Kylie Jenner, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner American reality TV family, has become the world’s youngest billionaire at the age of just 21.
Jenner, who grew up under the watch of TV cameras filming Keeping Up with the Kardashians, was on Tuesday admitted to the “nine-zero” fortune club by Forbes. The business magazine also ranked Jenner as the world’s 2,057th richest person. She became a billionaire two years younger than the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took the title at the age of 23.
“I didn’t expect anything. I did not foresee the future, But [the recognition] feels really good. That’s a nice pat on the back,” Jenner said in an interview with Forbes.
Jenner’s fortune comes from Kylie Cosmetics, the makeup company she runs largely from her iPhone, with the help of her mother Kris. Forbes estimated that the cosmetics company, which is 100%-owned by Jenner, made $360m (£274m) in sales last year.
Forbes’s estimate of Jenner’s wealth comes in its annual ranking of the world’s billionaires. Its research found that the total number of billionaires had declined over the past year from 2,208 to 2,153. The world’s richest person remains the Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos with a $131bn fortune, up $19bn on 2018.
Nearly all of Kylie Cosmetics’ sales come directly from Jenner’s social media accounts. She has 128 million followers on Instagram (three-quarters of whom are estimated to be aged 18-24). She has one of the most viewed accounts on Snapchat, and is followed by 26.7 million on Twitter. Such is the weight of her influence that when she tweeted that she was “sooo over” Snapchat last year, more than $1bn was wiped off the company’s stock market value.
Sales are driven higher by Jenner sparking fomo (fear of missing out) among her fans with warnings that collections are in very limited quantities. Her initial stock of $29 “lip kits” – matching lipstick and lip liner – sold out in less than a minute, crashing the website.
Jenner, who has been in the public eye since she made her debut on Keeping Up With The Kardashians a decade ago when she was 10, said:
“Social media is an amazing platform. I have such easy access to my fans and my customers.”
Read Also: Forbes Faces Social Media Backlash For Calling Kylie Jenner A ‘Self-Made’ Billionaire
The business, which Jenner founded in 2015, employs just seven full-time staff. It is almost totally outsourced. Jenner comes up with ideas for styles but the products are made by Seed Beauty, a private-label producer that also produces makeup for KKW Beauty, run by Jenner’s half-sister Kim Kardashian West. More than 500 people at Seed Beauty, which owns the makeup production company Spatz Laboratories, work on the Jenner-Kardashian brands.
Jenner does not directly sell her products either. Kylie Cosmetics’ orders and sales are outsourced to Shopify, a Canadian online company that also runs shops for Drake and Justin Bieber. Shopify promotes its success with Jenner to encourage other entrepreneurs to skip the “boring” things like fulfilling orders and logistics by using their services.
Jenner also does not have to worry much about the business’s finances or the day-to-day management of her 12 staff (including five part-time). Those matters are outsourced to her mom or “momager” Kris Jenner, who manages all her children’s financial operations – in return for a 10% cut.
Jenner, who used her reality TV exposure to secure modelling work with brands such as Topshop, said she had struggled to decide what to do with her life. Then her thoughts turned to her most talked about feature: her lips.
Jenner trademarked the phrase “Kylie Lip Kits … for the perfect pout” two years before setting up her company with $250,000 of money she had made through modelling and reality TV work.
The total combined wealth of the world’s billionaires is $8.7tn – more than three times the gross domestic product (GDP) of the UK – down from $9.1tn last year.
Via Guardian UK
Read more from Forbes HERE
I kinda like the fact that she’s winning. If she can do it, I can do it too