YouSaid · the spoken record

Jens Grede

lines on the record: 99
first: 2025-07-01
most recent: 2025-07-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In an American city wearing a pair of beats headsphones and a pair of Jordans way before we launched. And I said to her, that kid has never watched Michael Jordan play basketball, nor did they listen to Dr. Dre. Yet, both of those companies would have been impossible without its founders. So the work to make schemes a pop culture platform really started day one because we knew it took time. What made beats beats was LeBron wearing it between the bus and the locker room. What made Jordan people say, oh, Jordan, or they called skims in the early days a celebrity brand? And I said, that's fine. Is Jordan a celebrity brand? It is. It's just 40 years old at this point. It's the fact that the Jordan”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is incredibly clever. She doesn't get enough credit for what a great executive she is. She's very smart. She's a public person. She's also a private person, a celebrity, probably one of the most famous people in this world. She's also a creative director. I think we share some of that objectiveness. She can very much compartmentalize, I believe, the different roles that she plays and draw lines between the different areas of her life. We were both very aware that if you want to build something with longevity, if you want to make something that really matters, it has to be a platform. It can't be about one person. I remember showing her a picture of this kid.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six years in, I think Skims is a far more important company culturally than it is the size of a business. We're still a small company for what I believe is a very big brand.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come back to culture and the whole company was built on product franchises. You don't really know what people would be gravitating to right out of the box. I felt incredibly strongly about what we had done. But when we came to market, there was this moment maybe a couple of months in or a month in, I think we had two million customers on waitlist for product and we had no product left at all and no product coming. There was this moment for sure when I realized that it really had hit the nerve that our timing had lined up. People genuinely loved the product, the world that we built was highly desirable and it was OnePlus One plus one wasn't free, it was 100 all of a sudden. It was just asymmetric the amount of interest that customers had in the brand.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's more comfortable sometimes to make an example using others. And I think they've done a good job. They're kind of the anti-skims because they're not so marketing led. They were really leading through fabrication. And your experience was probably someone told you about it. We walked past the store or a friend of you wore it. They have gotten to a similar place just through the strength of their product. Been around longer. In the end of the day, product really is omnipotent for me, any venture that I'm involved in as a founder or as an investor. I'm just laser focused on the strength of the product. I don't care about anything else. The product is everything.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To raw material thinking about how can I bring a product at an exceptional quality and feel at an affordable price? And that was my whole focus because the companies that does solve it, I mean, I'm talking a lot about VWRI today, but that's probably because it's very important.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or to accentuate something that is already there. And I always say that you have to create the product so great that you will still get to the same place with or without marketing. Just on the strength of the product alone, sometimes when I've hired people into marketing functions, the trick question is for them to tell me the last ad campaign they saw from Tesla. They struggle with that question because Tesla don't make advertising. It certainly hasn't stopped them. I think the product is omnipotent. It's number one, two, and three. And everything else we do is just to aid the awareness and selling of that product. My product is everything. So years before we launched the company, we started in product development, really going all the way down.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a very objective person. I can remove myself emotionally from pretty much any situation and just really look at it very matter of fact. And that's incredibly helpful. When you start something, you need to have a healthy dose of naivete. That's important. In my business experience helps, it's very physical. For me, it all starts with a product. I was trained as a marketeer my whole first chapter of my life was one of a marketeer. And if you ask me, who am I today? I probably still identify as a marketeer first and foremost. But I know its role. It's lipstick. In the end of the day, it's only there to accelerate.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put together exceptional talent to build an exceptional product. There were all this full of communities, and I have mine. I can build an exceptional team that helped us have an exceptional result. That's second nature. We're all good at something. I've been relatively good in my career starting with a blank piece of paper, and I'll figure it out. In my head, I make sense of the scramble. I can articulate the mess into a step, a step one and a step two and a step three”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the visualizing. It's gratifying, it's fast, you start putting together this mood and design and all that's incredibly gratifying. It's fast. And then comes the second step where most good ideas goes to die, which is the execution of bringing that to life at the right cost. I've been in this world for my whole life. It's what I do. You have interviewed some of the most unbelievable investors and I'm sure founders and if some Altman wanted to build another product he knows how to do it. This is what he does.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a world. It was just stepping into a world that no one else owned aesthetically. I spent my whole life talking in these terms. I understand it might seem very clear to me when I say that expression and less clear to others. What I mean with stepping into a world, when you go into Ralph Lauren, you're in Ralph Lauren's world. It's very clear where you are. You could take all the signs of the walls and you know where you are. When I saw aesthetically what she wanted to do, it was just instantly identifiable. The look, it was just so distinctive, the color world, the architecture, the attitude towards women, how to lift people up. It was inclusive without ever having to say the word. It wasn't a decision. It just was naturally. It was so distinctive. I just had to help bring that to life.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was ever let's do this thing. It was more like, oh, we're definitely doing this thing. When you're an entrepreneur, it's not that you want to do something. It's that you cannot not do something. You wake up and you just, you cannot leave it alone. And once she showed me aesthetically what she wanted to create, I couldn't get that out of my head. I had finished the previous chapter. I had sold my businesses. I was in my late 30s, semi-retired. I had been walking around for maybe a year, two years. I was still the chairman of a group within Omnicom at the time. I was really trying to search for it. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? And then once I saw what she had in mind, there was no question about what I was going to do. Is what I had to do”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole process was very organic. I've had the pleasure of being part of a few startups for my life. And when it's at its best, it happens organically. And when it's two contrives or you're trying to like force a good idea, like what should we do? It tends not to work out quite so well. She really had an aesthetic point of view on what she wanted to make. And I had a point of view what was missing from this category from a price position, innovation piece. From her point of view, very much aesthetically driven certain solutions and things that just wasn't available in the market that she wanted to bring to market through a series of conversation, we just ended up in a place where we were just doing it. I don't know.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really for social. Some of it you can do through process, and that's good, but culture eats process. Just the culture of a company that is open to outside feedback, I think that has to come from the top. If I'm open to feedback, you will be open to feedback. And down the reporting line, it will go. Assuming that if a customer feels a certain way, it's warranted because they feel a certain way.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to spend a lot of time convincing or wanting to convince everyone they meet why their product is the best in the world rather than letting people tell them what they think about what they make. And I was aware of this. So what we did out of the gate was just really creating a very strong feedback loop with our own community, not losing ourselves necessarily in our own house taste. The customer is always right.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“House taste is a dangerous, dangerous thing. I collect wine. I love wine. Every winery I go to, they truly believe that their wine is the best in the world. Why do they believe that? They often have worked there for 10 years, 20 years. So they drink a lot of their own wine. And safe to say they've developed a wine that is perfect for their palate. Therefore, they truly believe their wine is the best in the world because every other wine they try will not taste as good as the one they make. House taste is therefore a dangerous concept for any company. You shouldn't get high on your own supply. You certainly shouldn't get too in love with what you're doing. It happens pretty easily. And I see it with a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of founders. They are really in love with their own product.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's about doing something that is worth the extra bit of money it costs. Because I'm sure you have coffee. If I ask, could I have a cup of coffee? You might have coffee here. I'll get that for free. In fact, every office building in America has free coffee. My office has free coffee. Pretty good ones too. But I still think the Starbucks is worth my 550 or $6. It's at a premium, but it's still available to me, still affordable. And I believe that the quality difference is worth the difference in price. That's a philosophy that I think runs like a red fread through all of my thinking, which is how do I make just a phenomenal experience for what you're paying? I'm less focused on the price. I'm more focused on what you get for your money.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We take for granted, like if Frappuppuccino or pumpkin spice latte or Starbucks inventions and they're incredible at building these franchises, what they've done in the last couple of years with refreshers is incredibly powerful. And I took that analogy to my company and I said, I want to be the Starbucks.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Powerful as the difference in taste between Coke and Pepsi. If you buy something that's not worry, I promise you you'll feel the difference because you know exactly how VWR is meant to feel. Well, that's Coke and Pepsi challenge. It's a distinct sensory experience, like the first SIP of Starbucks feels a certain way, the first sip feeling. I saw the opportunity to create that in this category in the beginning primarily for women and now, of course, for everybody, and really bring out the company that was a better alternative. It might be slightly more expensive, but still affordable. I think about Starbucks a lot when I do these things. I think Starbucks, to me, is just a phenomenal innovation company. Many of the things”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go, so you have two wardrobes, and you will have one at home, and you had one out or one at work, and the one at home started spilling in over your life. So that's one thing that's happening. Consumer taste is changing. Incumbents had gotten stale, discount driven, they weren't leading with innovation anymore. It was multi-packs. Even though it was cheap, we were paying a lot for not very much. So I saw the opportunity to really lead through innovation in the supply chain and built a business based on fabrication. Because what you love about VWRI is the way you feel. It's the feel as you're wearing the product, the way the fabric will feel to skin. I'm getting a little scientific on this, but I'm getting to a point, which is that is just as”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get trend at the lower price to the American customer faster. What is Shean? Is it even more efficient model? It's a supply chain and software company that is masquerading as a retailer. They found it even more efficient way to make and supply trends at an even lower price. Technology disruption in supply chain distribution, those things is what makes brands happen. With Skims, it was a combination of a few things. So one, I saw this very large part in retail, in underwear, in lounge. I saw that people were changing the way that they dressed, not just on weekends, but life was becoming two distinct wardrobes, one that is very soft. I'm not sure if you were. Great brand, and I'm sure when you come home tonight”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michael Kourse, Tori Birch, Bragenbone, the expansion of Coach, and all of these companies that today makes five billion, ten billion, fifteen billion dollar businesses. There was a change in consumer taste. That's kind of well documented. What no one talks about is, you remember all the diffusion lines, DNG, harmonic exchange. All of this diffusion lines. And it was only a couple of companies behind it and they went bust. All of a sudden, all over the world, there was all this floor space for these lower priced designer goods. The growth of those businesses and this change in distribution all coincide. In America, we had the JCPenneys and the Gap, and they were disrupted by the Europeans in the text that owns Sara and H&M. They had a better supply chain. They were able to...”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might have been started slightly earlier, but it was a distinct period of time where they expanded. And that's directly linked to Sachs and Neeman, Marcus, and Barnes, because these designers were able to sell their goods and finance the goods for something called factoring, where you get the money before you get your invoice paid. creating a positive cash flow, which is why someone like Georgia Armani still owns 100% of his business. That could not be replicated today. It was a unique situation and a unique financing model that led them to be able to retain the full ownership and scale their companies to a critical size. 2008. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, people wanted designer values, but they wanted to pay less for them.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of storefronts. These malls needed fresh concepts for their customers. Less understood this opportunity and created and bought companies and developed these concepts that he could replicate time over time over time with favorable economics in all of the malls that was built in America. He's a genius of retail. I'm just saying none of those retailers would be around if it hadn't been for the expansion of the American mall. If your intellectually, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karen, George Armani, Versacci, Gucci, Dolsigabana, I can go on. All happen within the same five years.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product, the strength of what we do, the value proposition that we offer, our way to market would ultimately have had the same result, but I very much doubt it would have been on the same timeline. Going back through history, and I'll get into why this was the right moment, Les Wexner, who is one of the godfathers of American retail, created Victoria Secret. bath and body express Abercrombie Hollister and more. Was it the brands he created? No, it was the fact that it coincided with malls being built in the 80s all across America. And all these great malls, the mall of America, for example.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a distinct feeling that if I try to do it again, I wouldn't be successful today. When it comes to disruption in consumer and especially retail, it's more connected to changes in supply chain and consumer taste than the brand itself. It's not that a brand comes along and then the world shifts or mobilizes it around the brand. It's far more common that changes are happening and the brand is in the right place at the right time. They say luck is an opportunity meets preparation. And I think that's true. Timing is just one of those things that are beyond our control somewhat. I ultimately have to believe that the way we make”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the end of the day, it's 80% of physical store business and 20%, an e-commerce business today generally in America. So people ask me, why do you want to open so many stores? And I said, I don't want to be the 20% business. I want to be in the 80% business. But opening stores is incredibly expensive. It consumes a lot of capital to build stores. If you and I was trying to start the retailer, we would really struggle to find the financing and being able to open a nice store in a good location, just unaffordable. Big wins, especially large retailers, large restaurant chains with a big footprint, it's almost impossible today to recreate.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't sometimes I think, oh my God, I haven't seen something for so long. Did they stop posting? Of course they didn't. It just moved past me. Just didn't favor it. So as we went from a social media to really an interest-based algorithm, that was pretty devastating for young brands. It was very, very hard all of a sudden to build a community on social, the way that nine years ago was very possible. Skims were one of the few larger brands that was able to build a community through social and get to a critical scale where we could pay our way. But today you have to pay to play if you want to be seen. The other part is distribution. I've seen post-COVID in shopping has really returned to 2019 levels.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you clicked on, maybe something a friend sent to you and you watched it three times and now you're getting served tons of lookalike content. It does not favor brands making content. It's not putting that in front of its followers. I don't know how many people you follow. Maybe I follow 1,200. Do I see content for more than 200 of those? Never.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having big wins, and I think big will increasingly win. This is the time for so many different reasons. One, going back to what we spoke about, which is popular culture being one of the only hacks in the consumer economy. So first going back, we have been in an era of brand creation with Shopify and other tools making it incredibly easy to start a business. And Fruetta and other platforms very easy to find an audience that cared about what you were doing. Today, the algorithm is not favoring loyalty, it's not favoring necessarily who you followed two years ago or five years ago. It favors who you recently follow. It favors what you're talking about over breakfast with your partner. It favors things that you have engaged with.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2020. Nothing has shifted Wall Street's views of Victoria Secrets. But the consumers go to any mall in America. And you see early 20-somethings with a Sephora bag, which is a darling from a financial press point of view, and a Victoria Secret Bag, they are unaffected. We tend to overanalyze a little bit and think that things really matters to customers that don't really matter to customers. We know that Coke isn't great for us to drink with every meal, but Coca-Cola seems to be doing just fine too.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you ask a 20 something consumer, if that would have impacted their purchasing behavior, common sense would say it would, but I never see it do. Victoria's secret is right up there too. They had an Epstein connection because the founderless Wexner had one. They had totally lost that connectivity with the customer. their fashion shows outdated the way that they portrayed women felt outdated. The whole concept in the early 2020s felt really out of step with our times. And everybody said it's over. It's not over. They're doing just fine. Now the street are still working on the thesis of that story.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I love this question because it will lead me into something I really want to talk about big wins in this era. Amazon told anybody who wanted to listen five years ago to buy Abercrombie think it was worth $700 or $800 million at the time. I think there's a big difference between what consumers care about and a consumer story and what is a Wall Street financial press story. Ironically, they don't seem to impact one another very much. If you asked consumers about Abercrombie, I think they were going through a very tough time.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moment that is lining up with the overarching feeling of society, which is, of course, more protectionist than it's been in the past. And it's probably a counter-reaction to globalism, which, much like technology, did not work for everybody.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is reflected in sports too. I remember, was it eight years ago, 10 years ago? But remember when there was a lot of talk about CTE? I'm not so sure all parents still want their kids to play football. But it was really a conversation. There was this feeling that the NFL was somewhat in trouble. Was NFL going to go the way of boxing? Today, that feels laughable because NFL owns sports in this country. NFL is the biggest sports league in the country and college football is the second largest sport in viewership numbers in this country. Far ahead of basketball, for example. To me, it seems pretty consistent. Football, Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, Olive Garden, Chili's has been in the news recently. They're killing it. We all want sliders and it's a very consistent culture.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the space race. They were inspired by rockets. And it was all about this promise of what tomorrow had for us. And we were certain that this generation was going to be so much greater off than the generation that had lived through the Second World War. And I think today, generally, we are fearful of the future rather than optimistic. I think we should be optimistic about the future. Winston Churchill. He once said, I'm an optimist because I see little used to being anything else. I'm definitely an optimist.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Logical changes and the uncertainty about the future that has driven this pop culture moment, that's really, if you think about it, has moved more from futurism to nostalgia. Futurism, we haven't really seen for quite some time. We're not hopeful about the future, quite as much as we used to be. Right now I'm obsessed with diners because I'm a disciple of popular culture. I'm listening to country myself. I've had Morgan Wallen in the car my way here. But I love diners because diners is one of the few things that now they're retro, but they weren't a restaurant concept that was born out of nostalgia like Italian food. Diners were hyper modern modernist structures. They were all about the future. It was in an era where cars were inspired.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right. We recently did a diner in LA, called it the Skims Diner. We took over a classic drive-in diner and we transformed it into a Skims experience, but root beer floats and waffle stacks high. In five minutes, I think we booked this place out for 10 days from morning to three in the morning, from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. Every table went in four or five minutes. People were lining up for any spiracies all around the block and it's just that feeling of comfort. You ask any 12-year-old or 14-year-old today, what's your favorite TV show? You'd be surprised how many people say friends. They're just clamoring for that less threatening, warm nostalgia that those shows and those experience gives you. I really think that it's a technology.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between the political philosophy of Western Europe and Eastern Europe. That's a long winded way to say that today I see culture moving with politics in an America first agenda and in a time of technological disruption and uncertainty. We are clamoring to those things that makes us feel good, olive garden, country music, apple beast is booming. Banana Republic is having the best year in probably decades.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worth a watch. It's a good satire. It's clear he spent some time with the stereotypical billionaire master of the universe, gods of tech. I think that movie, however exaggerated it is and how much it preys on our fear about the future, but that's how people feel. That's nothing new. I go back to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, which was about the prospect of a nuclear war, which really, if you ask your grandparents defined the whole life, these consequential moments that we are now experiencing, they experienced, and I would say they were probably more intense, the Cuba missile crisis. It's a highly intense moment. And the struggle between.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where they wind is blowing, dare I say, politically, but just in terms of what we put first. In a world today that most people really consider quite threatening, scary, uncertain. I just watched the movie Mountain Head.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything we have around us is a reaction, an counter reaction. I don't think that just goes for music. I think the current political climate is a clear counter reaction to the previous four years. That was a reaction to the previous four years. I think the same thing is true for pop culture. What I'm seeing quite interestingly where pop culture used to be more contrarian to the establishment. The 90s was about being contrarian to the establishment. It wouldn't matter if it is nirvana or public enemy. The establishment was somewhat the enemy of the young. Today, we live in a time where I see pop culture moving more in lockstep with the establishment and they say,”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A phenomenal entrepreneur. The lines between these disciplines have been entirely blurred out. Ryan Reynolds is a movie star is also the founder of a mobile phone network. I don't think that would have been the case 20 years ago. The consumer don't really mind. In fact, I think in a world where we have a distrust generally for authority and where truth is somewhat debatable, the importance of an individual, the voice of an individual has probably never been higher. I think we see that from the business I'm in all the way to the Oval Office, having a strong voice in culture today translates into a strong voice in consumer, but also a strong voice in politics.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know if the consumer makes as much of a distinction today as we used to. When we grew up, a singer was a singer, an actor was an actor. A brand was a brand. Soda Maker was a soda maker. Clothing company was a clothing company. Brands and individuals had very little agency to move past the box the consumer had put them in order that they had themselves worked within. There was just very little room. I think we made a high distinction between a corporation and an individual. My sense is if you ask a 20 year old today, they make very few of those distinctions. Not only can you be Wrestler who becomes the world's biggest movie star.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important thing in the world. I can watch fly fishing shows and engage with other fly fishermen. I truly believe that fly fishing runs the universe. The only two things that cuts across really is pop culture and sport. And I put sport in the culture bracket. Sport and culture is the only two things that generally tend to cross all those boundaries in society today being political, racial, religious boundaries that society has drawn up. And I think in many cases, the algorithms have strengthened.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brand recognition that Dwayne the Rock Johnson have for his tequila company Taramona. You tell me what's the value of Dwayne Johnson? It's a billion dollars or is it five? It's really the only way today that you can reach a critical mass of US consumers, not just building awareness, but building a sense of knowing what the company stands for and what the brand's trying to do is for personality and it is for culture. And I think today as we have lived through the fragmentation of media, my social media feed looks entirely different from yours and entirely different from my wives. We are consuming different news from each other. And often very different opinions from one another. If I'm into fly fishing, I can live in a fly fishing world where fly fishing is the most”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really hard to reach a critical mass of consumers today. If someone gave you and me a billion dollars to start a vodka company, we can call it winter warmth. And we spent that on TV and billboards and on meta, we wouldn't have half.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I got older, I would say the red fret in my career has been the ability to work in the intersection of pop culture and commerce. First through my first chapter on behalf of my clients and later on in life as an entrepreneur and as an investor, I have believed that pop culture today is really the only hack to the consumer economy that we have. For me, that was the obvious name because that's what I do.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, thank you. I have always wanted to have a really cool name. Mission Accomplish. And you're probably the first person who's commented on it. So 15 years later, I finally got that recognition. I was looking for. So I appreciate it. You got it. I named my company Popular Culture because I'm a real child of the 90s pop culture growing up in Sweden. You partly grew up in Minnesota. So you know the feeling, what it's like in January to ride your bikes to your friend's house. And I would ride my bike to my friend's house to watch Beverly Hills 9 at 210 and Baywatch. And we would sit there and eat chips. Could you imagine yourself living like that? Could you imagine yourself being at the peach pit? But I was a real child of the 90s. Pop culture and skateboard scene and music. I've always been obsessed with it.”
2025-07-01 · Invest Like the Best · Jens Grede - Building SKIMS - [Invest Like the Best, EP.431] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source