Photo Credit: Kim Kardashian/Instagram
Kim Kardashian is a year and a month away from 40 and showing no signs of slowing down. She just launched her shapewear line SKIMS Tuesday and within minutes she had already banked $2 million. To put this in perspective, that is just half of what Spanx made in the first year their product sold and they’re not only a household name but almost all shapewear is referred to as Spanx these days. She even used the woman she helped get out of prison, Alice Marie Johnson for the marketing campaign. But those millions she raked in didn’t come without controversy, and helping Trump hardly had anything to do with it.
The original name for Kim’s shapewear line was Kimono. She did her due diligence on the branding of the product by having it ran by retailers and a ton of respected industry people as she told Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie Tuesday and said everyone liked the name. Then came launch day over the summer and the second it came out, all the backlash came. “I called a lot of people to get advice from it. I really understood. I understood what people were saying and I would never want to intentionally disrespect a culture. I would never intentionally also hurt my brand and have that association.”
The unfortunate part about the Kimono scandal was the 2 million items created with the name on them although she did say they were able to use them without destroying the items themselves. “That was a really big deal to me,” she said. “I had to weigh everything out and so I announced I was going to change the name. It took a while to come up with a new name — Skims just sounded right.” And that’s exactly the sentiment the public had as they clearly broke their necks to scoop them up. Johnson praised her in a TMZ interview for pursuing her passion which we have to say she’s beyond lucky to still be doing her passion and as successfully as she is at her age. Let’s not forget that Paris Hilton is actually younger than her and the most recent news about her is how thrilled she is that a lot of the 2000s styles she wore were coming into fashion again. That means that people associate Paris with things from over a decade ago while Kim is current. Count your blessings, sis and keep grinding.
