It seems there’s simply no stopping Kylie Jenner these days, as she’s celebrating the 10th anniversary of Kylie Cosmetics, constantly dropping new looks for her fashion brand Khy and possibly giving her beverage line a Gen Z rebrand. She has close to 400 million Instagram followers and was once named the world’s youngest billionaire. However, her mom says there was a scary moment early in her career when she zeroed out, spending “every dime” she’d earned from Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
Kylie Jenner was just 9 years old when the Keeping Up with the Kardashians camera crews moved into the Kardashian-Jenner family home in 2007, so she’d presumably built up quite the small fortune by 2015, when she decided to use that cash to start a beauty line. Such an endeavor is apparently not cheap, either, as Kris Jenner recalled on the Smartless podcast:
I said, ‘So, what are we doing about the marketing?’ Like, you know, we need an ad in People magazine and we need to have a billboard. And you know, she goes, ‘Are we OK, Mom? Like, I know what I'm doing. Just relax.’ And I said, ‘I can't relax. You just spent every dime you've ever made on Keeping Up with the Kardashians to start your own brand by yourself with your own money. And I'm a little nervous. Mom's a little, you know, you're 17 years old. So what are you doing?’ and she said, ‘I know what I'm doing.’
You know what they say — You gotta risk it for the Lip Kit! The way Kris Jenner tells the story, Kylie was confident (konfident?) that fans would show up for her lip kits, but I can’t imagine there wasn’t at least a little anxiety about putting all of her eggs in one basket like that, no matter how fashionable the basket was.
Of course, now that we know that Kylie Jenner is a card shark who loves when the stakes are high, this story actually makes a lot of sense. (That, and the fact that she had her family’s fortune to fall back on; it’s not like they were going to let her starve if the Lip Kits had failed.) Either way, her instincts regarding her cosmetics brand were spot-on, according to her momager, who continued:
So I'll never forget the morning she launched her brand, which was the first time she disrupted an entire beauty business. She pressed send on the link to go buy this and put a post out: ‘Go buy my Lip Kit,’ and I think it was 4 seconds. We thought the site crashed, because we had to launch, you know, and it was just sold out in seconds. And then we knew, you know? Then it was on.
Indeed it was on. It’s safe to say that she quickly made back her KUWTK money, several times over, and her success — and ability to use social media as her driver — has only grown over the past decade. If anything what's been proven over the years is that Jenner, like many of her relatives, is a shrewd entrepreneur who understands the finer details of embarking upon a business venture. It would be an understatement to say that keen eye has served her well.
Now, in addition to running Kylie Cosmetics, Khy, Sprinter and more, she’s smoking (literally and figuratively) on magazine covers and dating one of Hollywood’s brightest stars. I’m not saying everyone should empty their bank accounts in pursuit of their dreams, but it certainly all worked out for Kylie Jenner.
Get some insight into how Kylie Jenner and her family members approach their business endeavors by streaming The Kardashians and Keeping Up with the Kardashians with a Hulu subscription.
