Kylie Jenner, sister of Kim Kardashian and ‘keeping up with the Kardashians’ star, is en route to become “the youngest-ever self-made billionaire” and is worth $900m (£680m) at just 20 years of age, says Forbes.
The fashion guru, the youngest of the Kardashian clan, starting selling her own cosmetics three years ago, what her half-sister Kim Kardashian West did for booty, Jenner has done for full lips. Like Kardashian West, she has leveraged her assets to gain both fame and money
Growing up in the Kardashian household she was under the public microscope, as she was only 10 years old when the reality show ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians launched.
She first gained attention to her business when she admitted during an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians in 2015 that her natural lips had been “an insecurity” that she wanted to change with temporary lip fillers.
Surrounded by a family with each member having a successful business of some sort Kylie admitted to feeling lost,
“I struggled for a minute with finding something to do on my own,” Jenner says. With her mother’s guidance, she started making seven figures as a model, notching endorsement deals with British retailer Topshop and Sinful Colors nail polish, among others.
In May 2015, after she admitted to having temporary lip fillers–and, she immediately cashed in on it. “I said, ‘I’m ready to put up my own money. I don’t want to do it with anyone else,’ Jenner recalls. She used some $250,000 of her earnings from modeling gigs to pay an outside company to produce the first 15,000 lip kits.
An intuitive marketer like most of her family, she spent months teasing the kits on Instagram, then announced the launch via social media just a day before they went on sale–November 30, 2015. The kits sold out in less than a minute. Resellers started offering the $29 product on eBay for up to $1,000. “Before I even refreshed the page, everything was sold out,” Jenner says.
Kylie leverages on her social media following.”Social media is an amazing platform,” Jenner says. “I have such easy access to my fans and my customers.” every hour, she takes to social media, pouting for selfies with captions about which Kylie Cosmetics shades she’s wearing, takes videos of forthcoming products and announces new launches. This reaches her 110 million followers on Instagram and millions more on Snapchat, which are mainly a female audience, And that’s before the 16.4 million who follow her company directly, or the 25.6 million who follow her on Twitter, or the occasional social media assists from her siblings and friends.
From their she only went bigger and with the help of her mum and partnered with the e-commerce platform Shopify, run by billionaire Canadian entrepreneur Tobi Lutke, that December.
Kylie Lip Kits relaunched as Kylie Cosmetics on Shopify in February 2016, this time stocked with 500,000 lip kits in six shades. “You could watch the buildup happen on the store as [the launch time] approached,” says Loren Padelford, who runs the high-volume Shopify Plus. “To watch the internet focus down on one website was crazy.”
By the end of 2016 Jenner’s company was selling 50-odd products, with revenue of $307 million–for a company less than a year old.
“No other influence has ever gotten to the volume or had the rabid fans and consistency that Kylie has had for the last two and a half years,” adds Padelford.
Its no surprise from all this hard work it is likely that some time later this year she will take a title that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg once held–youngest-ever self-made billionaire.