It’s official: this week, Kylie Jenner was named the “Youngest Self-Made Billionaire” by Forbes magazine. After stating this controversial claim in the July issue of “Women Billionaires”, Forbes has now doubled-down on this.
It’s no secret that the past few weeks have undoubtedly been hectic for the makeup mogul. Her now ex-best friend, Jordyn Woods, was supposedly caught cozying up with Tristian Thompson, Khloe Kardashian’s boyfriend and father of her child. Since the discovery, the Kar-Jenner clan has bonded together in the midst of Wood’s Red Table Talk interview.
Despite all the negative events the previous weeks, this actually comes as a win for the reality TV star. The company that earned her the title, Kylie Cosmetics, started in 2015 and the funding for the now estimated $900 million company came solely from Jenner’s pockets. The $250,000 investment produced 15,000 lip kits which sold out within a minute of their launch, so her wallet definitely isn’t hurting.
Over the past four years, Jenner has grown the company into a world-renowned brand that sells multiple beauty products. A recent deal with Ulta resulted in Kylie’s infamous lip kits being sold in over 1,000 stores. Within a few hours of launching in Ulta stores, their inventory sold out. Tara Simon, Senior Vice President of Merchandising at Ulta explained, “It sold out a lot faster than we had planned.”
Courtesy: Ulta via Twitter
Kylie Cosmetics only consists of seven full-time employees and five part-time employees. All of the shipping and packaging is outsourced by the California company, Seed Beauty. Shopify, an online outlet handles all the sales for the company while Kris Jenner handles finance and PR. This is, of course, for her standard 10% of the management fee that she also receives from each of her children.
Manufacturing and formulation are handled by Spatz Laboratories, whose parent company is Seed Beauty. After being in the industry for a few years, the sibling-run laboratory can come up with formulas fast. What is usually a six-month process only takes weeks for the Nelson siblings, meaning Jenner can display it on social media a lot faster than normal. Impressively enough, Jenner owns 100% of her company and claims social media is the reason her company has proven to be so successful.
Jenner is estimated to be worth $1 billion dollars, achieving that title younger than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. However, this title has come with some backlash. Some people claim she cannot be a “self-made” billionaire seeing as she already had established fame and money from the help of her infamous family.
Courtesy: Cosmopolitan Middle East
Following the release of the title, a few people took to Twitter to express their disagreement. Dictionary.com actually tweeted, “Haven’t we gone over this? Self-made [means] having succeeded in life unaided.” Jeffree Star, who founded his own successful makeup company even quoted that tweet saying, “I declined the feature, so they had to pick someone…”
Regardless of what you believe on the debate over whether or not Kylie Jenner is self-made, no one can argue with the immense success she has had with Kylie Cosmetics.