Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

In September 2022, Kim Kardashian announced she was co-founding a private equity firm. Her partner was Jay Sammons, a 16-year Carlyle Group veteran who had led investments into Beats by Dre and Supreme. The firm was called SKKY Partners and its pitch was compelling in theory: pair one of the most recognizable consumer brand builders on the planet with one of the most experienced consumer PE operators in the industry. Target culturally relevant consumer and media companies. Use Kardashian's reach to accelerate brand growth at the portfolio companies. Kim Kardashian investments, done this way, would represent something actually new.

What actually happened is worth understanding carefully, because the lessons cut in multiple directions.

What SKKY Set Out to Do

SKKY's stated target was to raise between $500 million and $1 billion for a debut fund. The thesis was focused on high-growth consumer and media companies where celebrity brand amplification could create meaningful value acceleration. 

The team brought in Angela Ahrendts, former head of Apple Retail and ex-CEO of Burberry, as a senior operating advisor. Kris Jenner was listed as a senior advisor. Sammons assembled a professional investment team drawn from major firms.

The first investment was in Truff, the truffle-infused condiment brand founded in 2017, which closed in early 2024 as a minority stake via an SPV structure. By late March 2024, SKKY had secured $121 million in total capital commitments according to SEC filings, with nearly $80 million of that structured specifically for the Truff SPV.

 In January 2025, SKKY made its second significant investment: a minority stake in 111Skin, the luxury London-based skincare brand founded by Dr. Yannis Alexandrides. The investment was intended to support 111Skin's direct-to-consumer expansion and push into Asia and North America.

What Went Wrong and What It Means

By late 2024, Kardashian's title at SKKY had quietly shifted from Co-Managing Partner to Senior Operating Advisor. SEC filings indicated she was no longer listed as an executive officer. Multiple industry accounts described the firm's Beverly Hills office as largely inactive by mid-2024, with fundraising stalled far short of its original target.

The explanation isn't complicated. Institutional LP capital is notoriously skeptical of celebrity-adjacent vehicles, particularly first-time funds. The enduring challenge was that Kardashian's strength, which is an extraordinary ability to build and market consumer brands to a mass audience, is real and valuable but hard to quantify in a traditional PE diligence framework. Her SKIMS success is real: she built a company valued at $4 billion within five years, launched a flagship Fifth Avenue store in December 2024, and SKIMS is now expected to go public.

Eric Bahn, Hustle Fund GP, has talked about how the best investor value-add is the kind that can be verified and systematized, not just described narratively. Kardashian's value at SKKY was always narrative-forward. Institutional LPs wanted to see a track record of deploying and exiting capital, and SKKY simply hadn't been around long enough to build one.

The SKIMS Lesson Is the Real One

If you're studying Kim Kardashian investments to understand what actually worked, the answer is SKIMS. She co-founded the shapewear brand with no external investment in 2019 and scaled it to a $4 billion valuation in five years by applying her consumer instinct and distribution reach to a product category she understood from personal experience. That is the same playbook Gary Vaynerchuk used with VaynerMedia, the same one MrBeast used with Feastables. Build the audience first, then monetize it through products that the audience already wants.

Elizabeth Yin, Hustle Fund GP, has noted that the most durable consumer businesses are built by founders who are genuine users of the product and have earned the trust of their target customer before the company exists. Kardashian built SKIMS exactly that way.

Angel Squad and the Celebrity Capital Framework

The SKKY story is a useful case study for Angel Squad members evaluating investments where a celebrity or influencer is attached as a co-founder or investor. The question to ask isn't how big their platform is. It's whether their involvement creates a structurally lower cost of distribution for the portfolio company in a way that scales independently of their attention. 

SKIMS works because Kardashian is the target customer and her audience trusts her product recommendations. SKKY struggled because celebrity amplification is harder to deploy in a PE hold-and-optimize context. Angel Squad helps investors develop exactly this kind of nuanced framework for evaluating non-traditional investors and founder profiles. With 2,500 members across 50 countries, the community is the place to stress-test your investment theses before you deploy capital. Visit hustlefund.vc/squad.

The Takeaway

The story of Kim Kardashian investments is not a cautionary tale about celebrity investors. It's a case study in matching the right vehicle to the right strategy. SKIMS succeeded because Kardashian's skills and credibility were perfectly aligned with what the business needed. 

SKKY struggled because PE fund-building requires a different set of skills and a different relationship with institutional capital. The lesson for angel investors: figure out what a founder is actually great at before assuming that greatness transfers into every adjacent domain.