Kim Kardashian West Talks Her Business Empire, How She Keeps Bouncing Back | Forbes Women's Summit

i'd like to begin uh quoting an answer you gave to a question in an interview several years ago you are asked how would you most like to be remembered and you said i'd like to be remembered as someone who was smart in business worked hard could be sexy and a mom and the businesses that you're involved with you're making an announcement today on a new venture but whether it's a kim kardashian hollywood game that we did a forbes cover story on a year ago phenomenally successful where a lot of other entertainers stumbled on that one we could discuss why you succeeded more than the others things like emojis 1.99 those are emojis with kim uh whether it's books workout videos which obviously i need uh fragrances uh and the like number of businesses so where did this passion for business come from where where where where was it genetic what how did it happen yeah i think i saw from really good examples of both of my parents who worked really hard growing up my mom was a stay-at-home mom so i saw my dad get up every day and go to the office and kind of in my later years when my mom married my stepdad i saw her find this passion of figuring out how to become his agent and manager and really figure it out when we didn't life wasn't so glamorous and just really figure it out and so seeing both of those great examples really put something inside of me that just gave me this passion to want to figure it out and um i worked for my dad in his office i've worked in a clothing store since i was 15 and i had maybe not the most glamorous jobs of burning cds and pressing cds in his in his record company but all of those experiences were so amazing and i just learned so much every single day working alongside my dad so as a teenager you combined seeing him as an entrepreneur and also in the entertainment business absolutely yeah so and with your mother then she really had to start from scratch to do what she did so you learned you don't have to have an mba to go out and learn something and do something absolutely i mean she was such a good example i mean coming from she was a flight attendant in her 20s and or late teens and figuring out how to be a manager an agent a secretary doing it all and really hustling and just figuring out how to make this amazing speakers business at the time it was bruce so bruce would do motivational speaking and my mom really figured out how to create this this business and as a kid seeing them work and on the phones and running around and everything was in home you really got a sense of how hard it is and it just really motivated me um one of the things that entrepreneurs will tell you and you're going to tell us is that you learn a lot by doing and you've done a lot of licensing deals over the years including as we're discussing cupcakes yes and and uh but now uh you're consolidating you're expanding but uh you're now focusing more where you are in truly in charge can you uh tell us the migration out of licensing to focus the focus four areas that you're focused on today yes i find it really powerful i found power in saying yes to so many things and i would work on so many projects whether it's from tanning to a shoe company to cupcakes like you were saying fitness videos i mean i did everything and i thought that was really powerful in trying everything that i could to figure out what i liked i learned so much along the way but now since i've taken 10 years to do all of that and do anything and everything i could sit back and i think i was kind of this year or last year forced into a situation that made me really want to stop you know being in the public eye and stop being on social media and i took that time off and that experience to figure out what do i want to do i've worked for 10 years in these licensing deals and i mean if i break it all down i mean the percentage that you would get from a licensing deal and then splitting everything with my two sisters so that's three ways and then it just i thought we worked so hard to be getting so little and it might seem all great and seem great and there's all these false information out there and numbers and i really wanted to create a business on my own and i know that was going to take a lot of hard work but i really my husband kanye and i started our kids clothing line kids supply and that is all online because i know you know moms that are so busy and working so hard they don't might not have time to go to the stores and so i was really you know proud to start this business with my husband you're asking what the four businesses are um my komoji and komoji merch i love doing that app and my makeup line that i announced today kkw beauty that will be all online as well and in the same beauty world i'm launching a fragrance at the end of the year and these are all projects that i'm doing full ownership every last detail from the box to the packaging to the being in the factories and feeling every you know packaging detail i'm 100 involved in and that's so prideful for me i feel really proud to have tried everything and then really focused in on the projects that i know i can really put a hundred percent of my time into uh in a moment i'd like to just discuss for example what you did with kim kardashian hollywood uh the amount of the months of time you spent on those uh details detail after detail that you never see in public but which makes a difference between mediocrity and the meteoric success but let's uh start your businesses today came from the brand you develop your personal iconic brand one of the most powerful in the world first how did you decide to go for reality tv which really launched the thing with it take the risk there i know as a youngster you like to watch mtv and there so what were the origins and what made you decide to take the plunge well i think it was 1989 my best friend and i were watching the real world and i joked to her that's it when we're older when we're big that's what i want to do for my job i want to be on a reality show and that was like the first reality show and so cut two our producers produced that show so i feel like it all came full circle i was kind of joking at the time but when we got the actual opportunity to do the reality show i thought it would be great to promote our store we have a clothing store called dash and i thought it would be great to just promote the store and so that's kind of why we got into it not knowing that you know we're starting to film season 14 and we literally didn't think anyone would probably be interested after season one or two we were you know so it's it's such a fun surprise and it's the main project that i get to work and see my family every single day so uh you said season 14 how have you sustained it when you thought maybe season maybe two seasons and then this is going to run out of gas well right when we think we've run out of gas someone will get pregnant get married get divorced there's it's always so unexpected and so crazy just to you know every family member kind of has a season or we go up and down when someone's kind of having a hard time the whole family kind of knows okay let's like kick in extra high gear to give that person a break or let's you know so it's kind of just interesting to see how every season just kind of goes up and down for every family member well it's certainly true in uh the last two episodes of this season uh certainly surprised me when uh you uh the way the the there's true true reality true drama the way you took after your former stepfather now caitlyn jenner yes for the book she wrote and the way she treated your mother you made it clear to your stepsister she hadn't read it that this is something she ought to know about you commiserated with your mother that was dramatic stuff yeah cutscene gutsy on tv you you took them to her it's real life yeah it's just you know i think the one thing that i'm really proud of is when we first started the show my mom said to all of us okay if we're going to do this we should all give it a 100 let's show everything let's be as honest and open as we possibly can and we have the power to edit out things and so i think just knowing that we gave everything thinking like okay well we just won't show that and then by the time they edited it and it aired or was going to air and we watched it that story had been in the tabloids but completely twisted so we're like no we want to show our story let's show this so there actually really hasn't been anything that we've removed from the show and i think that's what keeps it so real is or you'll hear stories in the tabloids but then you kind of tune in to want to know what really did happen or what's our side of the story well in the season finale um again now now uh my my youngest daughter we have five daughters that took me to task when i told her i was going to bring that last episode up because she hadn't she taped it but i haven't seen it yet so spoiler alert um but but uh you you uh for medical reasons you cannot risk having a a baby yeah and so therefore you talked to your sister and there was chloe about being a surrogate mother yes that's dramatic enough and then she goes with you to the doctor and there was a possibility she discovered she might not be able to have children spoiler alert sorry but it's a happy ending at least on chloe's part uh they they took her off the birth control and it all worked out see this this stuff captures everyone you know i'm happy it worked out for chloe and i have two beautiful children so i'm happy and content and if it works out for us to expand i'll be just as happy but i'm also really content um well give us your uh your take on why reality tv has such a big impact on popular culture you've been the gold standard of it in the sense of durability and keen ongoing interest a lot of tried and faltered but why do you think it's had such an impact on the popular culture i think because it's so real i know a lot of people sometimes don't understand reality tv or want to hate on it and you know we're not actors so it's you know shouldn't be respected type of mentality i see that a lot and i'm really proud to be on a reality show and i love to you know at the end of the day i feel like it's the new like how a lot of people don't understand social media and they can't quite grasp it or you know i mean my mom tries really hard she's really good at it but you know for a while she's like couldn't really figure it out so i think like a second language yeah it is and i think that's how reality tv kind of is looked at and so i i'm so proud to be on a show i mean i get to work with my family every single day it brings us so much closer together and it really has helped us honestly get through so many crazy things that's gone on in our lives and we get to you definitely have to have a thick skin once you see the episode air and it might bring up a fight or drama that you've already gotten over you have to relive that again but i i think it's very entertaining just reality tv in general i'm a fan of it and um yeah i'm proud to be on our show well you've uh parlayed the success there into becoming one of the most powerful figures on social media the numbers are astonishing 30 million facebook likes 51 million twitter followers almost 100 million instagram followers 101. 101 okay got to keep it every hour but what do you think of the what have you found to be the most critical rules or factors for uh social being successful on social media because again you've so outpaced all the others so yeah i think that being authentic and sharing your world with people is definitely really exciting especially if you have a brand you want i think it's the most amazing tool that's been invented to help brands and to help get your brand out there with everything i think you have to be you have to set boundaries um i know that when i hopefully you know when my kids grow up they're a little too young for social media now but i will set boundaries and i think it's different for every parent in every household but just like you know when i was growing up we had to turn our tv off at a certain hour or you know i i think there should be boundaries so you don't get too wrapped up in it but i do believe that it's such a powerful tool you can it's so important when you're building your brand and i think each platform really is different for different purposes i think you can use snapchat to really show your everyday life so let's say i'm following my makeup i would go to the factory and snapchat the whole process of how you pick everything out and i think people really get to see that world i think facebook has a great sell-through click-through um response and it's great to promote the audience on facebook as major twitter i love the conversation with people i think what people don't do enough in their brands i think people love to promote but for me i listen a lot and i love that conversation with the people that i follow and i really take their advice it's the most amazing focus group and i love that on twitter you can have that you know conversation back and forth and instagram i love to you know post photos and you can be really artistic on instagram but i think the most important thing is being authentic and listening so uh some specific experience what have you found in these new platforms and tools and you've articulated how each one is different how you see each one meeting a certain purpose what have you found has worked and what have you found hasn't worked from all of that experience i think that doing anything and everything and i'm guilty of that before pro people probably won't believe you and you probably don't even really grasp what like now if i'm going to promote something i have to use it i have to like it i have to be active with it i want to know the partners i want to know who owns the company i want to know so much about it and i love to be loyal to that company and just do what's authentic to me so but i tried so many things in the past and i think through all of that experience you just learn what you like and what you love and but i think the key on social media is just being authentic so you've learned a instead of a shotgun to be more of a focused instead of all over the place how do you decide what to post you uh what what is it just what it is such a struggle no like it it really is i really for if people think you just post and it's so easy like it's not i like my instagram to look a certain way and i'm i'm really like a lunatic about it because sometimes there is so much pressure to post too you know if you're if i go to japan and we don't you know we just want to have like a media free vacation and have a great birthday trip you know it's the upkeep you know then we tried kanye and i woke up at three in the morning and we couldn't sleep and i said let's go into you know in this town in tokyo where it's all these bright lights and let's go take all these pictures and i could post them on social media it'll look so cool and we tried to do it and it was such a mess and he just was not the best photographer and i was like he ruined my what my social media was going to look like so we scrapped that shoot but we got we got the good experience so the pressure is definitely there you've talked about sharpening your focus on on your businesses but of course everyone comes to you and with the words have we got a deal for you how do you now evaluate opportunities and potential things to do now that you've had this experience in which to say no this is just not going to work this is something i want to pursue because it must be a tsunami of stuff coming in yeah i think being an owner is very important to me and now i feel like i put the time in and i've been fortunate and i've saved my money which is you know i think hard to do when so many things are thrown at you and i've taken that and i've reinvested that into the new businesses that i'm starting on my own and so there's not a whole lot of room it has to be it really has to catch my attention if it's going to be a new project that i'm going to work on and i have to have major ownership major input there's nothing you know that i would do now if i didn't have creative control and if i wasn't in charge i was at a fragrance shoot the other day and the photographer is a friend of mine and i'd always dreamed of working with him and i was saying to him you know usually the boss comes up and looks at the screen and all of the photos and they have to approve them and do they like this look and if they don't we have to go reshoot it and we looked at each other and he's like you're the boss like do you like this and i was so i was it was such a proud moment just knowing that i put that all together i was making all the calls to get the whole team together and hired a creative director and it was such a proud moment just knowing like wow i used to work for these people and i would show up and do whatever they said and wanted and now i was in control and i'm the one making the shots and saying exactly what i want the picture to look like and it's my vision and that you know there's there's those moments when you just sit back and look at the photos and i'll call my sisters and be like i can't believe like this is happening i did it like on my own it's it's very it's an exciting it sounds liberating yeah i feel like i really took the time off to figure out what i wanted who i wanted to be and so proud that i'm in this position now discuss for a moment the successful which we did the cover story on kim kardashian hollywood the app the game where you start with a low list and go up to the a list what's amazing is that first it's free but you only get the money if people are so into it they're willing to uh pay for certain things and how and then you spent all the time on things like uh story lines and outfits can you describe the months you just went into this whereas so many other entertainers say oh that's good let the experts do it and i'm on to the next thing walk us just a little bit through what you did to make this thing work well the uh video game was presented to me and at first i will admit that this did kind of fall into my lap i wasn't really sure my husband was the one that encouraged me oh that's so cool you have to have a video game this is so cool and so once i got into it and once i realized what the character was going to look like it didn't really look like me i sent it to a friend that's a graphic artist that works on other video games and he redrew it for me and sent me all the notes of what exactly it should look like and once i started to get into the creative process i feel like i was hooked i mean i'll call them literally in the middle of the night and say the strap of the shoe is wrong on this character you have to change her shoes like i would never wear those shoes and um and they'll fix it and i think that having such a another thing in business what i've learned is i love to be in business with people that i love and that are good people like that to me is really important and the glue team um glue mobile is who did my video game they are so great to work with and i think just having that personal relationship with the head of the app team is just you know he always says it's you know we work with so many people and sometimes you have to get to the agent then the agent has to call the assistant then the assistant would call me and i'm like i don't work like that here's my cell phone here's my email i'm gonna send you pictures all night long so you know this is what i want this hairstyle and this and the game now i've had a baby so you should be able to have a baby in the game like we i think we really did create a reality video game and that i think what is so connecting because i'll be in mexico and in the game you can go to mexico one of the things uh the others have not done is you've been very careful to synchronize what you're actually doing with what's happening in the game yeah i think that it actually happened um you know maybe a year into doing the game and it was so fascinating to see the players be in mexico and me being mexico at the same time so now i love to give my schedule out and i'll say okay we're going to cuba we're going to armenia and we try to sink in exactly what we'll be doing in those cities as you know as far as lead time out as you possibly can and it's really worked for us um you mentioned before how you once did felt you had to do everything everyone was seemingly controlling you even though you're nominally in charge how do you uh do you have a sense now of exposure but not overexposure so that you don't undermine your own brand as so many others have done yeah i think it's really hard you know you do have to and if you go in my in one of my rooms in my house i have these big white boards up and it's these grids of all my projects what i'm doing the dates everything comes out all the launches just so that i can try to spread it all out i do think that some of my brands like kimoji is kind of more of a different side of my personality and not even you know some aspects that aren't even like my personality and so that i feel has its own area and my beauty world i feel like is one area so i think i i'm doing a good job at separating it all and showing different facets of my personality so uh how do you uh manage time you're you're a mother you've made it very clear they're going to have a lot of time you have the public appearances the travel the tv the commodities which you mentioned which you choose each one hundreds of them now yeah how do you manage it and not burn out i think if anyone said they did it on their own they would be lying i have a great team i have you know uh i definitely worked 24 7 but i used to do appearances all over the place and i don't really do that anymore so i definitely i love to stay home and focus on everything and so much of my kids line i've learned just from making clothes for our own kids so that just seems natural so that whole line has been planned out like a year in advance of everything that's going to be coming out and i think planning preparing and having a really good team behind you is key and how do you find time to brainstorm where you can just shut everything out and take a pause and say okay maybe i would re-examine this well i think when you i do take time for myself and i think that's very important and even going to japan and seeing so many amazing things i got so many great ideas and when you do take time for yourself that's when like the magic happens and these ideas come and i think no matter who you are what you do if you don't take time for yourself you can never rejuvenate and you can never get back that creative spark so i do take time off and i do get a lot of ideas from my travels and just being around people that give me ideas and inspire me so i think that is really important and i'll wake up in the middle of the night sometimes with these ideas and i'll just send it to my team and hopefully not wake them all up in the middle of the night but where where do you see yourself five years down the road hopefully i will still be doing what i'm doing i really hope to focus on the new brands that i've been launching this year and i feel like those are all my little babies that i've focused you know been i feel like my whole career has been leading up to this year of these launches to where it's like really authentically me so i just i don't really want to expand into doing a whole lot of other things i really want to focus on what i'm doing now now that i feel like i found my place and just continue to do that we all know what happened last november in paris where you were robbed and what was truly frightening reading about it was even though these guys had planned it they were amateurs they are you could easily have been killed and for a month that took time to recover what how how did you manage that knowing that ex you don't want to be overexposed but you have to somehow keep the show going while you're recovering from something that could have cost you your life yeah i think that first of all my show was amazing they said you don't have to film you can shut down and i did take a couple weeks where i just like had to get myself together but i find it powerful to be able to share my experience and we would film so many things just on an iphone and so many things that i had gone through without the full camera crew and used that because i did want people to see you know what that happened to me it could have been way worse so i feel really lucky and blessed and taking that time off like whether that forced me to take time off to regroup that was necessary and that was also necessary you know from what i've read from the people that had done that to me they had said they had followed my moves on social media and they were they knew my every move and what i had and so it's definitely a huge huge huge lesson for me to not show off some of the things that i have it was a huge lesson to me to not show off where i go sometimes if i'm at a restaurant i won't show or if i'm at the movies and i do want to share that experience i'll take the picture and save it and post it after i leave um it's just changed my whole life but i think for the better and i think that in life those things happen to you in hopes that you learn some things that will change your life for the better in my case it really did now in closing when you appeared on the cover of forbes a year ago you tweeted not bad for a girl with no talent which is quite an irony giving the obvious talents you have i think what do you say to those who downplay or dismiss your success or you just have the feeling that uh success is the best revenge are you able to be like the duck just let it roll off the back i do let it roll off my back i do feel like success is the best revenge absolutely to say that i'm not human for people to always say crazy mean things i mean it definitely does get to me but i think that i've with the support of my family we've always kind of come through on the other side but to write that i remember i was thinking do i want you don't want to be boastful and say i'm on the cover of forbes this is you know so amazing which you do want to say but of course people will be say something negative about that so i thought it was funny just the little hashtag for people that might question how i got here or what talent i have i was like i'm on the cover of forbes so i must be doing something right in closing your father said late father said family is everything always know your heritage could you just share with us the story of how your great-grandparents survived in the armenian genocide the boy who came to the church oh yes so we actually just went to armenia so i'm sure this i hope this story is real because it's a story that we grew up hearing from my dad and my grandparents that there was a boy in town in the town that they lived in in armenia and it was in 1914 just as the war was breaking out and turkey was on the side of the ottoman empire is on the side of the germany and austria-hungary and and the boy um couldn't read or write and he came back he went to the church and brought a letter that he had written this long letter that said for everyone in armenia go to los angeles california and everyone thought this is crazy we don't even know what california is we don't know where this is this boy they thought he was just crazy and my great-grandparents so i guess it would be my great-great-grandparents they listened to the boy and they came to los angeles california and um within a year um a million and a half armenians were massacred and killed in armenia and my great-grandparents got out as young kids because of this boy's story so they say this could be total like don't really quote me on this but they say in the armenian community that this boy has written another letter and it's in a church in los angeles i think and whenever the time is right someone will go and open this letter of where to go next so i don't know it's an amazing story and sadly the armenian genocide is still relatively unknown and when adolf hitler was planning his genocide against the the jews of europe hitler said who remembers the armenians yep and uh so we'd like to give you kim for spending some time with us a little presentation this is a book uh called armenia under people wow from 1896 so it's about 120 years old and describes armenia but it also has a chapter in here about what happened in 1896 which was a sort of a bloody foretelling of what was going to happen of riots committed against the armenian people killing thousands and this author describes it and uh with the hope that this was just a one on instead of sadly uh pretending of the horrors to come in so i'd like to present this thank you so much this is such a cool gift [Applause] wow and one final thing in english not an armenian now i i couldn't read armenians i took the english version but uh thank you so much but and also we know you admire elizabeth taylor you interviewed her once and you were inspired by her and you also she was a great friend of the family oh wow so of your family too and so we thought you'd enjoy this contract written signed 1945 when elizabeth taylor was 13 year old 13 years old to do something for the war effort the victory committee uh entertainment lowe's incorporated signed by her as a 13 year old and signed by what jay i guess you'd call her my manager her mother sarah taylor and signed on elizabeth taylor's 13th birthday so we thought you'd like to have a copy of that contract so special that's amazing thank you so much wow [Applause] wow thank you so much thank you for sharing your time with us i think people have a greater appreciation of what you've done and are doing thank you thank you so much

Channel: ForbesWomen

Views: 292,982

Keywords: kim kardashian, kim kardashian west, business, women, forbes women's summit, leadership, hollywood, Steve Forbes, Moira Forbes, Kanye west

Id: AwVZnxuEwxg

Length: 35min 22sec (2122 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021