When Emma Grede was growing up in Plaistow, east London, the “predetermined path” for girls like her, she says, was to “become a DJ’s girlfriend or a footballer’s sidepiece, or marry a gangster”.
The idea of success – let alone the multi-million dollar version of success – on her own terms didn’t seem like a particularly realistic aspiration. The fact that she dropped out of secondary school and then college didn’t bode all that well either.
All of this only makes Grede’s rise to the top all the more impressive. Today, she has a rumoured net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars. She has shepherded the Kardashians’ various fashion ventures, such as Khloe’s denim label Good American and Kim’s billion-dollar shapewear brand Skims, to global success.
She has appeared on Forbes magazine’s list of America’s richest self-made women. She is an investor on Shark Tank and appeared on its British equivalent, Dragon’s Den. She has her own podcast where she has interviewed the likes of Michelle Obama, Gwyneth Paltrow and Meghan Markle.
And when she features on other shows headed by high-profile entrepreneurs, like Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO, her remarks end up going viral. That’s because Grede does not mince her words. She may have lived in LA for almost a decade – she is based in Bel Air with her husband, fellow entrepreneur Jens Grede, and their four children – but her straight-talking is firmly East End.
Her new book Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work and Life, released earlier this month, is a characteristically frank manifesto for women in the workplace. Think of it as a more no-holds-barred version of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the 2013 book that encouraged women to be more assertive in their careers and less apologetic about their ambitions (and became a sort of totem of the millennial girlboss era in the process).
And if that book was divisive – largely for the way it seemed to blithely side-step any discussion of the bigger, systemic issues that might make “leaning in” impossible for some women – then Grede’s new guide will surely prove similarly controversial.
Indeed, she has already made headlines with some of her more inflammatory pronouncements. During a recent appearance on the actor Keke Palmer’s podcast, she declared that working from home is “career suicide” for women. She has also sparked debate by claiming that she is a “max three-hour mum” who won’t spend longer than 120 minutes with her children on weekends. And as for work-life balance? She’s not convinced it really exists – let alone that we should be asking our employers about it (as she spelt out during her Diary of a CEO appearance last year).
So is Grede simply telling it like it is, refusing to couch uncomfortable truths in the usual polite and convenient white lies that have been dished out to women (that it’s actually possible to have a huge career while also crafting nutritious kids packed lunches and making cakes for the school charity sale, for example) for decades? Is she just putting an influencer-era spin on Sandberg’s Lean In maxims? And is hers the sort of success that can actually be replicated through lessons in a self-help book – or is it something more mercurial?
Grede’s book begins with her story. She grew up as part of an extended family and her mum worked long hours on the trading desk of a bank. She would return “all out of gas”, so Emma, as the eldest of four daughters, ended up looking after her younger sisters (their father was not part of their upbringing, though Grede has since reconnected with him).
She would pack lunches, do their ironing and drop them off at school – responsibilities that inevitably had a knock-on impact on her own studies. Perhaps this is why she is so forthright when it comes to not sweating the small stuff in parenting: she’s already looked after one generation of “kids”, and she knows that even though her mum wasn’t always present, she still turned out alright.
Keeping abreast with the goings on in the school gates WhatsApp group? Reading every single email from her kids’ class teachers? Perfectly cutting out sandwich shapes for their lunch boxes? She simply isn’t fussed. “Ah, it must be so nice to never really be tapped into what’s happening,” she recalls a fellow mum telling her at drop-off, passive aggression presumably intended.
It’s a convincing argument – refusing to weigh herself down with details that no one, bar maybe a few other mums, is particularly bothered by. It frees up time and space for more important things and, she reckons, is setting an example for her children, especially for her daughters, by showing them that it is important to prioritise yourself.
More controversial, though, is her “three-hour mum” proclamation. Again, it’s rooted in a desire to not over-parent her kids, letting them find their own feet, and also spend a decent chunk of free time doing stuff that she feels enriches her.
“After a few hours of focused quality time, I’m doing other things,” she says. “I work out, I read, I do courses on things like transcendental meditation. But I don’t spend eight straight hours with my kids unless we’re on vacation – and I don’t think they would want that either!”
Why have kids at all, some trolls have asked? Other commenters, more reasonably, note that this might be something of a privileged position, contingent upon having childcare arrangements (Grede is open about the fact that she has support from two full-time nannies, a situation that most working parents probably can’t afford to replicate).
Her defenders, meanwhile, argue that if a male entrepreneur had said something similar, he would not have received similar censure (or, more likely, he wouldn’t have even been asked about childcare in the first place). They have a point.
I don’t spend eight straight hours with my kids unless we’re on vacation – and I don’t think they would want that either!
For Grede, the hustle started early. She picked up a paper round when she was 12, before selling fireworks, making sandwiches and selling designer goods that “fell off trucks”. At 16, she headed to the London College of Fashion, before dropping out to work full time, interning for free during the week before landing a job in fashion show production. One of Grede’s more divisive views, hidden in a footnote of her new book, is that “we need to bring back unpaid internships”.
Her view is that the experience and connections that they can provide are invaluable; the counter-argument, of course, is that in many cases they just end up perpetuating inequality. But here, and elsewhere, Grede’s outlook isn’t necessarily about tackling these bigger structural problems – it’s about making the most out of the situation you find yourself in. And it’s for this reason that her book might attract some of the same critiques that Lean In faced a decade or so ago (even though Grede is coming from a very different position than the Ivy League privilege of Sandberg).
Essentially, it’s a sort of bootstraps philosophy – and how much you agree with her advice will probably depend on your tolerance for this kind of individualism. “Nobody was going to give me any breaks, so I asked for them instead,” she writes. “I wedged my foot into any door that was even remotely cracked open. I pushed, I hustled, and I showed up.”
Here, she has been influenced by Oprah Winfrey: hearing the chat show host turned multi-hyphenate speaking about how “you couldn’t change the world, but you could change your relationship to the world” was revelatory for her, she explains in her book. She “dropped the blame”, she says, and now prefers to see herself as “the creator of my own experience” rather than “its victim”.
By her mid-twenties, Grede had launched ITB Worldwide, a talent and marketing agency, where she specialised in brokering deals between influencers, celebrities and mega-brands. For her, the twenties are the perfect time to throw yourself into your career in a big way, when you are less likely to be tied down by caring responsibilities (and when you have boundless energy).
This slightly contradicts a later point she makes about having children, noting that some women end up waiting too long for the perfect moment (although her stance that corporate egg freezing packages are pointless without “paid family leave [and] access to subsidised childcare” is an important one).
She’s particularly forthright on working from home, saying that she “loses sleep worrying about the impact of remote work on women who want leadership roles”, as she believes that in order to be promoted, they need to be highly visible. “You have to be in the room,” she writes. “You need to be seen.”
It’s a view that has inevitably proved divisive; one piece in Forbes went as far to argue that her take is “dangerous for women”. Critics have pointed out that, far from damaging women’s careers, working flexibly can actually help some stay in the game and advance.
It’s worth bearing in mind, too, that Grede’s career is very different from the average woman’s. She is a founder and CEO, who has a real and tangible stake in the places she works, so comparing her position to that of the average salaried worker isn’t exactly a like for like.
Perhaps that is why her remarks about work-life balance, and how it is overrated, might not resonate so strongly with those of us who aren’t in the C-suite. Yes, it’s probably not possible to really reach the top of the ladder without pulling a few late nights and being able to be reached on weekends, and maybe we should be more honest about that.
But does the same logic really work if you’re happy with something a bit less high powered? And should we really be shaming people for asking their employers about work-life balance in their company? Again, Grede sees this as a “personal responsibility” rather than something an employer should sort out.
Grede’s book, with its gold cover and its forthright attitudes, won’t please everyone. But we can safely assume that she’s not all that fussed by the furore. She’s the consummate businesswoman – and knows that a bit of controversy can be great marketing.
‘Start With Yourself’ by Emma Grede is out now