if I choose it to be.
But growing up, that really was not a part of my life. It was very much about what was happening over there and how that affected you. So it was interesting actually, I think I just got enraged thinking that all the possibilities that were not so obvious to me were the fault of somebody else.
And I was, I think, just a bit of a hothead. What I saw in my family and what I saw around me over and over again was this ability to just kind of lash out and not deal with things. I absorbed that as though it was just the default reaction to anything.
But I knew pretty early on, I had a really fantastic boyfriend when I was 18 or 19 and he was like, "Listen, your reactions are just not normal." I was like, "Really?" He said, "Yeah, I think you should try and deal with that."
And I did. I went into a community anger management course and I was like, "Oh, there is other ways to deal with this. I can breathe through it, I can find these tools and techniques and figure out how I can react differently."
With that is going to come a different result and with that people will treat me in a different way. It was like this insane moment of connection for me. I had not connected how my behavior might be impacting a lot of my relationships and what was happening around me.
But you do not need to tell me things more than once. I was like, "Got it." I stayed in the program for a couple of months and it is something that throughout my life, therapy in different ways—thankfully not group therapy anymore—but I have remained using therapists in different ways to unlock different things that for me become difficult.
I think about that as a tool and the way that I grow. When I had kids, I saw a therapist to really understand how I could be a great parent, how I would think about my own ambition balanced with my parenting. So it is just something for me that I feel pretty good about using someone else to come and help me figure something out that I am struggling with.
At that young age, before the age of 16, if I had met you as a 15-year-old and said, "What do you want to be when you are older?" what would you have said to me?
Fashion designer. Straight away. I was obsessed. You have got to remember I was born in '82. In the early '90s in England, it was like the glory days of fashion. You had all of those supermodels, the Kates and the Naomis, amazing designers like McQueen and Galliano, the British Brit-art scene, the British music scene.
It was just an amazing time in England. To me fashion was this means of escape. It was this fantasy industry. I did not know anyone that worked in fashion. My grandma worked in a bra factory, which I laugh about all the time now thinking about how many bras I make.
But that was as close as anything I knew to anyone that had worked in the apparel business. I certainly did not understand the idea of entrepreneurship, having your own business. To me it was just a fantasy. Like I am here in Plaistow, it is shit, how do I get away from it?
To me it was almost like the movies. It could have just as well been Hollywood. It was like, "That is over there, it is beautiful, it is glamorous, wouldn't that be fantastic to be part of that somehow."
I was thinking the other day about money. I was speaking to a friend and we were discussing money as if it was a person and playing through the attachment style you would have with that person—the secure attachment, the anxious, the avoidant. At a young age, what was money as a person in the room in your life growing up in the family?
Like the best thing ever. I mean, we worshipped money. We worshipped money, we worshipped what money could bring, we worshipped the material stuff that you could get for having the money. It was all about the car and the bag and the thing. That was it.
Was money around a lot?
There was none of it around. Absolutely none. I knew people that had money, but they were kind of over there doing their thing. They were not part of my thing.
But it was so obvious to me when I was a kid that money was something that I needed to find. So in my head that was always playing out in my mind of how do I get away from that being my reality.
I wanted to leave where I was. I used to have this vision and I would draw this fireplace and this beautiful Christmas tree and this credenza and I would imagine "that is the house of my dreams."
You are going to think I am insane, but years later, I had Grey on December 20th and got him back home. I sat down with my baby in my living room for the first time and literally burst into tears. My husband was like, "Oh my god, isn't it like amazing we have this baby?"
I was like, "No, it is amazing I drew this scene. This is the scene that I drew my whole childhood." I had this beautiful townhouse in Clerkenwell and it was like the window and the credenza and the Christmas tree and I was like, "I did it."
I will never forget the moment. It almost eclipsed having the baby. I was like, "This is insane. I visualized that, I made that happen. I have drawn this 500 times and here it is and here I am."
If you were to give someone some advice on how to make their drawing come true in their life, what are those core components of that manifestation becoming a reality?
First of all, I would not tell them to draw it because that is just not me. I think that certainly in this space of mindset, manifestation, visualization, there is a lot of toxic positivity around here for women. What you need to do is get to work. That is the first thing to say.
Yes, you can dream it, you can believe it, you can create a vision board, all the things, but do not forget what comes under that. What comes under that is an enormous amount of work and an enormous amount of planning.
What I do uniquely well, Steven, is that I have an ability to focus on what I am doing. I have an ability to get better at what I am doing, to constantly get better at whatever it is that I am focused on.
And then I have an ability to drown out and kind of disregard the noise of everyone around me. Those three things are important because focus is like a force multiplier in work.
When you have a plan and you have a focus and you can kind of go into what it is that you find important and double down on a very finite number of things, that is what propels you forward.
I was very fixated on working in fashion, but I also knew that I did not have talent as a designer. As much as I wanted to be a fashion designer, I could not draw. I could not sketch, I do not have much creative talent.
What I am is a great enabler to talent. I can sit next to a talent and understand their vision and figure out a way to turn that vision into a reality, but the creative part isn't what I do so well.
So really understanding what is your plan and how you can double down and get into the things that you are uniquely good at and that you uniquely have skills for is important. I think getting outside of your head is really important because so many people have dreams and ambitions and ideas, but it just exists here.
What I do is a lot of action. I made hundreds of calls. I always talk about this thing where at some point, because this was before email, I would send a lot of letters and I thought "no one is getting back to me, maybe they are not getting the letters."
So I started hand-delivering things around the West End. I would buzz on little doors of PR agencies and be like, "Hi, you know my name is Emma and I sent you a letter but I do not know if you got it." They would be like, "Whatever love," but sometimes they would let you up and sometimes you would have a conversation with somebody and whatever.
So I really believe in this kind of idea of action. And then you have just got to really, when I talk about this idea of disregarding what people think, there is just so much noise and you have to have this single-minded focus on what you are doing. I have been really good at drowning out the noise not just from what goes on inside me and my own kind of fear, but also what is happening around you. I think that those things are really, really key.
How do you balance drowning out the noise with another principle that I know is important to you, which is feedback? Especially from customers, because customers will be saying, "We hate this." Customers always hate change and they also do not know what they want. So how do you know what to drown out and what to consider to be feedback?
It is a great question. It is interesting because I am actually a person who takes in a lot of information. If I am trying to make a really big decision that I do not feel fully qualified to make, which by the way happens to me all the time because I am still learning so much, I will call a lot of people that I think are in the know.
But at the end of the day, I have to call the play. Often if you call up seven or eight people, they are going to have different opinions, there will be different patterns that emerge, there will be contrary types of things that come out of that.
So you have to then still go: "Where is my gut? What feels good to me? What is right for my customer?" I think it is very different when you get customer feedback because what I have learned is that everything your customer says is true, because it is true to them.
So what I do is, of course, we have a balanced view. We try to speak to as many customers, we are doing giant surveys and you take the sum of those parts. But when it comes down to customer feedback, I think it is ingested in a very, very different way than that kind of decision-making feedback.
When I make a decision on behalf of my business, that has to come from my gut and from the intentions of where I want that business to go. When I am doing things for customers, it is very different because you just want to please customers.
You referenced calling around people that you respect. I had someone refer to this as your "Personal Board of Directors." Who is on your personal board of directors? Who are these people that are taking these phone calls and why are you calling them?
The first person I speak to is my husband, Jens, a lot because obviously we work together. Jens has a unique understanding of me, of my weaknesses, of what might be stopping me from making a decision, so I feel like I go to him a lot.
Because he will...
Oh, he is going to tell me the truth. Some of the biggest unlocks in my life and my career have come from Jens. I will never ever forget, Steven, one of my first board meetings for one of my first companies, it was called ITB, and I would get so nervous ahead of a board meeting.
He would be like, "Why are you so nervous?" and I would be like, "I do not know," because I am a good chatter, I am a good presenter, I can sell anything, but I would get to these board meetings and I would just fall apart.
He said to me—just wrong timing by the way if you are going to give your wife a little bit of feedback—literally just before we went in he said, "You know what? I know why you are suffering here, Emma. You have an employee mentality."
And I, I mean I was 26 or 27 years old, I could not think about anything else in the whole meeting because I was like, "He is completely right. I have an employee mentality." Well, why? Because I had only ever been an employee up until that point.
But I was looking, instead of being there as the CEO to guide the board into a decision, I was looking for everybody else to tell me what to do. I was seeking their approval instead of going in and saying, "Here is the direction, this is what we are doing, everybody come with me and these are the reasons."
So it was such an interesting insight and I think that you could only have, or I could have only heard that from somebody so close to me.
At that early stage in your career, what role are mentors playing? Do they matter? I say this Emma because I have kids coming up to me all the time saying, "Steve, I need a mentor." How pivotal and important that is to become a successful person?
Listen, from my own experience, I do not think I had any mentors. I started work—let's talk about real work—I have had a job since I was 12 years old. I worked a paper round and then I worked in the delis and then I worked in clothes shops.
When I got my first real job in an office, in a fashion show production company, I was 18 years old. I have had a salaried job in a place that was working towards something that I felt was interesting and in the kind of direction of where I wanted to go since I was 18.
At that point, you make whoever is around you, if you are smart, you make whoever is around you your mentor. I used to sit in front of my boss and everybody thought that was so unfortunate because she could see my screen.
That was the beginnings of online shopping, Net-a-Porter was our client and we all had a discount, so everyone would sit on Net-a-Porter all day, except me because my boss sat behind me and they were like, "What a nightmare!"
And I was like, "No, not a nightmare at all." Whatever she says when she is on her sales calls, I would write down and I would use them later on my sales calls. Now, was she my mentor? No, she was my boss. But I used her as such because I would learn from her, I'd take, you know, I even copied her outfits. I would do the whole thing.
So for me she was really formative. But I do not think that you should walk around looking for a mentor. I think you have to walk around asking questions. Because anyone who is going to be a good mentor probably does not have time to mentor you, first.
Secondly, depending who you are and what your exposure is, you are not going to have the right people around you to get mentored. So you have just got to be super inquisitive. For me in the beginning, I would just take whatever client I had, if I came into contact with the CMO or the CEO, I'd just ask them a question. I'd be in the meeting, I'd be like, "I have two other questions for you that have nothing to do with the work that we are doing or the whatever brief I was there to deliver," and I'd ask a question.
What part of you do you think if I removed would definitely assure that you would not be where you are today? Because people see Emma today and they see these skills and this knowledge and all this stuff and these relationships. But what is the like, because you said "I'm dyslexic" and I know I think you left school, you dropped out of school at 15?
Yeah. And then I went to college for a while and I lasted six months there. I'm a serial dropout.
So it's not something you learned necessarily in school. So I'm wondering what the characteristic is that was the wind in your sails that brought you here. If I removed that thing, you definitely would not be here.
I mean, listen, we did not call it that then, but it would come down to grit. I think that that is what we would say now. Angela Duckworth coined that phrase, I guess, or that term and wrote that fantastic book about grit that everyone read and was like, "Oh my god, I just want my kids to have grit."
But your kids want for nothing, they are not going to be gritty. That's just facts. You do not grow up in Bel Air gritty. But if I think about what it was for me and still is, I am just gritty. I am very clear about what I want and what I need and I will find a way, whatever it is.
I am not any of the things that you would have on my resume—an apparel CEO, someone who goes out and raises hundreds of millions of dollars, somebody who starts an agency in multiple countries—I have zero qualifications to do any of that stuff.
I will just make it happen because I'm in the moment, I see the opportunity, and I am prepared. I'm prepared because it is like I have done all the work to get to the point where that thing that is in front of me, I will make it happen. I have done enough work to say, "Okay, I can take this to that next place."
And is that grit an ember that life blew on?
No, Emma at 18 years old would have been like... it's so interesting, we do not have yearbooks in England but if we did, I reckon I would have been like the "most likely to succeed." I do not think anyone at school was like, "Oh, she's a bit of a waste."
No, it is like I had that mentality that I was away from the pack, that I was going to do something special. But also my mentality was like whatever it takes. If I could, if I think about the most important words for career advancement, like the three most important words would be, "I'll do that."
That was me. I had my hand up my whole life. "I'll do that." Every single time. Any time anyone has asked me, whatever it took, wherever I have been, in whichever workplace, I was like, "I'll do it. I'll do that."
And that is what people started to look at me as—someone that would just figure it out. It is not like I had any particular skill, I just put myself in a situation and in the space of "let me have a go," every single time.
To me it makes perfect sense because you grew up in a situation as an older sister where you were playing the role of a dad, where you did have to put your hand up and say "I'll do that." You did have to make the lunches.
I sometimes think back to my own life and think about how void of independence is maybe a scary thing to some parents but it's also an incredibly useful thing for a kid to learn, that "I have to get myself from A to B."
Whether it's from home to school, or from home to dinner, or from home to whatever it might be. And that, I do not know, I look at your life and go "Okay, you had this massive void of independence."
And in there grows skills, belief, and understanding about life that most others do not get. So it is no surprise that at such a young age you thought you could do stuff. So many people, they have an idea, they know where they are now and they kind of might have an idea of where they want to be, but the gap between it is not something they've ever had to traverse. Like they've never had to walk it.
Do you think it is possible for someone to make themselves gritty? You've got team members, employees, you can see the variance in gritty and un-gritty, resilience...
I see a lot of un-grittiness, yeah. Go on.
Where do you see the un-grittiness? And is it possible to make yourself gritty? Have you ever seen someone go from, what should we call it? What is the opposite of grittiness?
Floppy? I do not know. I do not know what the opposite of grittiness is actually.
Soft, I guess?
Yes. Listen, I do, if you want it. Like anything else, it's all about: do you actually want to be that way and to behave that way? We were talking about this actually, funnily enough, on the way over because I just came from my own office two minutes away. It is Friday, all of the product teams are in, the rest of the office is pretty empty.
And I think post-COVID, people have really taken the liberty of, as we allow them, they can come in four days a week. It is interesting because we talk so, so much about the flexibility of working from home and what Zoom life has kind of done for business, but we do not talk about any of the rigidity of it and what it takes away from work.
I can tell you and I can guarantee you that had I been a work-from-home person in my 20s, I would not be where I am now. There is no doubt in my mind. I think about some, I met my husband at work, I made some of my best, strongest relationships in my life that are the most important things to me and the foundation of my happiness and my being a solid person at work.
That is where those relationships come from. So I think it's really interesting now that we have this aversion of wanting to be away from the office all of the time and I'm like, "Oh that's like..." It's so interesting to me because I'm like such an in-person person.
I want to be with people, I want to collaborate, I want to do things quickly and the culture of work right now makes that so hard. So I think yes, you can teach someone to have grit, but I can't teach you on a screen, babe. I can't reach you. You won't see how I move.
And in the same way that I had this woman that sat behind me and I would take notes of everything she said, that happened in real time. She would walk out of the room and I'd be on my next new business call saying her lines. It was just that quick and that immediate and I would test it out and I'd make it my own.
All of that is lost. So I feel a little bit sad for the way that we are working right now because I do not think that we are having that exchange of what happens when you are in a really dynamic environment and you are able to learn from people around you because we are not as together as we once were.
When you are looking around your team and thinking "that person is going to be a star in the future, that person is going to be a star in the future," what are the factors or the characteristics of those people that you look at in your office and go "She's going to be a star, he's going to be a star"? What is it about them? What are they doing that others aren't doing?
People ask me this all the time. I think that the sure way to put yourself in a position for more responsibility, for a promotion, is to be excellent at what you are doing. I find it really difficult when people are like, "I'd really like to do this thing over there, I'd really like that opportunity," and I'm like, "But you are only 70% good at what you are doing now."
I'm looking at the 120% people, the people that are smashing it in the role that they are at now before they are going anywhere else. So that's the first thing to say. But I do not think it is any, I hire much more for attitude over experience.
I really want the people that come in with like a winning mentality, a "figure it out" mentality. Also what I love is these people that have like an understanding across the business. It is like you are an amazing, thoroughbred wholesale salesperson, but you really want to learn E-commerce and you really want to learn about stores.
And you really have a good understanding of what's happening in planning and merchandising. In business leadership language they call them the "T-shaped leaders," but that's what I care about—people that have an interest in the entirety of our business and they can see outside of the lane or the division that they work in.
So that becomes interesting to me. But to me it's so much more mentality, energy, enthusiasm, attitude. I'm also, one of the things that I think is massively overlooked but a key thing now is flexibility. Because I hire a lot of people that are in their 40s and 50s for super senior executive leadership level roles.
But if you come to me from a competitor and you believe that the only way to get from here to here is the way you've been doing it for the last 20 years, that's problematic to me. I need you to come both with the experience and a level of flexibility because technology means that the customer and the consumer experience is changing all the time. So that ability to say "I've got all of this knowledge but I'm willing and ready to flex" is really important. So I need all those things.
I need a lot, Steven. Tell me some sentences I could say in an interview with you that would be immediate red flags.
"So can you talk to me about work-life balance in this organization?" Sorry babe, I'm leaving. Get out. Here is the thing: work-life balance is your problem. Like that's yours to figure out. Because the way we run organizations now is that no one misses a dentist appointment or a doctor's appointment or a haircut or their kids' parent-teacher conference at our organizations.
That's just not how we work anymore. You come in, you have set hours, but there's flexibility within your working life. It is not like "Oh my goodness, such-and-such is not at their desk." That's just not how we work anymore.
So when somebody talks to me about their work-life balance in an interview process, I'm like something is wrong with you. You haven't been able to figure that out. That is not the way you win this interview.
I'm not trying to give this away. We do a screening survey and one of the questions tests for this. So I actually know the exact percentage of the general public that when asked this question will pick work-life balance as one of the most important things. And it's roughly 33%.
33%.
So 33% of people on our screening survey will say that work-life balance is more important to them than another range of options including doing perfect work, beating the competition, leading and inspiring others, having a happy team, etc. They will pick work-life balance as being one of their most important things. So it is a lot of people that prioritize this.
And it is not to say for me, listen, it is not to say for me that it is a bad thing, but it's not what I would pick.
No, babe, it's not what you would pick because you are as ambitious as anything. I wonder if you put on that list of options "earning 10% more year-on-year, getting a meaningful bonus." Because here is the thing: these things correlate and that is what people do not understand.
In order to run an organization where there is the ability for your people to have a good work-life balance, you have to be profitable. The company has to be in line with, if not beating, its competition. We have to be able to run an efficient business to give people what they need. The two things go hand-in-hand.
So I have this idea that with the people that I work with, we are in a social contract together. It's like: you are going to work really hard and in return you should get an amazing place to work, you should get an incredible environment that is feeding you in ways that are not just about your job.
So when I look around at our office and our organization, we are doing... I just left the office yesterday, there was like a fertility seminar going on where there were like hundreds of people in the kitchen of our office all learning about having their eggs frozen and various different things. I have four kids, I clearly did not need to be in the seminar. I'm like "I'm done."
But you know, that was happening. It's like we do things for our employees that are above and beyond what a workplace back in the day may have considered the norm. So I just feel like you've got to, with that, something has to give.
And there are certain things that are the employee's responsibility within that. And you figuring out what works for your life, how you are going to pick up your kids, how you get home, how you get to work, what happens in... these are all things that you need to figure out within the construct of your life. That isn't the employer's job. That isn't the employer's responsibility.
What people are maybe alluding to is "Am I expected to work seven days a week?" Because I need that information to be able to figure out if I'm going to be able to pick up my kids and be able to do my DJing or whatever on the weekend. So what is the expectation in your business?
I do not think the expectation is that anyone is going to have to work seven days a week in order to get to have an average job. They are not going to have to do that. If you have ambition, if you want to do the most, if you want to grow, if you want to be one of those people that's at the top of the organization, the chances are you might have to work a little bit more. That's the truth.
What are we talking about here? Are we going to lie to everyone? Do you work five days a week, Steven? No, babe. You are working on a Saturday and a Sunday and if I text you wherever you are in the world, you come back to me within about an hour.
I'm assuming that's not just what you do for me, that that's just how you roll. And that's how I roll and that's how most successful people roll. And there is something to speed and agility. And I do not, listen, I think I have a tremendous work-life balance. I am in Malibu most weekends, I'm on the beach, but I think that we have to have a level of honesty about what it takes to be really successful.
And I think that everybody is tired of hustle culture, people are tired of burnout, and figuring out how you can do what you need to do and be really successful at the same time is what I consider personal responsibility.
But at the same time, if we tell everybody that to be really successful you can do that in a way that is without being 150%, without waking up most days and doing some type of work, without thinking about work a lot, it is just not honest. It wouldn't connect with what I see and what my experience is of most people that are truly successful.
Why do some people hate what you just said?
I think because it hits them in a place of like "I just do not want to do that." "I want all the benefits but I do not want to do the bit in the middle." And I get that, it's not for everyone. Then do not do it.
But is it possible to have the success, to be number one, to be on the magazines, to be Emma, and is there like not a way where I can have my evenings and weekends but still get like the...
I have some evenings and weekends.
But like, all of my evenings and weekends.
No. No. If it is possible, tell me who she is and I'll tell you, I'll show you a liar. I do not think so. Honestly, Steven, like what are we talking about? Because I think that most people do not want everything.
Most people do not and are not sitting here being like, "I need to be in all the magazines, I want this, I want that." Most people want to have security of a well-paying job, they want to be able to afford their rent or their mortgage and have a nice car and live well and go on a few holidays and that's like a good life.
Should you be able to do that? Absolutely. Should you be able to do that without working evenings and weekends and putting in all the hours? Yeah, I really think that you should. But if you are leading an extraordinary life, to think that extraordinary effort wouldn't be coupled to that somehow is crazy.
It's interesting post-pandemic how it feels like leaders got gaslit a little bit. Founders got gaslit by platforms, like if you go on LinkedIn, you've got all these people telling you how to run a business and what you are doing wrong and work-life balance and you've got to be more like this and you've got to be this kind of leader and you have to be this empathy and do this and that and the other.
And if you are a young founder growing up in this world where everyone is telling founders what to do, it can feel incredibly confusing. And I think in particular post-pandemic where how we work was like shuffled up and it's now like pick and mix. Before the pandemic it was like we all got it. We come to the office five days a week, we work. It's a difficult time to be a founder because you've almost got to step out, if you know what I mean.
Yeah, you do. You have to. Listen, I do not think that that is as hard as people are making it. You have to understand that you can't be a leader and a people-pleaser at the same time. And if you are walking around trying to make everybody happy, guess what you won't have? You won't have a great business.
You have to have a focus on what it is that you're trying to do and you have to be relentless in the pursuit of doing those things. And you need the people that are going to... I am so much about the people that help you.
I hate that idea of being a "self-made" whatever. I'm really not self-made if you understood how many people there were around me that just like got me here today. There's like a village sitting outside. But nothing happens on your own and it takes so many people and so much skill and so much that I do not have.
When you start a company, this idea that you should make all of these concessions before you're thinking about what the goal is, what the end... I call it "enterprise mentality." It's like you have to put the business first, the needs of the business.
And sometimes that is about thinking about your people and being a certain type of leader. Sometimes it's not. So you've got to balance those things. The point of a business is to make profit. It's to create a company to serve your customers, all of those things. It really isn't about what I think so many people are trying to make it about.
Now, your leadership style is going to be such a huge part of what makes that business successful, but it isn't everything. And so I think that we've just got to try and separate these things a little bit. That can't be the first thing that you're thinking of—how you're doing all of that stuff. The first thing you think of is how is the business going to grow, how are we going to thrive, what are we actually here to do.
I think founders are scared as well because we live in this age of social media where if you especially if you have a profile, if you do something wrong, there is this really interesting incentive that the employee has where they can pop back.
And so if you fire me from your company, Emma, and I did not feel so good when I was there, I now have you by the balls a little bit, if you know what I'm saying. Because I can post on my TikTok and say, "Emma's not who you think she is."
That's just part of being in business though, right?
But then because you are living under that threat from some kind of activist employee, how do you stop that from changing the way that you live with that enterprise mentality and do what's right for the business?
I do not think you do.
I've had so many founders say this to me in my portfolio. They've said like, "Man, I'm like scared of being canceled."
Well, do not do anything to be canceled. I mean look, I think it's a fine line. If you're a leader, you're never going to please everybody. And I think that this is where leadership style and who you are as a person really comes out.
I do not think anybody, I'm somebody that leads with no ambiguity. Nobody's like, "Hmm, I wonder what Emma's thinking." It's like, I'm very clear in what I'm thinking, I'm very clear in what the goals are, and the reason that we've been able to do what we've been able to do is because of those things.
I have a very straightforward management style and I bring everybody along with me. Now listen, there's always going to be someone or a fraction of people that will feel disgruntled. I've gone through various things in different companies where you've had to downsize or let people go and things that are really unfortunate and that's just part of the course of business.
Are you doing those things in a way that is congruent with who you are as a leader? And really thinking about what that actually... it's not, again, it's like I never have like an individualistic idea about that.
If I have to look at a company and downsize, I'm not thinking about the 50 people that I have to let go, I'm thinking about the 400 jobs that need to be saved. And sadly, sometimes there is a little collateral damage. That's just part of being in business.
I certainly am not sitting here sweating what somebody might do on TikTok because I know who I am and I feel good about the decisions that I make because of where they come from. They come from me, they come from my heart, and I know that I'm a good person. So I would never sit here and be like, "Oh no, someone's going to like shame me."
What was the most important lesson you had to learn about leadership as an up-and-coming, talented black woman in business?
I do not think it's any different than if I'm really honest, I do not think it's any different from any other woman. But I do think it's different for women more generally. I think that probably the most important lesson was how distinctive and important my point of view is, and why that gives me an edge.
But I also understand that this kind of empathy coin has two sides to it. What makes women phenomenally good leaders and makes them fantastic at mentoring staff and looking after the needs of the team is sure has the underbelly when it comes from perhaps downsizing their team or firing the wrong person or if people are not getting pay rises, how they might feel about that.
So I definitely had to learn that there's two sides to what makes me great and to keep both of those sides in check.
So it's balancing the empathy part of you with the needing to make difficult decisions. Because it doesn't feel like care to fire someone. It's like...
No, it goes against the grain of care, of being like a maternal individual who is looking after people because that's the opposite of that. You're leaving someone to their own devices. And so that's been difficult for me, for sure.
Do you remember the first time you had to contend with that dichotomy and how it felt?
Yeah. I do. I think it would have been like way back when in London, in ITB, the first time I had to do like a meaningful downsizing of the agency. And I had to fire like... it was a small agency. I had like 60 people and I fired 15 people in one day.
We were in a tiny office, Gresse Street in just off Tottenham Court Road, and everyone sits together. There was no giant boardroom that you could go into and then go out the back door. It was like they went back upstairs and told everyone. It was awful. It was absolutely awful.
I laugh about it out of just horror of how it felt at the time because it really to me it felt like the end of the world, the end of my life, and I felt so responsible because often times you know so much of being in a competitive dynamic environment, you're pulling people out of other agencies and other jobs and you're bringing them in and you're like, "That's the best person for this," and then all of a sudden you're like, "I'm so sorry, but it's over." And that for me was soul-destroying the first time I had to do it.
But in hindsight, how do you look at that decision now with your wisdom?
Well, look, again, I go back and say I created a better company because of it. I created more discipline in the business because I was able to see the mistakes that I'd done that weren't just about overstaffing but it was just about running a less healthy engine.
I do think it made me a better leader in the sense of I had held so much of the anxiety of what was happening in that company it not going well to myself. I hadn't really shared with the full senior management team like quite how bad things were because I thought "I'm the CEO, that's all my problem."
They should be able to just come in and out. With that, there was a lack of accountability from everybody else. And so I think I've really understood now that I'm here at the top of the organization and it's almost like I'm the manager.
I sit on the sidelines and I have a bunch of people. I shouldn't be running on the pitch to score the goal. I need to stay on those sidelines and I need to direct everybody to do the best job possible.
And now I think so much more about bringing everybody on the journey. When you are having difficult times, which we do all the time in all of our businesses despite what it might look like to people, you need to bring people on the journey and get them involved in what those solves are. Because if you get to that place where you have to downsize or you have to change the way that you are doing business and you have to make meaningful changes, they are there with you.
They have been part of the solution, they have been part of those solutions not working out, and they are going to be part of making them right for the rest of the business.
I think there is a lot of business owners that can relate to holding onto all of that pressure themselves—cash flow issues, the uncertainty around the business. They internalize it, they take it home with them, it is with them seven days a week. How did it feel for you when you were going through those challenges with your first company?
I ask that because I want the person going through that—I was going through it—to feel seen, but also to have a bit of a blueprint, a roadmap of what to do about that.
The truth is, it feels like the end of the world. That is how it feels. When you start something from the ground up and it is yours, there is such a sense of responsibility. And you know, I think that what happens in business, it is always like a confluence of factors, right?
You try to work out what has made this thing happen and it is like death by a thousand cuts. There is no one thing that you can point to and say "that was it, that's what made this down-trending moment happen." It is a bit of this and a bit of that.
But often what it comes from is you get so in what you are doing that it is very, very hard to rise back up. I think what I have taught myself, this muscle that I have taught myself, is every kind of quarter, at least every six months, I try to float up and see what is happening.
Not what I am telling myself, not what are we doing, like what is happening. What is happening with the competition? What is happening in the market? Back then, I just did not have the ability to do that. I was so heads down, so in the work, so deep in my clients and doing the best job that I could that I had no ability to zoom out.
§02Transcript — part 2
I do, again, I am not just blaming myself, but it really was about that inability to see clearly. So I think for anybody that's kind been through a moment like that, it's either surrounding yourself with people that are able to help you have a little bit more perspective, or trying to make that a habit that you do that in your business.
Bill Gates talks about having reading week or like an away week. He takes himself off and he does it twice a year and he goes and he just sits somewhere beautiful. It looks like it was by the water or something. Goes into a little cabin and he just reads, but he thinks about what is happening in his business, what is happening in the world.
And I certainly would never want the comparison to Bill Gates, but I think just having the ability to zoom out a little bit is something that all founders should really, really think about and it's given me unbelievable perspective that I've made that a practice now.
That's so, so true. I was talking the other day on a solo episode on the Diary of a CEO about this idea of clouds and trenches. One of the ideas that emerged from that process was as I was writing the solo episode, I thought about the day that I went fishing. I do not fish, obviously. But I went fishing because whatever, I just found myself there.
And I'm on this boat in the middle of the lake. The art of fishing is you sit there and you do nothing. And you're on a lake and it's pissing it down so I'm sat there in my mac and it's just like leathering on me. And this boat, this is not glamorous, this is a two-meter wooden boat.
Oh babe, we all had an idea of like a yacht.
No, it was like at a castle somewhere. And it was the most important like seven hours of my life at that exact moment because I'd been in the trenches for so many weeks in a row that sitting out on that boat for seven hours just waiting for this nibble that never came because I'm shit at fishing, it turns out, was so powerful.
I thought like, this is the distinction between being able to stand back from the photo so you can see the picture. Founders, especially when you have cash flow issues and clients giving you shit and team member issues, you're like this. And I think that the problem is as founders we can feel guilt of not being in there and not being in the trenches, but because we do not realize we're serving our company by creating a little bit of space. So is it a practice for you?
It is and honestly I've really made it a practice. It's about, first of all, I have to get out of the office. That's the most important thing. And it's really about me creating the conditions for me to be really thoughtful.
So it's like I prepare to like be with myself. So I'm really taking a snapshot of like what's happening with my competition. What are people doing? I'm on the sites of my competition. I'm like "what is the customer seeing?"
I go like in store. I really try to understand what everyone else... what are customers truly experiencing from this brand? And then it's really about looking objectively at what we're putting out there.
And I really do that and I think I have a really, really good sense of not... I do not know how to say it without swearing...
You can swear.
I just do not believe my own bullshit. I've still got the ability and it's so interesting because I think that when you join a new company, I always say to people that come, you've got fresh eyes for a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months at best until you start telling yourself the same stories that we tell ourselves internally.
And I am very good at having those fresh eyes. And so when I have new people in the business, I will go to those people and be like, "What are you seeing? Where were you before? What have you... versus what we're telling you? Like what are you seeing in this company?"
And so I make a point to like get around to any new starters. That's just like part of the process—competition, new starters, having the zoom out, what am I actually like serving and delivering to customers?
And I kind of take all of that and come up with like just a one-pager. For me it's always very simplistic. You know, it's like three things. I'm like "this, this, this. Go and work on those things." And it will often be in line with the priorities that I have, like the broader priorities of the business, but sometimes there's just like a random thing that I'm like "Ugh, didn't see that happening. I didn't see how shit we'd become at that."
You know, and so it's like I try to have that level of objectivity all the time.
Are you paranoid?
Definitely. 100%. Yes. Well, also I'm rightly paranoid. I work with some of the most copied, duped brands in the whole world. Do you know what I mean? It's like I'm not actually paranoid, I'm just like everybody's copying me.
And how do you think about people copying you? Because anyone that's successful, all of my friends that have done anything well, they just everyone just copies.
I'm totally unbothered. We've moved already, babe. I'm like by the time they've copied me, I'm a year and a half in the future. I'm like "go for it." Done. It's over. You can't... there is no other way to behave.
If you sit around and you're so concerned at that... now do not get me wrong, if it's like copyright, that's different. You'll hear from my people. But it's like this that that is just part of being like I work in fashion, it's very cyclical, where are ideas owned anyway? Who knows?
But does it piss you off?
Yes. Absolutely. I've been known to walk up to a founder in the gym and disturb him during his workout. In the early days of Good American, I was like, "Excuse me, sir"—I won't say who—but I was like, "You are..."
We used to have this one company that would buy whatever we dropped at Good American and they would photograph it and put it on their website the next like three days after and take pre-orders on it.
And I was like, "I know you're doing... I can see the rip pattern. Like I know that's my jean. That's literally my jean. You haven't like tried to make it, you've just taken our thing and you're taking orders on it." Would drive me crazy. So when I saw him I went and told him about himself. He didn't care. He still carried on doing it. And he had a brand 12 times the size of our business, so you know, it worked for him.
They're what?
They're big. They're a big one. Do not say anything more, Steven, people will work it out.
No, no, no, I'm not going to say anything else. I'm not going to ask anything else about it. But tell me more. I'm joking. You know there is a lot of companies out there that do a good job copying everybody else, right?
But that means you can become successful just by ripping someone off.
I'm sure people have. You know, I do not know how fun it is to run a company like that, but...
Are they fast fashion?
They might be.
I know who it is. I've figured it out. You got your first foray into the world of fashion was that internship you had at 19 years old. You became a show producer after that at Inca Productions. You worked at a marketing agency between 23 and 25 years old called Saturday Group, which is now known as Wednesday Agency, co-founded by your now husband, Jens?
Yes. Indeed.
Which is where you met him?
Yes. Now I'm in business with Jens. So we started our relationship as I was an employee, and then he was my investor—so he and his business partner invested alongside somebody else that I brought in in my first company. Then I married him. Then we had four kids together.
And it has been an unbelievable relationship and remains one of the most important things in my life, but it hasn't always been easy because he is obviously doing his thing and he is very ambitious and he has his own things going on.
When you bring kids into the equation, everything changes again, it shifts a little bit. I think what is important is to have somebody who just sees all of your talent and sometimes sees it before you do yourself.
And I think that Jens has been unbelievably encouraging of me at every turn. Every time I've had any doubt, every time I've been like, "God, that feels like a little bit outside of my comfort zone," and he's been like, "But you did this, but you did that." I'm like "Oh yeah, I did, didn't I?" He's like "Keep going."
Not everybody has that. You'll know people who are really ambitious themselves and maybe their partner is envious, resentful, maybe they subtly play them down. What would you say to someone who right now is listening to this and has a partner who they feel doesn't want them to climb to the top of the mountain and isn't willing to help carry them up there and actually sees their work as a competition?
I say this all the time: everything starts with yourself. And you have to be willing to put what it is that you care about, what it is that you want more than anything, first. You have to be able to do that first.
And if you have somebody who isn't necessarily like a big cheerleader, which not everybody can be for everyone else—that's one thing. But if you've got someone that sucks your energy and your ability to believe in yourself, that's a problem. So I do not think that everybody needs the cheerleader husband, but you need somebody that at least supports your belief in yourself so that you can go off and do what you need to do.
How do you and Jens keep the relationship spicy when you're both working very, very hard? I ask this in part for myself, right? My partner is on the other side of the world in Bali doing her business and I'm out here in LA doing my thing. So I'm wondering how you stay as these independent beasts that are building your own things, but then you nurture the third person or the third thing, which is your life together. Do you schedule date night?
Yeah, for sure. I mean look, I think that I'm very, very lucky with Jens. We are really into each other. We're really interested in each other. And that's the starting point for any great relationship. I am interested in his point of view about something.
When I see something, read something, get something on social, the first person I think about is "Oh my god, I need to see what Jens thinks about this." And so that is just the default nature of our relationship.
Yes, we schedule date nights and you know, 16 years in, that takes a lot of different shapes and forms. We'll go to a Lakers game together. Jens loves the basketball and I was like "You know what? He loves the basketball, all the good restaurants are downtown. I'll make sure that we go to like some new crazy restaurant that I want to go to ahead of the game, and then we go to the game." It's like the perfect date night. We both get what we want.
How often is date night?
Oh, we do a date night every single week without fail. And it's really funny because our teams, we have like team meetings, we all get together like once a month and it's everyone, and the first thing everyone puts down is "Date Night."
They program it in. Wherever we are, it just becomes... and it's so interesting that I always think it's so funny that they safeguard it in such a way because I feel like they all feel like this has become like a really important thing.
But I do not know that there's any big secret. The secret is just being interested in each other, the secret is just growing together. And I think that we are so fortunate that we've been able to work with one another because it comes from this place of like interest and respect and I'm interested in the person that he was 16 or 17 years ago—I wish I knew—but I'm interested in the person that he's becoming. And I think he's interested in the person I'm becoming.
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So 25 years old, you start ITB Worldwide and you run that business for a decade roughly, up until 35-ish. And you meet Kris Jenner in this process of these 10 years. When did you meet Kris Jenner?
I met her for the first time on a job that I'd done for one of the girls. I was actually introduced through an agent at WMA. They just gave me her number so I just called her.
Why would they be furious now?
Well you know, probably. They maybe should have ushered that introduction slightly more, but hey ho. Yeah, I just called her. At that time, Kris wasn't the Kris of now. She was still extremely famous. I remember when we went for lunch, there was like a little crowd forming outside, but it was very different from how it is today.
And what was she like when you met her?
Amazing. You know, but also like not in that way that when you go and meet someone, for me it was just like meeting any other manager, agent, publicist. Of course it was Kris and she was on the show and so I had an understanding of who she was, but also I was trying to get something done.
You know, I would have been doing some type of endorsement and trying to get some information about whatever it was that I was working on at the time. So it was just like a means to an end. Wherever I would go at that point in my life, I was meeting with managers, agents, publicists all the time and that was part of my job and part of what I did on behalf of brands.
What was that journey from meeting Kris that first time to getting into business with Kris and pitching her to be a business partner? And then what happens to ITB, the agency you were running in the background?
So it was a really interesting time for me actually because there was this big shift in what I'd done in the agency was built this entertainment marketing agency. And we really kind of sat at the intersection of where brands and entertainment get together.
So film product placement, endorsement deals, influencer packages—that was like the very early days of influencers. Most of them, we were calling them bloggers at that time. So the agency was growing and I'd opened an office in New York that was really doing like the majority of the business and it was fantastic.
So the business had become very kind of US-facing from a client base point of view. And then this idea of like talent-based equity deals kind of raised its head. I read something about Ashton Kutcher taking equity in some Silicon Valley startup and I started to get calls.
People would always phone me when they wanted to put an A-list talent in a fragrance ad, for example. But people started calling me and saying, "Hey, we've got this startup, we'd be willing to give X, Y, and Z 10% of this thing for an endorsement." And I was like, "Well, that's interesting, but how do I commission that?"
Because usually I would be getting paid a percentage of whatever cash was crossing hands. So for me it was this new interesting part of the business that I had to figure out how to monetize. Fast forward, I did a couple of deals and instead of taking a piece of equity—because at the end of the day my agency wasn't in that way, shape or form figured out that we could bring equity into the business—where does that go?
That wouldn't go to me, that would go to the shareholder base, it would then mean nothing to anybody. So I was like "Do you know what? A flat fee." And so I did a bunch of deals with a bunch of talents and I'd say "You're going to pay me a couple of hundred thousand dollars, I'm going to work out for X to take 10% of your company."
And I did three that were very, very successful. Then what happened is I kind of sat back and I was like "Wow, it's so interesting." I remember this company reporting some numbers and I was like "I cannot believe that they've gone from there to there."
And in my head I made a direct correlation between the talent that had been brought into that company—it was Pharrell Williams at the time. I was like "Wow, because Pharrell did this thing, the value of the company jumped like this, I got my little couple of hundred grand and wasn't incentivized by any of the value that was created and therefore, I'm really losing here. Maybe I should do one of these for myself."
Maybe I should create a company and bring a talent into that company and give them a piece of equity in order to accelerate the business. That was the start of Good American. That was the initial thought because I wasn't getting paid what I needed to from my clients so I was like "Well, who is going to give me... who's going to pay me correctly? No one. So I'll create it myself."
At that time Jens and Erik had started Frame, which is an incredibly successful denim company. So I had kind of thought in my head that between G-Star and Calvin Klein, and I'd worked with Topshop for a long time—very denim heavy—Jens had Frame, and so I was like "I know something about denim. That's a category I can do."
No, what I knew was denim marketing. I had no idea about how to make a product. And then fast forward, I sit down and I sit at a dinner and next to some guy who had invested heavily in a big plus-size retailer in America.
He was telling me all about it and I looked on my phone, I looked at the retailer and I was like "That's gross. Nobody wants to dress in those clothes. That product is horrible." And then everything just came together. I was like "Oh my god, I'm going to create a denim company. I'm going to make all of the sizes all the time, and I'm going to make everyone look hot. Bastard. End of."
That was it. I was like "Ding ding ding!" and it just came together. And I was like "Oh! And you know what I know how to do? I know how to book talent and bring them into the brand and converge all of those things and it's going to be explosive."
So the idea was kind of set in my head. And at that point, I'd had the conversation with Kris who had said "You know, we're looking for these type of partnerships now." So I just went back to her and I was like "I have an idea and I'd really love it if I could pitch your daughter." The rest is history.
You pitched her?
I pitched her.
You pitched Khloe?
Mhm.
What did Khloe say?
I do not remember the exact words. And you know, I never like to... it's so interesting, we have a great working relationship, the family and I, because I do not speak on their behalf. And I'm very careful not to speak on their behalf. It feels really unfair because they are so unbelievably famous that anything that you say becomes news.
So I prefer never to talk about what she said. What I remember is the end result is that she said yes and we're in business together eight years later.
What was the process of making Good American a good company? You had that initial hypothesis when you were sat at that dinner.
No, it's so interesting actually. That's the thing that we got right. I think that what we understood intrinsically was that there was this huge subset of customers that were left out of the fashion conversation.
If you were above a size 12, that there was almost nothing cute in the market for you. And what we didn't do was create any separation. We just like "We're going to make 19 sizes of clothes."
And what happens traditionally in most retailers is that you've got one set of sizes, then you go up to floor five and there's this like horrible little subsection and you've got bit of the assortment for petite and a bit of the assortment for plus-size women and it's completely not reflective of what's downstairs for everybody else.
So we were like "Do you know what? We're just going to connect all of those things. We're just going to make one product, we'll make it in 19 sizes and whatever we do, we'll let the customers choose."
So if we're making a dress with a giant slit up the side of it, we're not going to moderate it because we think that a girl at a certain size doesn't want the slit as high, because you know what? We bet she does.
If we make a teeny tiny fluorescent pink bikini, we're going to make it in every size and we'll let the decision be down to the woman. And it turns out we were 100% right with our instinct because these girls weren't buying—not because they didn't want to buy it—they weren't buying because it wasn't available anywhere.
And so our instinct to just like make the stuff and put it out there and see who comes was the right thing to do.
What part of the strategy and the games you played in 2018 could not be replicated now? Because the game has changed.
So many. The game is so changed. You know, the arbitrage that existed in social media then—like how you could pay to acquire a customer—is almost entirely gone.
And so when I think about how we could work with Facebook and how we could work with Instagram, how powerful those followings were back then, you can't compare it to now. And so you could acquire a customer very cheaply.
I think that the algorithms worked completely differently, therefore the cohorts in your business behave completely differently. And if I think about it, we had a three-year golden period of runway.
The good thing is, I think we knew. And I always talk about the beauty of my board members at that time, going back to people like Andrew Rosen and John Howard, who were the total opposite to everybody else on my board that was like "Emma, you need to just double down, acquire as many customers as possible, do not worry about profitability, just spend, spend, spend."
And they were like "Absolutely do not do that. You need a profitable business that works when this is over." And so I just was like "I'm going to do what these guys are telling me. They have a lot of experience, they have a lot of successful businesses, they've been doing it for a lot longer."
And so I think that while we created a foundation for the business that was really important, that was rooted in being digitally native, we never rested on that being the only way that we could meet customers.
We were immediately saying "We've got to open our own stores, we've got to create a wholesale footprint." And when the tide turned, which it inevitably did—and that really happened, COVID kind of gave you an acceleration but then the fall-off was pretty quick—we had this buffer of an incredible business that allowed us to stay the course.
So if someone is in 2025 and they're trying to deploy a strategy to build any kind of brand and they're thinking about the channels, what kind of strategy are you thinking about now to acquire customers as being some of the most interesting but maybe unobvious?
I really am blown away by what happens when you meet customers in real life. I think that some of the more experiential things that we've done that stay with people...
Post-COVID, people want to be together and they want to be in person and they want experience and they want memories and they want things that last and they want physicality and what's tangible.
And so whatever you can do that brings those type of experiences—like in-real-life experience—is always going to beat anything that is like more digitally native. And so a good example of that is we just opened a store on Sunset for Skims and we connected the store opening with this incredible diner next door.
It's like a 24-hour kind of like Hollywood staple diner. There were queues around the block. Every single slot for the entirety of the six days, and it's 24 hours, was booked within five minutes. And this is to get pancakes and chicken tenders and like a root beer float.
And what was so interesting to me is I took my kids, and it was so cute. It's like a '50s diner with a jukebox and we Skims-ified the whole thing, it looked amazing. My three-year-old two days later said, "I want to go back to the cafe." I was like "You're English, that's so cool. You want to go to the diner?"
She's like "Yeah, I want to get the thing with the cherry on the top." And I was like "Wow, in a three-year-old's head, that even like she had an impression of like that being like a special moment and something that stuck in her mind."
And I was like, those type of things for me are just way more valuable. Now look, if you're starting a business, it's really hard to do experiential in-real-life things like that, but I think the point is that getting in front of customers—getting to them and that physicality of being in front of them.
And whether that is if you're starting a new drink, like being in the supermarket, being in front of like the point of purchase. Like that is really important to tell your story and have some physicality around what you're doing.
Are you seeing this idea of community becoming more and more important for building brands? Because a couple of years ago it was all like just throw some Facebook ads at them or get some influencer to tell them about it. Now we're seeing this transition towards like running clubs and yoga things with the brand present.
Yeah, I think it's community, definitely. And you know when I think about what that means for our businesses, you know oftentimes it's really about like owning that customer experience.
If you for example Skims has an app which is like an incredible place for customers to experience the brand. And I think there's like a lot of, again, it's like there's high-low ways. There's very, very few brands that can be successful in an app, right?
You've got to really have so much brand affinity and so much love for that brand that people will come, get off of whatever they're doing and like click and be in your app. So I think that's certainly not for everybody. I do not think that would work for a lot of the brands that I'm involved in.
But the sense of like standing for something, having some kind of purpose, galvanizing people around something that isn't just about your product is probably the way to go, I think. And Good American has been so successful because it always stood for something.
At the end of the day, we were selling blue jeans and white T-shirts, but people understand why they come to that brand. They understand that there's a purpose, but you also have to evolve that purpose continuously.
And when I think about where we started eight years ago and where we are, in the middle somewhere we became B Corp certified. And that was another real push for the company. It was very, very, very heavy lifting.
But that was something that for our staff became so important to them. Denim is a tough business to be in, it's a very polluting business. I have a lot of really young people, a lot of young mothers that work at the company and they wanted to know that they worked in a place that cared about the world that they live in.
And so it really was something that was an undertaking by that company to say "We all feel that we could do so much better." And I think that the underlying values of that company are about it being about our customers and the people that work there, and whatever is true to them being the most important thing. And so that has really evolved over time.
How old are you here in this photo?
I must be... 15.
Fifteen?
Yeah.
Aw. If you were to speak to this Emma and this Emma was keen to start a business and she came to you and said "What are the first principles of business? What are the three most important things in being successful in business?" that you've learned in your decades now of wisdom and experience. What would you take say to her?
Oh, bless her. Well, I'd say I love your curly hair, first of all. It's not a bad place to start actually because I would say that it's so important to be true to yourself in whatever you do.
And you know, I think that I have an incredible gut instinct and I have very strong feelings that guide the decisions that I make and that has really led me so well. So I'd be like "Have conviction about what it is that you feel deeply and go with that."
But by the same token, I'd say "Know what you do not know." Because there's a lot of places where I'm weak and one of my greatest strengths and a superpower of mine has been "Know what you do not know and hire people into the kind of gaps and the holes that you have in your own knowledge."
That's been really important for me and I feel like I'm so privileged that I've worked with people in one company and being able to bring them into another company and another and I start almost a lot of things with like a similar group of people. And I love that because they fill in for where I'm not so good.
And then despite everything you've been told, you're going to have to take some risks. And I think that everything that this kid knew was "do not be risky, do not take any risks, like figure everything out and be really safe."
And what I've learned is that nothing is going to come easy. And I think that when I moved here, I moved to America with a two-year-old and a newborn baby and I had no friends here, not like real friends. And it was a really scary move because you move away from, you forget when you move country you move from all senses of what is familiar to you.
And that's very difficult in any stage of your life, but there's a special vulnerability that comes along with having a new baby and having a new venture that you do not really understand how to run at the time. And so I would say like learning to take risks has probably been the best thing that I've done.
How do you feel about her?
You know, I think she's so cute and so lovely. You know, I feel like that's... you know, I still look exactly the same, do not I? You know, I feel like this person was dying, like dying to, dying to just do something different and dying to escape her circumstances.
But also, you know, this person loved these three people so much—Charlotte, Rachel, and Katie—they are like my world, my sisters, who are on a group chat and we chat all the time.
And like my reason for being successful was so much about them. It's so much about this idea of being able to share and and look after them and take all the things that we had in our childhood and move it into a new space. And I'm really proud of myself that I've been able to do that.
Dying to escape that situation?
Yeah, because I feel like for me, you know, I didn't feel that safe when I was younger. I really didn't. I really, really didn't. And I, I felt like I should probably have a future where my kids feel... I want to be thoughtful about the words because you know, my mom is still alive and she did the very best she could with what she had, which is all any parent can do.
But I feel that for me and my sisters there was just so much uncertainty in so many things that I wanted to make sure that for my kids there was just this solid foundation. And I'm so happy I've been able to do that.
Some of the skills that I think you have that are unappreciated—one of them is the ability to articulate an idea. And some people call this "sales." How critical do you think it is for women, for men, for everybody to cultivate that particular skill, and how did you cultivate it?
Oh, I think it's one of the most important things. When I think about who I am investing in, when I think about what businesses to support, I do not care if a founder has a lot of missing pieces, but if you can't sell, you ain't getting my money. No way.
Like no way. You can't outsource that stuff. You either have an ability to convince somebody of what you are doing and sell your idea uniquely, or you do not. And I've never invested in any founders that didn't have that as a skill, that couldn't bring me on a journey and tell me their story and convince me that this was something that the world needed.
How do you sell? So if you were selling something to me, what are the core... what would you be thinking about as you're preparing that pitch and putting it together?
Oh, you see, you're just so much more thoughtful than I am. I would be so... you know, my whole thing is like I have to be passionate about the thing that I'm doing. I have to like see the need, I have to figure out the like "what am I solving for?"
And then I'd go in on that. I'm like painting the picture of like where the problem sits and then I'm showing you how I've uniquely come up with the solution. And then I'm, you know, I'm like old school, right? It's like I create a value proposition. I'm all about like the perfect place for pricing and then it's like I'm going to get it to you in a unique way.
But I do not think it's like so complicated. I'm a born salesperson. That's just who I am.
When you reference this, you touch your chest a lot.
Oh, do I?
Because it's like a heartfelt thing. That's what I'm saying. Intuition, feeling. And I do get that from you—that I think you've cultivated the trust with your intuition, which obviously took some time. Is that something we cultivate? And how do we know whether to trust our intuition?
How have I learned to act upon feeling? Well, I guess there's an element of doing it and turning out to be right. But I think that you've got to know the difference between having intuition and a gut feeling and then just sort of general excitement and being able to separate those things.
Because I get really excited about things. And it's so interesting because when you sit on a show like *Dragon's Den* or *Shark Tank*, like you really need to learn very quickly to separate those feelings and so that helped me a little bit.
But I think that that is the... is it coming from a place that kind of hits you in your heart spot or are you just feeling some sense of excitement? And that that is two very different things for me. Like are you moving me emotionally or am I just like "Oh that feels like money over there"?
It's like "that looks like it's going to chop up into some nice dividends at some point." That's not how I make decisions. I never go that way with that sort of general excitement of something to that's going to be like more financially exciting for me. They never work out.
Have you thought much about as you look back through your career and now you have the clarity of hindsight, how important the size of one's dreams are? Because I imagine that if you spoke to that Emma, now you'd be like "Listen, dream bigger, it's going to you know."
And I think it was when I heard about how WeWork took investment in the back of a car from Masayoshi Son from SoftBank, the big billionaire investor. And he gave the WeWork founder a billion-dollar check and said, "You know the only problem with you is you do not dream big enough."
He'd just given him a billion dollars and he was criticizing him for not asking for more. And as I reflect back through my career, I go "Jesus Christ, like so many moments I oversold myself because I just couldn't see it."
You know what happened in the end of that story, right Steven?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But still, like listen, this guy walked away with a billion dollars even though he...
Listen, he did all right. He did all right. But you know, it's like I'm not investing in his next thing, are you?
He's just raised 250 million.
I saw it. I saw it. I can't believe people are just walking back into that, but there you go.
The thing that it put in my mind was actually that, you know that whole adage of "Aim for the stars and you'll land on the clouds"? I was like, there's truth to this idea of just aiming higher.
Yeah, I think there is some truth to it. I mean look, I do not know that I even had an idea of how high high was. I think that it's perspective and your environment that gives you an idea of like what is high.
You know, I often talk about this idea "you can't be what you do not see." And for me I do not think that I had a lot of role models. In England at that time, it just wasn't... who was there? Do you know what I mean?
I kind of honed in on Oprah because she was on the TV when I would come home from school and I was like "That is aspirational. There's a black woman who reads all these books, that has these crazy ideas around gratitude and manifesting."
At the time she was talking a lot about manifesting and meditation, but then that kind of moved into mindfulness. But the exposure to those ideas to me at that time, it felt fresh and new and I was like "I am going to watch Oprah and I'm going to be like Oprah in my way of thinking."
Not that I wanted to be on TV, but it's like that's the type of level of thought I wanted. I wanted to be thoughtful and articulate and move like Oprah. Because I thought she moved good.
So when it comes to like your dreams and your ambitions for me, I think that they've maybe been a little bit more bite-sized. It's been like "Let's get out of this place, get out of Plaistow. Then let's like get a job and surround yourself with the right people."
And then like, and you know it's all been very kind of much more incremental. I always think about this idea of how I've leveraged everything that I've had into the next thing. I'm pretty good at doing that. I have grand plans that I started writing when I was 30, but they're much more theoretical about how I want to feel and how I want to be spending my time as opposed to like "What will I be doing?" at that moment.
One of the things you said over and over again as well when talking about building business is hiring and how important that is to you. It's taken me a long time, longer than I would have liked, to realize the importance of hiring.
In my first business, I think it was an afterthought. I thought most important things are if I work seven days a week and I do not leave this office and I have good ideas, we'll be good.
Not so much. Not scalable.
Yeah, and you learn the hard way because you start hiring your friends and you go off vibes etc. So the hiring advice that you needed at the start of your career that would have helped you to make less mistakes. What is that advice?
The hiring advice was: Learn to fire. Because I think that what happens in business is the people that get you to 10 million are not the people that get you to 100 million. The people that get you to 100 million are not the people that get you to 500 and then to a billion.
And so what happens is as a founder you get so... you know what it's like, that startup vibe, those early people, the work that they do and the times you have together. That becomes so much part of your success story.
And if you hold on to that for too long, you kind of miss what is next and you miss that ability to be able to pivot and to level up. And so I think that the mistakes that I made early on were not moving people out of the business quickly enough.
Because?
Because I just didn't want to fire them. I was so loyal because I have loyalty and I'm like such a nice girl and I was like "You just needed to go and I didn't want to say that."
And what was the harm that they did by staying or by you staying?
Oh, well it restricted my growth. It restricted my ability to be able to move up and level up and have better clients. You do not know what you do not know until it's like right in front of you. And so I needed to keep constantly up-leveling your people. So that's what I missed.
If I could bring that old Emma in that didn't want to fire and I sat her here, what would you say to her? Because I know because kids come up to me all the time saying this, that there are so many people who can relate. People-pleasing, "We're a family."
No, we're not a family. We're not a family. And that's the first thing. I think everybody really needs to understand why they are there. And this is about leadership style. Are you clear in what you are all there to do?
Because it's like I am not building a family. I am here to run an organization. That organization is here to create a profit and we all have to be very, very clear about our goals and how we're getting there.
I think that in the past what happens, and especially when you have successful companies, success masks a lot of problems in a business. And when you get successful, you've got to allow yourself and your team to be equally critical, even when everything's going well.
Even if the bottom line's well, there'll still be dysfunction within that organization and you can't let the success mask what that dysfunction is. You've got to get into it. And actually it's even more important when you are successful that you deal with those things, because otherwise the problems get bigger and bigger as the company gets bigger and bigger and you end up with a problem that you could have stamped out much earlier on that you then didn't.
So it's just a really key thing and it's a muscle. It's like anything, you get better at this all the time. I've become better and better at spotting who are the right people.
And inevitably actually I spend more and more of my time bringing the right people into the company. I reckon we were talking about this the other day, I think it's like 20, maybe even 25% of my time is spent on talent and cultivating like the right people to come into the company.
It's a lot of time.
It's a lot of time.
Oh my god. But that's the difference between good and great.
100% good to great. Who you bring in... when we talk about culture in a company, culture is who you hire, who you fire, and who gets promoted. Now that is my job. That's my decisions to make within the organization and so I really think about how much more thoughtful can I be about those decisions and the majority of that is put in who I hire.
So on that point then, how does one get truly exceptional people to come and join them? I say this because in the last five years I've become increasingly obsessed with hiring.
I feel like I'm the head of recruitment. I built the process, sign off everybody that joins every company, obsessing about it, building tools myself in my bedroom to make our screening process... it's my absolute obsession because I now have the clarity of hindsight. I go "Oh my god, my net worth and my outcomes can be correlated to like 10 exceptional people that I brought into my ecosystem 10 years ago."
But me and you are in a different place now. And if you go back to when you first started your agency all those years ago, you didn't have the same leverage.
No way.
So if you're a startup founder now and they agree with this principle that hiring is so critical, A-players really matter, how do they go about getting exceptional people to come and join Emma's company?
Well Steven, that's the reason that you've got to be a great salesperson, otherwise I'm not going to invest in you. But it comes back down to that, because in the beginning you've got to sell a dream, a vision.
You might be willing to give someone some equity, but chances are that equity is worth zilch in the beginning. So you've got to be that person that can say "Here is where we're going," we're going to paint a vision.
But you've got to have the strategic chops to say... anybody good is going to understand that a founder alone goes nowhere. So it's "What am I coming into?" If it's the founder and it's very little, then what's the vision that I'm buying into and what's the strategy to get there?
So it comes back down to this idea of can you sell a vision? Can you sell the strategy that these people are going to come into and actually work towards? And I think that that is probably the thing that I'm good at. I've had a pretty clear idea about what I'm doing.
And I can do that because I do not do very much. Everybody always says to me "How do you do so much?" It's like I do not do very much. What I do is obsess over the customer. I obsess over a set of products and then I get them to them really quickly.
§03Transcript — part 3
That's it. That's all I do. So it's not really that much that I do. And I think that it's so, so, so important for you to be able to do very, very, very few things really, really well.
I think that really goes against what a lot of startup founders think they have to be doing, because they think they have to be good at everything.
No, no. I think it is the opposite. And I think that if you start to tell yourself that, it's a slippery slope, because no one is good at everything. You've got to find people that have expertise that can do things that you can't do.
And that can be really difficult in the beginning but again, it's like so much of it is about curiosity—asking as many questions as you can so you can start to figure out who is going to be the best person to solve that problem.
In the beginning, I just feel like I had no idea how so many parts of my business worked, but I would make sure that I would be the person to ask enough questions to get to the point where I could hire somebody that would be competent to do that role.
So you train yourself and you train these muscles that get you better at hiring. And you're going to make some mistakes. I never feel like we spend enough time talking about failure, about the mistakes.
I've made so many mistakes. I moved a whole bunch of people here to LA and shut the office down 18 months later. Because I thought I had something that I just didn't have. I thought that the reputation I'd built in London would translate to LA. What I didn't understand is LA is a community and I wasn't part of it.
It was like a closed door. I got here and I was like "What?" I mean it was just... frozen. Frozen out, completely like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. "They not like us."
This is it. So you... and it really was. And so I think that learning, not just understanding "Okay I had this thing, it went wrong," but it's like really going deep and being like where and how did I fail? And how do I consistently get better at that? And staffing is one of those things that you just get better and better and better at it the more you do it.
I'm really obsessed about this idea of like truly exceptional people. I was listening to something Steve Jobs was saying throw it up on the screen for anybody.
I've built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players. And I found something: I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other because they've never had a chance to do that before. And they do not want to work with B and C players, and so it becomes self-policing, and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players and it propagates.
Have you found that to be the case? And also, I want to address another point here, which is the insecurity of an early stage founder who looks up and sees someone that's really experienced and then they have that sort of self-doubt and go "How the fuck am I going to manage them?"
You know what, at the risk of disagreeing with anybody so prolific and amazing, I think as someone who has been able to move people between organizations or between companies, sometimes it can be the company that can make people great.
You can have a truly exceptional person in a kind of dysfunctional company and then they do not do as well. You can bring in somebody not quite exceptional into an exceptional culture and company and the organization makes them great.
Makes them look great or makes them great?
No, makes them great. Because what people tend to do is level up, whether you end up the average of the people that you surround yourself most. And I have in some cases brought people in that I'd be like a B-minus, and they've turned into an A-plus.
And I, the more I think about this Steven, the more I think that's happened on a number of occasions when the organization is exceptional and when the people there are doing exceptional work, they can actually level up the people. Now they have to be somebody that wants to level up, for sure. But I've definitely seen it work that way.
One of the things that I think a lot about—it kind of dovetails into this a little bit because I was referencing how we can sometimes be our own worst enemies and doubt ourselves away from like finding the truly exceptional person, so we end up hiring our friends—is the idea of prejudice.
I love this idea that you've hired friends. Who are these friends that you hired? That is a terrible bloody idea!
I was 18.
Says me who works with my husband.
No, I was 18 and I, they weren't actually friends but they weren't qualified. I just met them at like... I met one guy at a Prada store and I was like "You can be my account manager." And then I met some guy at like a rap battle and I was like "You should be my marketing director" and he liked...
This is great. Between Prada and the rap battle, I get it. I can even see how these things weren't happening.
There was no rigor in deciding who...
No, but that's what it comes down to: rigor. It's like you've developed systems and processes that have helped you get to where you are and it's like now I have a giant organization and a head of people that spend their life not just, again, bringing people into the organization but then like making them great once they get there. I had no such thing. I do not think I knew where the HR office was when I was in employment. I'd be like "Who are they? Where are they?" Some girl called Jo that sits in accounts. I do not know where she was.
But I say that because we're in a different time now where there is such an ability for us to be more thoughtful about who we're bringing in. And so I think any founder who's really smart is going to use all the tools.
All you need to do is know that it's a really important thing that you will do. Who those first 3, 5, 10 people that you bring into your organization will be the difference between good and great. And so being slow and thoughtful and purposeful and using everything at your disposal to make those decisions is probably the best time that a founder can spend outside of developing product or whatever the end product is.
How do you think about prejudice, Emma? And I mean here is being counted out before you walk in the room. So people hear that you're... it might be a woman or something else and you feel that they're not taking you seriously. Has that happened in your career as a black person, as a woman, as anything that puts you in the minority as it relates to the accomplishments you've made?
I'm going to give you a bit more context as to why I ask this. It's because one of my fears is with some people they count themselves out before they walk in the room because prejudice is real, so they limit themselves.
And there's a really great study they did many, many years ago where they got a group of black people, I believe it was on a vocabulary test, just to talk about their race before they did the vocabulary test. And if they got them to talk about their race before, their performance dropped.
If they didn't get the group to talk about their race before in a different study, performance was the same. They did the same with women. They got them to identify their gender before doing a math test. And because there's a stereotype around math, or at least there was at the time, in women, women on that test would perform worse if they talked about their gender right before they did the test.
But importantly, if they didn't, the results were the same as everybody else. So stereotype threat is a real thing and the unpopular conversation is there could be ways that we're holding ourselves back before we even walk into the room because of that stereotype threat. It could be age, it could be race, it could be gender, it could be anything else. It could be a disability. And I just wonder how you think about that.
I mean look, it's undoubtable that that is real for so many people in their lives and the way they think about themselves. I think that any thoughtful organization has and certainly in more recent times, if we think about what's happened in the last five years, anybody that didn't look at their company hiring process and beyond the hiring process look around their business and see "Is it a true reflection of our customer base, of society, of what we're trying to achieve and who we want to be making decisions?"
We're talking about foolish companies here. I feel like anybody and everybody did that. Look, the great thing about prejudice is you very rarely know if it actually happened to you. Nobody likes to point it out. They're like "Listen, you didn't get this thing because actually I'm prejudiced against you."
I'm sure it has happened. It's never something that for me, knowing how I'm hardwired, I would have let get to me in any way, shape or form. You know, I'd get in a room and would never feel any such held back by my education, held back by my accent or anything like that, or being a black woman.
In fact to the contrary, to me I always felt like it was a bit of an advantage. There was only one of me. I used to walk into these offices and work experience and everybody would always single me out because I was the only one that kind of looked like she might have a different opinion.
Everyone came from the same kind of private school stock and there I was with the accent, with the big curly hair, black girl sitting in the corner and inevitably they'd be like "What do you think?" So, you know, it just played out differently for me and therefore my experience is kind of a reflection of that.
That's what I wanted to know. I wanted to understand that because it's something I really want people to realize, which is prejudice—yes, it's real, as you said. But it doesn't have to be your problem. It can remain theirs.
And I really worry that people will internalize other people's prejudice and then limit themselves.
Yeah, and I think this has a very different... listen, you and I speak as two British people, right? I've lived here now for eight years. It ain't the same here in America.
How do you mean?
Well, the way people relate to race is extremely different here. And if I'd been born in America, maybe I'd have had a different feeling about how the color of my skin impacted my life on a daily basis, because it's very, very, very different here and very much more prolific and a point of everyday not just conversation, but everyday prejudice comes up and manifests itself in a very different way here, in with negative connotations.
And so I thank God that I was raised in London and I had a very different way of associating how I felt about myself. I had a very different way of the way in which I was raised and how I experienced race as a kid.
How you felt about yourself seems to be more internal than external in that regard. And that brings me to my next question, which is just about: how do we not give so many fucks? Because it's hard to live and it's hard to strive and it's hard to take risk if we're imprisoned by the amount of fucks that we give.
This I feel like this is like my speciality. You know, it's really interesting because so much of that is just like in us, right? It's like hardwired who we are and how many fucks we give.
And I just so happen to be the type of person that has such self-assurance and such conviction that I do not care, or I just have such high... it's not that I do not care, I just have such a high value on how much I care about what I think that maybe what other people think just kind of pales into insignificance for me. That's the honest truth. And so I just have very high self-worth.
I've heard you talk before about how as well we kind of misunderstand how much people actually give a fuck about us.
I think about that all the time, because it's just one of those things that we just imagine that people spend a lot of time crafting texts to us that you would like sit and be like "What did they mean by that?"
It's just sent. Do you know what I mean? I didn't even think about the words and whether I was using caps or the wrong emojis or whatever it is. And I do think that there is this thing that we imagine because we're at the center of our universe that we're at the center of everybody else's. And it's just not the truth.
Nobody's watching you. I think about it all the time. No one wakes up and thinks about me as much as I do. So we've just got to relax. Well, maybe it feels like it for you, but I just do not think that anybody's that interested.
It doesn't feel like it for me, but you... I think humans are like from an evolutionary perspective, our brain is built to deal with like 20 tribe's people. So we interpret everything as coming from a member of the tribe, whereas in reality it could be like Dave in Swindon with like an egg emoji who's telling you that those jeans suck.
Yeah, totally. Listen, and Dave at Swindon is like allowed to have his egg emoji. I just do not think his egg emoji needs to ruin my day. I'm like, poor fucker, what's he doing? How embarrassing.
One of the next seasons of life I find myself moving towards quickly is parenthood. When did you start trying and what was your fertility journey like?
I love that you asked this and I was very surprised that you are. I had the most easy, unbelievable, brilliant fertility journey with my first two and then probably the saddest, most disappointing, hardest time in my life with the second two.
And so it really was a tale of two halves because I have an 11 and an 8-year-old and you know, without too much information, I literally came off the pill and puff, I was pregnant. Which was amazing. I was 30. Thirty years old, you know, had got married, actually had zero ambition to ever have kids ever.
And then it was like one of those fairytale things where I literally walked down the aisle and was like "Oh my god, I just can't wait to have a baby." I do not know who that girl was. So I got pregnant very easy with my first child, a couple of years later had my second child.
Life happens, moved to the US, everything's going fantastic. I decide baby number three, come off the pill again and I'm like waiting... and it doesn't happen. And so I'm like "Honey, you need to go and get yourself checked." He's like "Okay."
So we do the things that you do when you do not get pregnant so easily and there was just no explanation for my infertility. And so I went through a few rounds of IVF. And for me, you know...
What age is this, sorry? Just so I can track.
So I am at this point 38. So I'm, you know, I'm not like quite yet a geriatric pregnancy, as they like to call it in this country when a woman over the age of 40 has a baby, but I'm skimming. I'm on the edge of where fertility starts to become, you know, more of an issue.
And anyway, for me it was devastating because I really, really had something... and I'm sure so many women will tell you this, once you've made up your mind that you're having another baby, that was it for me. Then it was just "Well, how is this going to happen?"
And I was so lucky in some ways that I was here in Beverly Hills at the time. Access to the best doctors was so, so easy and so I went on what would become a journey through IVF and it was one of the hardest, most soul-destroying times of my life. I couldn't think about anything else. You know, you could be like "Emma, what do you want for dinner tonight?" I'd be like "A baby." I just was single-track. All I could think about was I need this, I need to be pregnant.
Why soul-destroying?
It was soul-destroying because I went through multiple rounds of IVF and every single time for me, actually it did work out, but then I lost a baby three times. And it was really just awful. For me it happened at nine weeks, 11 weeks and 16 weeks.
And so you know, at that point, 16 weeks you're about to tell people, you think you're past the danger zone so to speak. Something in my heart told me that it wasn't going to work out for me. I actually think I knew deep down, but you're doing all the things—I'm having the acupuncture and the doctors all feel great about it and of course you have IVF and then it's successful, you're like "Great, now I'm pregnant, I'm having a baby."
And so that loss was just an inordinate... it was so hard to deal with. And again, it was a very isolating time because it was like COVID, I was on my own, driving in gloves and a hazmat suit... you know, it was the time we really didn't know.
And the roads were empty and it was tough. Police would pull you over and I'd be like "I'm going to the IVF clinic," which was like one of the few things that you were allowed to be on the road for and driving around for. So it was just very, very difficult.
But you know, I had a happy ending. And so for me my journey ended in something that I never thought would be a way that I would go, but I ended up deciding that I would have a surrogate and I met an incredible woman and she carried my twins, which was the like single biggest thing that anyone can ever do for you. You're like "What? Like this is so crazy."
And it was amazing. I had like such a profound, incredible pregnancy with this amazing wonderful woman who, beyond what our contractual commitment was—because you hear horror stories—she asked me for nothing. It was a beautiful, amazing partnership and my twins were born via surrogacy and that was that.
Complicated emotions?
No. And you know, I have to tell you Steven, I loved... and maybe I approached it more like a bit of a... I was very transactional about it.
Not the surrogacy. The moment before.
Beyond. Beyond. Beyond complicated emotions because you are... you know, I've had pregnancy loss before, before I decided to have children. I've had a complicated, as so many women have, a complicated fertility journey. It was emotions that were too hard to bear.
And for somebody who's used to being able to get her way and work towards things being as they should be, and to me it's like the amount of effort I put in directly correlates to the result, and there was no such thing in this.
You could have all the shots and all the acupuncture and do everything that you're supposed to do—not work out too much, do not go in a sauna, be an angel, eat all of the right things—and still I couldn't hold on to the pregnancy. So for me it was just something that I couldn't... I couldn't bear.
In that moment, are there any... are there decisions that you wish you'd made or is there something you'd wish you'd known? Because we do not talk about this enough, so people end up going through this themselves.
You know what? I'll tell you. I wish I'd have spoken about it more with all of my friends that had gone through it. And I will tell you this story. I was a couple of summers ago... you know I'm often the person people confide in. And I happened to be in this place, very confined, like on a boat.
And all of the women were in some type of fertility thing. Like they had different things going on. And I looked around and I knew I was the only one of all five of us that knew everybody's thing. And I was like "We could be having such a good conversation now! Right? It would be so rich and so useful."
Because again, like there was somebody that had had kids via IVF, there was someone who had just come from somewhere, there was somebody that was in the middle of like diagnosing endometriosis, and there was somebody who was pregnant but not telling everyone she was pregnant because it was IVF and she'd had all the problems.
Anyway, like everybody had their own unique circumstances and I was like "In a group of women where we discuss... I won't even say what we discuss... we discuss every single thing... that that is like the last taboo. It says something about your womanhood that it would be such a deeply held secret and something that you just can't discuss."
It's such a shame. And I'm not saying that that's what it is for all women and all groups of friends, but it's definitely something that people really, really struggle with talking about.
And certainly for me, going down the surrogacy route, I really felt an element of... I wouldn't say shame, but it was like "Why couldn't I? I was willing to do this myself. Why couldn't I? I should have just been able to do it. I was ready at 38 to like have to like go back on the workouts and figure myself out again."
And so I felt like I'd been robbed of an opportunity to do something. And then you know, coming out of it, I was like "Wow, that was such a profound, incredible experience that I would never have had had all of these things not happened." And so in a weird way, I was just kind of grateful for the opportunity to have been to have seen how selfless like another human being could be.
Were you aware of the biological clock in the way that people are now aware of it back then?
Yeah, I was. Although I have to tell you that there's nothing... for most women, we spend all of our time thinking about how to not get pregnant. You're just like "I just want to like not get pregnant forever" until it's your moment that you want to get pregnant and then there's this second moment where it's like it's no longer your choice and the window's really, really narrow.
And so I, you know again, I have hundreds of women in my office and I mentioned to you at the start of this conversation there was some fertility seminar yesterday. I think that there's still so many myths around it. There is no good time. You can freeze eggs but it's not like freezing embryos, it's very different.
And so the idea that the decision is all ours is just not realistic. And that there is... there is a window and it is narrow and it is something that you have to think about. And I think that there are a lot of women that know that they do not want children, that's fine. But if you do, it's really something that you ought to be more plan-ful of because it's bloody difficult and it's not how you think.
Thank you. Thank you for talking about that because as you say there's not enough people that talk about it. And actually had I not had the access to information on doing this podcast and meeting these women who have been very open about it, I would have had no idea.
And I would have probably found myself in a bit of a struggle because me and my partner weren't thinking about that. We're thinking about getting the bag, we're thinking about building our businesses, and we're 32 now.
So when I hear people like you say, "Listen, if this is something you want, then plan. Make a plan." And I do not think many people listening actually have a plan for children. They see it as the thing they'll get around to when they're ready. But this clock...
The clock is ticking.
It doesn't work like that. I've got an idea. I think you should start a podcast.
Steven, whatever you say I will do! That's a great idea. Let's go. What should it be called?
I think you should call it *Aspire*. And I think you should launch it in May. How does that sound?
Steven, you're so incredibly smart and thoughtful. And I feel like if my podcast could be born here and be just half the podcast that you have, we'd be quitin'.
I think you can do even better. I think you can level up. This is what you said, you said people come and see something then they level up. So you level up. Why podcasting? Your podcast launches in May, it's called *Aspire*. What's the mission there?
You know, and I'm so glad that you asked the question like that because for me it is a little bit of a mission. And I think that the more success I've had, and I'm sure this is very similar to you and you've mentioned it on a few occasions... actually I remember being out with you in Manchester, do you remember when we had to like walk from the studio to the bar where we were doing the thing?
And you know, it's like inundated with people and questions and people just wanted like just get like this one thing that they're trying to figure out across the line and say like "Steven, how do I do this?" And so that happens to me all the time wherever I go.
And I've made it a habit of mine in the morning on the way to the work to just like jump on the phone to someone for half an hour. I do it almost every day, four days out of five. And I'll speak to some founder and give them like 30 minutes of whatever it is that I can.
So the podcast was honestly from the beginning about figuring out: how can I scale mentorship? How can you get to this place where all of these people that want to ask me questions can actually get some answers from me?
And you know the podcasting was not the first thing that came to my head, but the more I looked into it because I am a huge podcast listener—I listen to so many podcasts—but it's kind of interesting that for such a kind of broad space, there is kind of such a narrow point of view in so many ways.
There's so many men hosting podcasts and when we start to think about business, it becomes even more male-dominated. And so in my head I was like, well, I just have a very different point of view, I have very different experience, I have a very different access.
And what's been so interesting is all the people I called up to do a podcast, they'd never done a podcast before.
Really?
Yeah! Everyone that I was like "Hey, would you come on?" they were like "I've never done this." And I was like "Well, that's interesting." And immediately even just from that kind of casting point of view, I was like "Oh, maybe I have a distinct point of view that could be interesting here."
But all I want to do is very, very simply take what I've learned and take the people that I know and have it be impactful because I feel like everyone aspires to something. Everybody wants to build the life of their dreams. And so I was really thinking about this as something that maybe if I could facilitate conversations and tell people more about the journey that I've been on and be really thoughtful about what it takes, right?
Because I just feel like again, in the female media landscape there's so much toxic positivity and I'm like "Babe, you're not going to be able to manifest your way there. Like I'll tell you the truth, if you want to listen."
And if you're willing to put the work in, like all of these things could be, you know, applicable and you could have access. And so that's what I want to do. I want to just like do things how I do them—be honest with people, bring in people that I know and be honest about my journey. And I'm excited to do it. It's been... I've done a couple of episodes and I'm like "I'm just having a chat."
I think all the things you've done in your life, I think the more and more that you find yourself in the public eye and the more of the work that you do on your podcast *Aspire*, I think that is ultimately going to be the greatest part of your legacy.
And I say that because there is nobody else able and capable of occupying that space that I can see. There is no one who comes from where you come from, who has been on the journey that you've been on both in the UK and in the US, that's climbed both mountains, that is relatable even though that they're so high up the mountain, that is had to contend with some of the things you've contended with—which many women and men contend with—which is like parenthood and family.
That is articulate, that is seasoned across a variety of different environments and spaces, that is also a black woman... there is nobody. And if you reflect on you as that young girl looking up at Oprah or me looking up at Jamal Edwards, it was so important. It was the kernel of belief that stays in your mind that says "If they can, there's no reason I can't."
And I've said this to my team a ton of times over the last couple of months about you: there's no other Emma. So she almost has a responsibility to that gap. Because you've done incredible things in your life, you've done so much philanthropic work which I'll put all in the description below to help so many people, but it's not lost on me that the older I've gotten, just seeing someone that you can that makes you realize that that brings down those like limiting beliefs that you have or that society has passed to you, could go on to create 100,000 Emmas.
And that... it's hard to think of a more astonishing, important legacy than that, like the 10 million Emmas that you will create. And so I'm so glad you're doing this because I've said to my team a ton of times "There's not another Emma. There's not somewhere else that could occupy that position." So it's so important that you're successful in it and it's so important that you continue to do it. So, so thank you for that.
That means so much.
It's so true though, I say it all the time behind your back. I'm like "There's not another one. There's only Emma." So she has a... not has to, because it's not an obligation, but it's a responsibility.
It's a responsibility. I think I see it as a responsibility. It's one that I'm taking really seriously because I feel like there is an amazing opportunity there. And if you take anything seriously and you apply yourself and you think about like "Who are you here to serve?" You know, I think about that every day. I told you, it's like I'm obsessed with customers, I'll be obsessed with listeners.
And at the end of the day I just want to do something where it's like it's just about doing a good job. Right now I'm obsessed with like what is the content that you put out? How do you have a conversation that's not currently being had?
And I feel like there are such incredible people like yourself that are having beautiful conversations that are actually moving us forward in ways. I text you when you have an amazing episode. I'm so proud that you could be black guy from England who's doing these things, who's at the top of the charts and I look at that and I think that's so important.
And so for me it's interesting to think about how this could be important for a certain group of people right now.
It's going to be important beyond what you'll ever see or realize or understand or be able to measure. And you know that if that 15-year-old Emma there had seen this Emma, what that would have meant to her. You know what that would have meant to her.
Quite a lot.
Exactly. We have a closing tradition here, Emma, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is: What about you is better or has vastly improved because of the person who loves you the most?
Who loves you the most? Well, Jens loves me the most, doesn't he?
More than your mom?
More than my lovely mum. You know I would say whether it was my mom or it was Jens, you know, when you are... when you're so loved, and I feel like someone who is so loved—you know my sisters love me, my kids love me, my mom really loves me, Jens loves me—you have like such capacity, right?
And that's what I always feel. When I think about what it is that kind of like keeps me going and gets me up, I have such a huge capacity for more. I have such a like huge capacity to give, to put the work in, to receive, to make things better.
And I honestly think that that's what's happened to me—that I've... my ability has just grown so much and continues and my capacity just keeps growing. And it's a really interesting thing as you get older to see that like happen within you.
You know, because we always talk about like having insane energy in our 20s and then... I'm 42 now and I think I have more capacity for learning, for giving, for being open to new things than I've ever had in my life.
And I think that that is because I'm really loved. And it's so interesting, I do not think it's about what I've achieved. I do not think it's about anything else. I think that I know I feel so safe and so secure and so seen that I can do anything because even the biggest mistakes, like these people they will always love me. Like it's totally fine whatever I do. So it's like I would say that.
That's a beautiful thing. Emma, thank you so much.
Thank you, darling.
I'm a huge fan of yours in every way and you're like a big sister to me and I really appreciate our relationship and long may it continue.
Oh I hope so. I'm so proud of you. I really am. I look at everything you're doing and I'm so happy that you're here in America about to take it over.
Come on, babe!
No pressure.
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If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make this show better and better and better. I cannot tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button.
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