Can Kim Kardashian Conquer Activewear?

Kim Kardashian says she has just one regret about NikeSkims: that the “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” cameras weren’t rolling when a delegation from the sportswear giant’s innovation team first flew to California to explore a partnership with her shapewear label Skims.

“It was just such an amazing epiphany,” she said of the meeting at her Calabasas office two years ago. “I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy. Nike is number one. I want Skims to partner with number one.’”

“Seeing the marketplace and how overcrowded that is, I wanted something that was so just clear, different, innovative,” she continued. “I wanted it to have the credibility that Nike has and I wanted the customer to have this feeling that they’re going to get a really strong Skims product.”

Nearly two decades after first rising to fame, the model, actress, mega-influencer and shapewear mogul still seems awestruck at how deeply she’s become embedded in the fashion industry.

“I always loved fashion,” Kardashian said. “Even if I didn’t have the best fashion sense or didn’t know what I should be wearing, I always knew what looked good on me and what was unflattering.”

And though Skims was valued at $4 billion in 2023, when we spoke in August, Kardashian was practically pinching herself over her partnership with the world’s top sportswear brand.

It’s not hard to see why.

Though it’s still early days, some say NikeSkims has the potential to become as big as Nike’s goliath Michael Jordan partnership and could help the sportswear brand to finally crack the code with women, who presently buy the company’s goods in smaller numbers than men.

For Skims, which carved out a lucrative niche in the market with its body-positive, shade-diverse shapewear, the tie-up is key to its efforts to position itself for future growth as an all-encompassing apparel and lifestyle company, backed by the legacy, credibility and innovation engine of Nike.

Meanwhile, for Kardashian herself the deal could prove the ultimate symbol of her unmatched cultural influence.

But all parties know the stakes are high and they have to stick the landing.

Nike may be far ahead of its nearest competitor by billions of dollars in annual sales, but it’s facing its steepest growth slump in decades and chief executive Elliot Hill is under pressure to prove that a renewed focus on sports and performance product can deliver a turnaround.

“This is not a short-term thing; it’s a long-term vision” targeting “millions of women across diverse international markets,” said Amy Montagne, Nike’s brand president and a key architect of the tie-up.

Skims co-founder and chief executive Jens Grede will be measuring success more bluntly: sales. “We often talk about money like it’s isolated from what we do,” he said. “But money is a byproduct of doing something great — when you do that, it flows; when you do something poorly, it tends not to.”

‘Employee Number One’

NikeSkims offers a rare thrill for Kardashian: the chance to create entirely new milestones, or firsts, for a superstar whose bucket list might seem nearly complete. Even the brand’s initial unveiling in February — an image of her wearing an “employee number one” badge — underscored the tie-up’s novelty, signalling both a fresh chapter for her and a playful sense of relatability.

“Being employee number one and having that badge, I don’t take that lightly,” Kardashian said. “I’m the type of partner that leads by example, and I’m in it with everyone.”

In practice, that means everything from serving as fit model for nearly every NikeSkims item to poring over thousands of Pantone colour books — just as she’s done with Skims, she said.

“I have all these tests that I do when we’re in our fit meetings — testing for armpit fat and back fat and just all the things that might get overlooked,” Kardashian explained. “I never want to just look at images, or even fit models in person. I need to feel it myself.”

NikeSkims is, of course, a major team effort with personnel based in Portland and Los Angeles, led day-to-day by co-GMs Tracy Romulus and Paula Galperin — Skims marketing and merchandising executives, respectively — and Nike veterans Jordan Mills as senior director of global integration and Jaclyn Safley as VP and GM.

“We’ve tried to recruit the best people in the world that will wake up and go to sleep thinking about NikeSkims,” Grede said. “It’s going back to treating this as a startup.”

Gen Z’s Jordan

Partnerships at the scale of NikeSkims only come together after months — often years — of executives obsessing over numbers from projected growth rates to total addressable market. But there was one data point that “tickled” Grede most.

“Michael Jordan was such an icon — 30, 40 years ago, 15 percent of American teenagers wanted to be a professional athlete,” Grede explained, citing a report he’d recently read. “Today almost 20 percent of teens want to be a creator… Isn’t Kim Kardashian the Michael Jordan of the creator generation?”

Kardashian, with 354 million Instagram followers and brand partnerships with everyone from Balenciaga to Dolce & Gabbana, is widely considered the most successful influencer in the world: a single social media post can spark a sales explosion.

“Many millions, if not billions of people are deeply engaged, deeply affiliated with her as a brand, as a human,” said Americus Reed, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “They feel some kind of relationship with her.”

But while her mass appeal is unquestionable, turning that into a Jordan-esque slamdunk will be no easy feat. (Jordan generates over $7 billion in annual revenue, more than seven times Skims.)

“The notion of a content creator is a fuzzy thing,” Reed said. “The notion of a superstar [athlete] who can win you a Game Six three years in a row — that’s very concrete. Michael Jordan is this phenom … the greatest athlete ever.”

But the fact that Kardashian isn’t that is, in many ways, the point.

Almost since its inception, Nike has embraced the mantra “if you have a body, you’re an athlete.” Yet the brand has built its allure around its adjacency to a pantheon of God-like athletes, like Jordan or Serena Williams, and “athlete” hasn’t always been something most women see in themselves.

“Every woman should feel their inner athlete but also feel their inner sexy curviness, and that shouldn’t be so separate,” Kardashian said. “[NikeSkims is] blending that together and giving the customer both of those feelings in one,” she continued. “I’ve seen the curves and all the Instagram brands and some I love so much, but it might not have the hold if I go running … or I’ll see some brands, and it can be too technical, and it’s just not made to have the curves, and it’s not as flattering.”

NikeSkims will also lean on both brands’ deep ties to youth culture.

Nike has long ranked as the top clothing and footwear brand among US teens in Piper Sandler’s biannual surveys, though its lead has been slipping in recent years. In the bank’s autumn 2025 report, 49 percent named it their top footwear brand, while 28 percent ranked it their favourite apparel label.

Skims, meanwhile, has carved out credibility with Gen Z and Millennials through body-positive marketing, diverse shade ranges, and, more recently, its new ‘campus collection,’ featuring tees, sets, and flannel sleepwear. It’s a clear play for the student market, as the brand takes steps to move beyond its shapewear roots and position itself as a general lifestyle and apparel label.

“Youth culture today definitely expects a lot more from their apparel and their footwear brands, because there’s so much out there,” Kardashian said. “They know what they want. They just don’t want to sacrifice the style for the functionality and this really gives them both.”

Kardashian’s Scorecard

Even as the success of Skims signals her savvy as a businesswoman, Kardashian is, above all, a content creator and, in her eyes, a brand’s cultural connection is deeply correlated with sales.

“If it culturally connects, it’s a huge win,” she said.

Case in point: in July, Skims released what many saw as a teaser for its 2026 beauty launch — a face wrap marketed as its “first-ever face innovation,” made with the brand’s signature sculpting fabric meant to de-puff the face and define the jawline.

The launch went viral — drawing swift criticism. Actor Anthony Hopkins mocked the product in character as Hannibal Lecter. Plastic surgeons dismissed it as ineffective. Dentists warned of TMJ risks.

On Kardashian’s scorecard, though, “That’s a win, and we sold out.”

“I don’t mind that people don’t get it,” she added. “Overall, I would say success in a product, I don’t measure it just on sales. I measure a lot of it on the cultural impact that it would have.”

That’s not the old PR cliché of “all press is good press,” said Reed. “She’s not advocating for doing something bad and stupid and getting negative press. She’s advocating for moving the needle in a relevancy way.”

Whether or not the tie-up with Nike helps to prime the market for a potential Skims IPO, as many analysts expect, remains to be seen. Grede, for his part, has stuck to his script.

“We like being a private company; we haven’t had a need to be a public company… I’ve said we deserve to be a public company [and] we’ll be a great public company,” he said. But for now, “there’s no external conversations about this that we are partaking in whatsoever.”

Skims’ immediate priorities are setting up the NikeSkims partnership for the long haul, relaunching Kardashian’s beauty business under the Skims banner and geographic expansion, including its planned opening of new stores in London and Dubai, he said.

The good news is “the ball is very much in Skims’ court when they do push the [IPO] button,” said Neil Saunders, managing director for retail at GlobalData Retail, a London-based consultancy. “The partnership with Nike certainly drives up Skims’ valuation,” he added. “It shows the authority of the Skims brand; it shows the significance of Kim as a celebrity influencer and as a businesswoman.”

But the investment community is waiting to see how NikeSkims performs.

The venture launched on Sept. 26 with much fanfare: a 58-piece line of sports bras, leggings, bodysuits and tops, all in Skims’ muted shades of brown, burgundy and chrome-like black. A campaign video featured more than 50 globally recognised women athletes, Serena Williams, Sha’Carri Richardson and Jordan Chiles among them alongside Kardashian who declares “Put my body on a pedestal,” in the opening sequence.

The day before, a choreographed scene from the video was recreated on the steps of the New York Public Library, with Kardashian attending alongside her mother, Kris Jenner, and sister Khloé. That evening, a star-studded party at the Skims flagship drew Nike’s top women’s talent roster — many of whom also appeared in the campaign — including Williams and Sabrina Ionescu, as well as Travis Scott, Latto and Martha Stewart.

“It was probably one of the biggest consumer launches of the year,” said Grede.

Still, the launch hasn’t created the big bang many expected. Some media reports zeroed in on the lack of queues at stores. But Saunders is sanguine. “Sure, it’s lovely to have big crowds, but you don’t always get them for everything — and I don’t think that’s really the acid test,” he said. “We need to see how it commercialises over time.”

Kardashian, meanwhile, recently had an “aha” moment that left her with few doubts.

“I went on a little vacation with my kids and every single item I packed, from socks to underwear to pyjamas to… our [NikeSkims] prototype jacket… every single piece was a Skims piece,” she said. “It was just what looked the best and what was the coolest for the trip… I just looked around and was like, ‘Oh my God.’”

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