What Being Famous Actually Buys

SKIMS launched in 2019 and took around two million dollars in sales within minutes.

No advertising budget produces that. It is not a marketing achievement that can be reverse engineered, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. It is what happens when one of the most photographed people alive opens a shop.

So this chapter has to do something the others have not needed to. It has to separate the part of the story that is unavailable from the part that is.

Start with the unavailable part, stated plainly. Kim Kardashian's fame guaranteed that an enormous number of people would look, once, free, on day one. That advantage is not purchasable and almost nobody reading this will ever have it.

Now the interesting question, which is why so many celebrity brands have had that same advantage and are gone.

Because fame gets everybody to look once, and nothing about fame makes anybody come back.

The first purchase is attention. The second purchase is the product. A brand is built entirely out of second purchases, and celebrity converts spectacularly on the first while doing nothing whatsoever for the second. The graveyard of famous people's clothing lines is full of launches that were enormous and then quiet, and in almost every case the thing that failed was the garment.

Which brings us to what SKIMS did with the attention it was given.

The product was shapewear, in nine skin tones, in sizes from XXS to 4XL.

Nine tones is not a marketing position. It is a fix. Shapewear had spent decades being made in roughly one colour, called nude, which was nude on some people and obviously not on most. Women had been cutting up, dyeing, layering and altering these garments at home for years, and the industry had watched them do it and changed nothing.

That is the single most useful observation in this chapter, and it costs nothing to make.

When customers are modifying a product by hand, the category has stopped paying attention. It is a signal in plain sight, it is free to notice, and it is available in dozens of categories right now. Somebody altering a garment on their kitchen table is telling you exactly what to build.

The third piece is the least glamorous and the most decisive. SKIMS has operator co-founders.

Jens and Emma Grede brought the experience of actually running an apparel business: the supply chain, the size grading, the fulfilment, the boring machinery that decides whether a company that has been noticed can deliver.

That division is why it worked. Attention is the easy half, and it is the half celebrity brands always have. The failures overwhelmingly fail on the other half, where the fabric and the logistics live, and no amount of fame fixes a garment that does not fit or arrive.

So the honest summary is this. Fame accelerated a good product. It did not create one, and it has never rescued a bad one.

What is available to you is the rest of it: find a category that has been lazy for a long time, fix the thing its customers have been working around by hand, and make sure somebody in the building knows how to actually run the operation.

And be clear about the risk in the other direction. Attention accelerates whatever is already true. A good product reaches its audience in weeks instead of years, and a bad one reaches a very large number of disappointed people in exactly the same weeks.