The Times Magazine 69mother who worked full-time at Morgan
Stanley. At 12, Emma left home for her paper
round at 5am every day and came to enjoy
pacing the quiet streets for what she now
realises was a form of mindfulness away from
the noisy bustle of her home.
She might count her money in zeros
these days – last June, Skims was valued at
$1.6 billion, while Good American has an
estimated worth of $12.7 million – but she
is still an early riser.
“I wake up at 5am, then lie in bed and
think about what I’m grateful for. Then I go
down to the gym at 5.15. I’ve definitely gone
all LA – I have a woman who does lymphatic
drainage on me. You have to have a famous
doctor when you live here. I might not have
lost the accent, but inside I’ve gone crazy.”
In a very LA move, a week after our
interview in which she chats to me from
her desk while drinking a green juice, Grede
posts on Instagram the news that she has
just had twins via a surrogate. In 2019, Kim
Kardashian made headlines for choosing to
do something similar after complications
during her second pregnancy.
“I turned to surrogacy after multiple failed
rounds of IVF,” Grede emails in the very earlyweeks of her babies’ lives. “I just couldn’t hold
on to a pregnancy. I had natural births with my
first two children but multiple miscarriages.
I appreciate surrogacy is expensive [Kardashian
is said to have paid upwards of $100,000], but
I’m keen to talk about my journey in the hope
it will empower people to talk about fertility
struggles without judgment.”
As well as juggling the twins, her other
two children and her businesses, Grede is
also studying part-time, a course in African-
American history. (Diagnosed at 21 with
dyslexia, she rues having been a “horrible
student” at school.) I can only assume she has
a staff of 200 working around the clock to
help her manage it all.
“I’ve done really well,” she demurs. “I live
very comfortably. My children are fantastic.
I have a lovely relationship with my husband.”
What about the four-room wardrobe?
“Can we lie?” She looks a little stricken.
“This is a British magazine and my family
might read it.”
I read about the wardrobe-cum-dressing
room in a recent US Vogue interiors piece shot
in the couple’s Thirties whitewashed mansion,
complete with Scandi-issue haute blonde
wood and white bouclé furniture, a vine-
wreathed terrace not unlike the one where
Harry and Meghan sat for their Oprah
interview, and a 110m swimming pool.
The piece also describes her habit of
hoarding bags of M&S Percy Pigs. Grede
and her family left London in 2018 and
their five-storey Bloomsbury townhouse
went on the market for £5.5 million just
before the pandemic hit. Is there anything
else about home that she misses?
“We never get rain,” she says, almost
wistful. “But I’m so English I still angle myself
towards the sun here, even though it shines
every day. I’m trying not to eat meat here,
because it’s shit in America.”
In fact, she eats always the same soup and
salad for lunch to cut down on the number of
decisions she has to make in her already
crammed day. She wears her clothes in exactly
the same combinations for the same reason.
She often suffers from headaches.
Has the milieu she exists in become
ordinary to her?
“I’ve spent 15 years working with
celebrities,” Grede replies. “You get
desensitised, less bothered. The last person
I was properly star-struck by was Mellody
Hobson, the chairwoman of Starbucks.”
As for her own ambitions, well, just
think of the heights to which reality TV
businesspeople have already climbed in
the States. Emma Grede laughs. “I’d love the
title ‘president’,” she says. “But I don’t think
they get paid very much.” ngoodamerican.comClockwise from left: Grede on Shark
Tank last year; with her husband,
Jens Grede, and their children, 2018;
with Khloé Kardashian in Miami, 2019