There’s a lot more to Kylie Jenner than meets the eye.
From afar, she looks just like another Instagram influencer happy to trade her TV fame for social media notoriety.
Many who don’t know her well have been quick to throw hate comments at her all across the web.
Others call her a fake, or worse. They say she would not be where she is today if it had not been because of her fame-obsessed family, and her mother, in particular, engineering everything for her.
In reality, however, Kylie Jenner is a business genius. None of her success just fell into her lap, at least, not quite like that.
Her half-sisterĀ Kim Kardashian West had this to sayĀ in defence of her younger sibling:
“Itās not like that was handed to her. She figured that all out. I mean, we all have.”
Kim knows, because she has faced off the same accusations about fame and success.
From Zero To A Billion
From 2015 to 2018, Kylie Jenner took her cosmetics business, Kylie Cosmetics, from zero to over a billion dollarsā valuation in just three short years.
Here’s the inside scoop on how this young female billionaire made her fortune at just the age of 21.
Kylie was born in Los Angeles, California in 1997. Where her life differs from you and me is that she grew up practically in front of the TV cameras.
By age 10, she was making regular appearances on the hit reality showĀ Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
It was a stressing time for a young girl who, self-confessedly, lacked confidence in front of the cameras.
āEver since I was in sixth grade, I would wear purple eye shadow,ā sheĀ told Forbes in an interview.
To help herself feel a bit more confident, she got into makeup, learning from what she had seen the makeup artists do in preparing her for show appearances.
Makeup became something of an obsession for Kylie, and it was soon paired with a growing social media following.
Her fans were quick to notice her enlarged lips, which stirred a controversy as young girls started doing theĀ Kylie Jenner Lip ChallengeĀ to imitate her look. This involved placing their lips in a shot glass and then sucking the air out of the glass.
Kylie Takes Over The Cosmetics World
Kylie began teasing her Kylie Lip Kits across Instagram, SnapChat, and other social media. When she announced the launch online, the kits sold out in a matter of minutes.
She used $250,000 of her own money, saved from some prior modelling gigs, to finance the production of her kits.
Kylie brought on her mother to manage PR and finance, with the Shopify Plus platform handling sales. A private label company called Spatz Laboratories handles production, while Kylieās staff consists of just a handful of full-time employees.
In 2016, Kylie Cosmetics did around $300 million in revenue, thanks to Kylieās highly engaged fanbase of 18-24 year old women. By 2018, the company was valued at $800 million, a figure that went up to $900 million in early 2019.
By then, Kylie was officially a billionaire.
In the process, though, she has changed how the cosmetics world thinks about product and marketing. Other celebrities like Rihanna and Kim Kardashian have jumped on the bandwagon, releasing their own beauty products.