Skims wants to be the new Nike. Brand experts say that’s a pipe dream.

• Skims CEO Jens Grede compared the Kim Kardashian-fronted brand’s successes to Nike in the 1990s.
• Grede told the FT that, like Nike, Skims “exists at the intersection of culture and commerce.”
• Brand experts say it’s impossible to match Nike’s success, especially with Kardashian’s influence.

Companies are just like people, they have heroes.

According to Jens Grede, the CEO of Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand, Skims’ hero is Nike — though, to be clear, not the Nike of today.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Grede drew a parallel between the success of Skims — a shapewear brand he cofounded with his wife, Emma Grede, and Kardashian in 2019 — to Nike in the 1990s.

“High-performing product, delivering real value for money, and a brand and a company that always had a voice in what was happening in the world,” Jens said of Skims and Nike to the FT.

“Skims exists at the intersection of culture and commerce,” Jens added.

The 1990s was a belle époque Nike — a decade that saw its sales swell from $2.24 billion to $9.2 billion between 1990 and 1997 and the brand become a cultural phenomenon.

Besides Skims, the Gredes have launched multiple brands with the Kardashian-Jenner family, including Khloé Kardashian’s Good American denim brand and, most recently, Kylie Jenner’s clothing brand Khy.

However, Skims, most recently valued at $4 billion, is the golden child of the Grede-Kardashian-Jenner brand empire.

Timely versus timeless

On paper, Skims and Nike of the 1990s have commonalities.

“They both started as brands about innovation. They both have progressed and moved into a much more emotive lifestyle place that they are now,” Isabelle Aleksander, a senior brand strategist at JDO Global, said.

Both companies have also put athletes at the forefront of campaigns — Nike with Michael Jordan in the 1980s, then sporting heavyweights like Tiger Woods and Roger Federer in the 1990s.

While Skims officially partnered with Team USA for the two most recent Olympics and is the official underwear partner of the NBA, WNBA and USA Basketball.

But replicating Nike’s blueprint doesn’t necessarily guarantee the same result, Aleksander said.

“All of their campaigns feel on time; someone is in the news, the next day they’re on a Skims campaign,” she said. “But that timeless quality is what I think Nike has captured and sustained, which I don’t feel from Skims.”

A wildly different retail landscape

Another issue is that the retail landscape is very different from what it was in the 1990s, and consumers are more fickle.

“The consumers that they talk to are tired,” Aleksander said. “We want newness in a way that we didn’t at that point in time.”

Consumer fatigue may also be connected to having an overwhelming amount of choice — from companies founded by young entrepreneurs to celebrities with existing cachets, Matthew Quint, director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School, said.

Even Nike has struggled in the new retail ecosystem as younger brands such as Hoka and On take market share.

The problem with Kim

Another potential issue is that Skims has hedged its bets on Kardashian, Quint said.

While Nike did have celebrity endorsements in the 1990s, it wasn’t partially owned by a celebrity — especially one who has been in the public eye since the noughties.

“Skims is not likely to be a for everyone brand because there are going to be people who don’t want the association with Kim Kardashian,” Quint said. “It’s a little narrowed relative to what Nike’s potential was back as it was growing rapidly.”

Aleksander said Kardashian isn’t able to be a “North Star for the wider masses” that Nike’s buzzy star-powered campaigns and messages with Michael Jordan, Spike Lee, Andre Agassi, and Pete Sampras, delivered in the 1990s.

“I always think about Nike and irreverence,” she added, “That golden thread that comes through of ‘you are part of this, you are a collective, you’re a community, you’re a voice.'”

Anyone from a teenager in a struggling community, to a CEO was a Nike consumer in the 1990s, which Aleksander said is a type of branding “magic” that she doesn’t see Skims replicating.

“Ultimately, you’re buying into Kim,” she said.