Emma Grede says she started planning her life in her 20s, and she has kept the habit ever since. The UK-born mogul, now one of America’s Richest Self-Made Women, says she is already working on the blueprint for her 50s while running businesses, hosting a podcast and promoting a new book.
Grede, the chief executive and co-founder of Good American with Khloé Kardashian and a founding partner of Skims, said she thinks in decades, then narrows that plan to years and quarters. “It’s the X Y Z decade,” she said of the way she marks each phase of life, adding that she revisits the plan every Sunday.
Forbes named Grede one of America’s Richest Self-Made Women in 2025, a milestone that underscores how far she has come from Plaistow in East London, where she grew up with a struggling single mother and battled dyslexia. She dropped out of high school and later left the London College of Fashion, yet went on to build a career that now includes Good American, Skims and her podcast, Aspire with Emma Grede.
The interview, edited for length and clarity, comes as Grede promotes Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life, a book that mixes memoir with advice on managing emotions, clarifying goals and changing how readers think about what is possible. That framing matches the way she describes her own routine: highly structured, tightly policed and built around early mornings, workouts and family.
Grede said she gets up just before 5 a.m. and works out at 5:30, lifting weights three days a week and doing reformer Pilates with a trainer two days a week. She also said she helps get her kids ready and out the door before going to the office, and makes time for a weekly massage with cupping, plus lymphatic drainage massage when she likes it.
What stands out is not just the discipline but the scale of it. Grede describes her planning as something she has done for decades, not weeks, and she ties that habit directly to the life she has built since her 20s. In her telling, the business success followed the same logic as the routine: decide what matters, break it down and stick to it.
That is also why the book lands now. Grede is not offering a reinvention story so much as a method, drawn from a path that moved from Plaistow to the top tier of self-made wealth in the United States. The question she leaves readers with is not whether she has a plan. It is whether they are willing to make one as detailed as hers.
