Grace started posting fitness content on YouTube and Instagram under the name GraceFitUK while studying music at Oxford, building an audience of over a million before she had launched a single product.

TALA (2019-present) —> Ethically made activewear, TALA turned over £6.2M in its first year and has since raised £9.2M across two rounds from VC funds Active Partners and Venrex.

Shreddy (2019-present) —> Fitness subscription platform offering structured workout programmes and meal plans to nearly 1M women, with a growing supplements range, including Superwoman, an 8-in-1 women's wellness blend formulated to replace over £100 worth of individual products.

The Productivity Method (2022-present)—> Range of planners and diaries tied to her Sunday Times number one bestselling book, Working Hard, Hardly Working.

Working Hard with Grace Beverley (2021-present) —> Podcast with over 20 million listeners that has consistently placed in Spotify's top five business charts.

Retrograde (2024-present) —> AI-powered talent management for content creators. $2M pre-seed led by Elkstone, co-founded with exited tech founders Jake Browne and Gary Meehan.

Kim was running a clothing boutique with her sisters before Keeping Up with the Kardashians launched in 2007, and spent two decades building, iterating, and occasionally shutting down businesses across beauty, fashion, and entertainment.

KKW Beauty and KKW Fragrance (2017–2022) —> Makeup and fragrance lines launched in 2017. In 2021, Coty acquired a 20% stake for $200M, valuing the business at $1B. KKW Beauty shut down in August 2021, and KKW Fragrance followed in April 2022 as part of a rebrand. Kardashian rebranded following her divorce from Kanye West, dropping the "West" from her name and consolidating everything under SKKN.

SKKN by Kim (2022–2025) —> The rebrand of KKW Beauty focused on premium skincare and later makeup. Coty's existing 20% stake carried over from the KKW era. In March 2025, Coty sold that stake to SKIMS, folding the brand into Kim's broader consumer empire. Financial terms of the exit were not disclosed.

SKIMS (2019–present) — Inclusive shapewear and apparel brand co-founded with operators Jens and Emma Grede. Valued at $5B with $926M raised across four rounds from investors including Thrive Capital, Wellington Management, and Goldman Sachs.

SKKY Partners (2022–present) — Private equity firm targeting high-growth consumer and media brands, co-founded with former Carlyle executive Jay Sammons.

Update Energy (2026) — Functional energy drink backed by $8M. Kim joined founder Daniel Solomons as co-founder in 2025 and launched in 4,000+ Walmart stores in March 2026.

Know the problem from the inside, then follow the audience outward.

Both women built their first products from lived frustration rather than market research. Kim was customising her own shapewear because she couldn't find shades that matched her skin tone, and Grace was training, tracking her fitness, and taking supplements before either of them turned the problem into a brand. That intimacy gave them the product instinct their competitors had to pay consultants to approximate. The Update Energy story extends this further: Kim's most valuable signal to Daniel Solomons was a recurring purchase order, and the co-founder relationship followed from genuine love for the product. Because they understood their audiences so deeply, both women could move into adjacent categories with confidence that demand already existed. Grace extended from fitness content into books, podcasts, planners, supplements, and AI infrastructure, while Kim extended from shapewear into beauty, fragrance, and functional beverages

Partner with operators who own the disciplines you don't.

At SKIMS, Jens and Emma Grede run operations while Kim concentrates on creative direction and cultural positioning. At SKKY Partners, Jay Sammons handles investments while she provided consumer intuition and deal access. Grace applied the same logic at Retrograde, co-founding with exited tech founders Jake Browne and Gary Meehan, who brought the startup infrastructure and AI expertise the venture required. In every case, the creator brought the audience and brand instinct, while the operators brought the systems and execution infrastructure.

Know when to reframe.

Both women made deliberate category choices within the territory their audiences already trusted them on, and that same intimacy told them when something had run its course. Kim shut down KKW Beauty, relaunched it as SKKN, then folded the entire beauty operation into SKIMS when a single brand architecture made more strategic sense. Grace moved from fitness creator to product founder to AI entrepreneur as each phase built the credibility required for the next.

At Vivaio, we partner with creators who have the audience, the insight, and the ambition to build something real. We bring the structure, network, and technology to make it happen. If you're a creator with an idea worth building, that's where we come in.

Explore our latest articles and subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter to get it all delivered straight to your inbox.