Kylie Jenner the 20-year-old is about to become a billionaire and has a total social media reach of 160 million. She was just 10 years old when she made her debut on her family’s reality television series with the Kardashians. The show is still running and its youngest star is now the popular family’s highest earner.
Kylie is the founder and owner of Kylie Cosmetics, a makeup company she runs mainly from her black iPhone X with the help of her mother Kris. The company that just employees 7 full-time workers, has sold over $630 million of lipstick, lip liner and lip gloss and makeup since it was founded on Valentine’s Day in 2016.
Forbes magazine has recently revealed that Kylie is now worth almost three times as much as her sister at an estimated $900m net worth. She is about to become one of the youngest “self-made” billionaires ever. Her speed of achieving the mark is definitely impressive and can’t be ignored. Forbes also estimated that she is likely to become a billionaire at 22 taking a year less than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg when he became a billionaire in 2008.
Kylie Cosmetics doesn’t advertise its products traditionally as it is not even needed for the company to follow the trend of its competitors. The impact of Kylie Jenner can be guessed with the impact her single tweet had on Snapchat. Most of her 110 million followers on Instagram are young females, which fits the target audience of the brand perfectly. She is also one of the most viewed accounts on Snapchat and is followed by 25 million users on Twitter.
Also Read: This Kylie Jenner Tweet Made Snapchat Lose $1.3 billion In Market Value
Kylie is herself fond of using social media platforms and sees them as a great way of connecting with her fans. “Social media is an amazing platform. I have such easy access to my fans and my customers.” she once said in an interview.
Sales of Kylie Cosmetics are mainly driven by Jenner’s FOMO (fear of missing out) posts that she posts with warnings that collections are in very limited quantities. The initial stock of $29 “lip kits” sold out in less than a minute and even crashed the website.
Her success can be seen as a perfect example to learn the trend shift in the beauty industry, which is now heavily influenced, by social media influencers and video bloggers.
Kylie comes up with ideas for styles experiment on herself and Seed Beauty that also produces makeup for KKW Beauty, run by Jenner’s half-sister Kim Kardashian West, makes the products. Around 500 workers at Seed Beauty, work on the Jenner-Kardashian brands.
Kylie Cosmetics’ orders and sales are outsourced to Shopify that also runs shops for Drake and Justin Bieber. Shopify promotes its success with Jenner to encourage other entrepreneurs to stop doing things like fulfilling orders and logistics by themselves.
Kylie Cosmetics is not the only brand to use social media; several western brands such as Huda beauty and Anastasia Beverley Hills have gained immense popularity in recent years. YouTube endorsements have helped to make a product a “must have”.
Stephanie Saltzman, beauty editor at Fashionista shared her thoughts on how significant influencers and online marketing have been. “Maybe historically consumers would use what their Mom used or would go explore a beauty counter in a department store. Now it’s in the palm of their hands through social media. “It feels more authentic coming from a person and Kylie Jenner is a person as opposed to a blanket, faceless corporation,” she said recently.
Kylie had struggled to decide what to do with her life. Then she decided to work on the most talked about feature: her lips. She trademarked the phrase “Kylie Lip Kits … for the perfect pout” 2 years before setting up her company with $250,000, which she had made through modelling and reality TV works.
“Ever since I was probably 15 I’ve been obsessed with lipstick. I could never find a lip liner and a lipstick that were the perfect match. So that’s where I thought of the idea that I wanted to create my own product,” Jenner said in an interview with Shopify.
Even with such a large fan base, she was scared that sales might not take off when the website first launched. “I kept calling my mom, saying: ‘Mom, I’m so scared. Do you think it’s going to sell?’ Because I put all my money upfront. You know, it’s all my money. I put everything into this.”
Now the business earning so much, she is planning to turn it into a family firm. “Maybe one day [I’ll] pass this on to Stormi, if she’s into it,” Jenner told Forbes.
