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SKIMS Hits Five Billion as Kim Kardashian’s Brand Goes All In on Stores

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

SKIMS co-founder Kim Kardashian. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Six years after Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede launched SKIMS as a shapewear line in 2019, the brand has crossed a threshold few fashion startups ever reach. On November 12, 2025, SKIMS announced a $225 million capital raise led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with participation from funds affiliated with BDT & MSD Partners, taking its valuation to $5 billion, up from $4 billion at its last raise in 2023.

The numbers behind the valuation are not small. SKIMS expects to surpass $1 billion in net sales in 2025, powered by a tight control of its own story: inclusive sizing and skin tones from day one, celebrity-fronted campaigns, and a social following most labels can only envy. It has also moved far beyond shapewear into loungewear, swim and an expanding menswear business.

What the new money buys is physical presence. SKIMS plans to use the funding to accelerate brick-and-mortar expansion and international growth across the next two years. The brand currently runs around twenty directly operated stores across the United States and Mexico, and in September 2025 it opened its first international standalone flagship on London’s Regent Street, a signal that the next chapter is global.

Two partnerships show how wide the ambitions run. NikeSKIMS, the brand’s joint venture with Nike, puts SKIMS inside the world’s biggest athletic company, while the purchase of Kardashian’s SKKN brand set up a return to beauty under the SKIMS name. A shapewear label valued at five billion dollars, built in six years by a founder who treats every launch as an event, is no longer disrupting fashion retail. Increasingly, it is fashion retail.

We Speak Brands

On Now Sprays Its Shoes On With Robots, and It Is Scaling Fast

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

We Speak Media

On's Cloudboom Strike racing shoe, the line built on the brand's LightSpray innovation. Photo by Rmason75, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

A typical athletic shoe upper takes around two hundred steps to make. On’s newest racing shoes take one, performed by a robot arm with a spray nozzle. On July 3, 2025, the Swiss running brand inaugurated the world’s first LightSpray factory at its headquarters in Zurich, a 1,400-square-metre facility where four robotic arms spray a continuous filament onto a midsole, fusing upper and sole into one piece in a few minutes, with no gluing or stitching.

LightSpray was four years in the making, developed by a team of around twenty colleagues, including materials scientists and roboticists, working out of the On Labs in Zurich. The technology first appeared before the Paris 2024 Olympics on the Cloudboom Strike LS, a shoe weighing about 170 grams that has since been worn at the front of major marathons, including by New York City Marathon champion Hellen Obiri. Because the sprayed upper has no seams and uses minimal material, On says the process dramatically cuts waste and emissions compared with conventional shoe-making, while moving production closer to the runners who buy the shoes.

The Zurich plant turns out to be a pilot for something much bigger. In February 2026, On opened a second LightSpray factory near Busan, South Korea, with thirty-two robots and roughly thirty times the production capacity, starting with shoes beyond racing, such as the LightSpray Cloudmonster 3 Hyper, while the research and development that feeds both plants stays in Zurich.

It is a fitting arc for a brand born in the Swiss Alps in 2010, when former professional triathlete Olivier Bernhard teamed up with David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti to build shoes around pieces of garden hose. Fifteen years on, On is not just selling shoes. It is reinventing how a shoe gets made.