Emma Grede on the Career Rules That Hold Women Back at Work

Emma Grede has built companies in industries defined by exclusivity, yet one of the biggest constraints she sees facing women isn't access itself. Rather, it's the scarcity mindset-the belief that money, knowledge and opportunity are limited, and that one person's success must come at another's expense.

The British entrepreneur and retail powerhouse, well-known for her businesses with the Kardashian sisters, tells Newsweek that one of the most important shifts women can make is abandoning the idea that someone else's access somehow leaves less for everyone else, and to stop treating knowledge like something to be hoarded.

"It doesn't mean because you have a piece of information that I'm going to miss out; it doesn't mean because you get more, I get less," she says, arguing that the more candidly women share what they know, the more everyone stands to gain.

In her book Start With Yourself-a practical guide aimed at helping more women take control of their professional and personal lives-the 43-year-old argues that scarcity often operates as a "magic trick," a fear-driven mindset that is learned but isn't necessarily real.

She isn't alone in countering this concept: Brightland olive oil CEO Aishwarya Iyer has spoken about having a "mindset of abundance" instead; Pelin Thorogood, the co-founder of Radicle Science healthtech company, has described moving away from a scarcity‑driven "either/or" mindset toward an "all‑of‑the‑above" one; and Sharmadean Reid, founder of networking community The Stack World, has framed the concept as understandable but damaging.

With little sugarcoating, Grede lays out her roadmap for success while urging women to question what she calls "old thoughts"-the inherited, deeply embedded ideas they are taught about ambition, success, money, careers and work-life balance.

Grede says that women can create lives that work for them, but not without honesty, intention and hard work. Some readers may bristle at her blunt, direct and deeply pragmatic approach. She notes in her book that the world is rarely fair to women, but also that "fair" itself is a shaky ideal, always measured against someone else's circumstances. Rather than debating and dwelling on women's disadvantages, she urges them to start with themselves: to create opportunities, act on them and claim an active role. As she writes, "you are not a bystander in your own life."

"A lot of my friends who read my book said, ‘Oh my God, I wanted to throw it across the room,'" she says. That may not be a reaction most authors seek, but Grede is OK with that-as long as readers pick it back up.

The business leader says "ambition really requires discomfort," explaining that she wants her debut book to leave readers feeling challenged, curious, seen and to make them question their assumptions. More than anything, she wants it to burrow into their thinking and help them build frameworks that better serve the lives they want.

Grede reiterates this sentiment over the phone while driving in Los Angeles, three weeks ahead of her book's April 14 launch. "Power has to be taken, no one is going to hand it to you," she says.

Rewriting the Scripts

Running through the book are anecdotes of Grede's own story: growing up in London, taking on early responsibilities at home, leaving school, grinding through low-level jobs and relying on sheer grit to move upward, all the way through building her first business, entrepreneurial successes and losses and the realities of raising children while continuing to build her career.

Grede made her name in the fashion and entertainment industries as co-founder of ITB Worldwide, which specializes in talent-driven brand partnerships. She led the marketing company as CEO before selling it and launching apparel brands. In 2016 she co-founded and became CEO of size-inclusive denim brand Good American with Khloé Kardashian, which made $1 million in sales on its first day.

In 2019, she helped launch Kim Kardashian's SKIMS shapewear company, along with her husband Jens Grede, and serves as its chief product officer. Other businesses she has co-founded include cleaning brand Safely, launched during the COVID-19 pandemic with Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner and TV personality Chrissy Teigen, and, in 2025, the Off Season fashion line in collaboration with designer Kristin Juszczyk-wife of San Francisco 49ers' Kyle Juszczyk-the NFL and Fanatics.

What emerges in her book is less a catalog of hardship and pity than a record of what Grede extracted from each step toward her business successes-a lesson, a warning, a sharper instinct, a clearer vision of the world. In some cases, the takeaway was what to pursue; in others, it was what not to do, especially when it came to managing and leading others.

At the heart of Start With Yourself is rejecting what Grede refers to as "old thoughts." These run from outdated binaries around parenting and careers to the belief that there is one "right" decision, or that women should be content with what they have and temper their hunger for more.

Rather than treating these old thoughts as fixed truths, she recasts them as cultural scripts: repeated, absorbed and too often mistaken for fact. She challenges the assumptions and urges readers to rewrite them, pushing back against complacency and the workplace tropes that often pass as norms. Grede's truth is not always comforting. One example is what she describes as an "employee mentality," the habit of waiting for permission, approval or a boss to tell you what comes next instead of taking the reins and advocating for yourself. She says that you have to think of yourself first because nobody else ever will.

Visualizing, Not Manifesting

The title Start With Yourself grew out of Grede's belief that "there's so much that we can do individually as ourselves on our own that will change the trajectory. And it will change it not just for us, but for all the women that come after us," she says.

The business leader counters the idea that people should stick only to what comes naturally. Talent helps, of course, but so does the ability to figure things out-not always by arriving at the perfect answer, but by having the mindset to work through uncertainty.

She writes the new thought as, "You will bring a particular genius to your career, and it's your job to figure out what this is." That means staying open, curious and willing to keep learning. It is an ethos Grede says she applies in her personal life, too, including in the way she has carved out time to experiment with AI and explore what it can do. Vision is central to this, and a theme throughout the book. Ambition, Grede says, is hard to maintain without clarity on what you want, why you want it and what you are willing to do to get there. But she separates it from the idea of manifesting, which has been spoken about positively by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Spanx founder Sara Blakely.

"You can't manifest your way to anything, or at least that hasn't been my personal experience. So, when I talk about holding a vision for yourself, it's like, what is the way that you want to live? What is the way that you want to show up? What are your principles? What's important to you? And making sure that every decision you make is going in the direction of those things that are important to you," Grede says.

"Too often we get stuck with old stories and old thoughts in the culture that stop us before we've even started," she continues, saying that women regularly stop themselves before they can reach their potential, getting trapped on the lowest rungs of the problem and being too intimidated to fully picture what they want and then pursue it. They convince themselves that they can't start a business because they don't understand every operational detail, but Grede says that doesn't matter.

"Are you a visionary? Do you have a creative bone? Do you have something that you're trying to do?" If so, she says, lead with that and then bring people onboard to fill in your gaps.

Embracing fear and risk is also key. "Risk is a requirement; playing it safe is the real danger. Risk is the bridge between who you are today and where you're going," she writes. For her, risk, fear and failure are entwined: the fear of failure so often keeps people from taking the leap in the first place. But throughout her own life, she says, failure has been less an ending than a catalyst, something to learn from, grow through and use as momentum for what comes next.

"Every day or every week, there are failures in my business," she told GQ magazine last year, speaking on the importance of developing a thick skin.

Grede says fear hasn't gone away for her. What has changed is how she reads it-not as a warning, but as a "signal," something that points to what is new, uncertain and worth aiming toward.

Part of her book's argument for overcoming fear is about breaking the hold of perfectionism. Progress matters more than polish, and the only way into bigger, newer things, she suggests, is to stop overthinking and push past the fear.

Candid Conversations

The mom-of-four pairs her call for agency and ownership with an insistence on greater candor among women. She highlights a need for frank conversations about money, motherhood, IVF, ambition, guilt, partnership and trade-offs-conversations that move beyond the scarcity mindset and vague encouragement into something more nuanced and useful.

"I think that we need to talk about everything. We need to share the details. But when I say talk, I don't mean have a chat. I mean, get into the details, share the nitty-gritty, give the information that matters," she says, adding that women often hear the broad strokes-someone hired a lawyer or signed a contract-but don't ever get into the specifics. How was the contract structured? What business lessons came from it? What mistakes were made?

However, some of her past, more frank assertions on topics such as motherhood and career trade-offs have drawn criticism. These include remarks she made on The Diary of a CEO podcast last year that "work-life balance is your problem, not the employer's responsibility" and, separately, that balancing ambition and parenthood has meant working out what makes sense for her and her family-and it's often not dropping off your kids at school.

Grede recognizes the impact of some of her messages, following some of them in her book with the words, "unsavory but true." However, she maintains that, despite some people's criticism, honesty is what will move women forward, rather than pleasantries.

She often returns to the value of mentorship, a theme that runs through her podcast, Aspire with Emma Grede, public appearances and career. She has become a mentor figure for many women herself, whether through the podcast, in the business world or as a guest investor on TV show Shark Tank and its U.K. counterpart Dragons' Den-where her bluntness toward one entrepreneur was criticized by some viewers.

But, Grede is quick to point out, mentorship is not a shortcut, nor is it something that simply arrives because you want it. You still have to show up, ask the right questions and do the work. It's another subject on which she refuses to indulge easy platitudes.

"I also think that we have to be really honest about where success really comes from, right? It's like, you can't consume your way to success. Watching successful people isn't the same as becoming one," she says. Grede does not gloss over hard work or romanticize success. Whether she refers to it "sweat equity," grit, determination or ambition, hard work is at the core of success and there is no shortcut around it. "This book should feel like a wake-up call for ambitious women," who want "money, power, career and families," because ultimately, Grede says, it is "about self-leadership."

Newsweek's reporters and editors used Martyn, our Al assistant, to help produce this story. Learn more about Martyn.

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This story was originally published April 15, 2026 at 2:00 AM.