Kylie Jenner is officially the world’s youngest “self-made” billionaire—here are all the glorious details
Update: On March 5th, 2019, Forbes officially announced that Kylie Jenner has become a billionaire. Kylie, 21, initially only sold Kylie Cosmetics online, but the magazine notes that the recent introduction of her brand to Ulta stores increased last year’s revenue by 9% (which is a lot when you’re already dealing with huge amounts of money). And because Jenner owns 100% of her company—i.e., there are no investors or board—she takes it all home. And she’s now officially valued at one billion dollars. Go, girl!
This also means that Kylie now holds a title that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg once held—the youngest “self-made” billionaire (though “self-made” is highly debatable, of course, considering she already came from an extremely wealthy family with tons of media exposure). And it’s mostly due to her lip kits. Whether she’s modeling her latest lip kit colors or ditching the filler and embracing her natural pout, Kylie has brilliantly monetized the fascination around her lips and turned it into a multimillion-dollar business. Kylie covered the August 2018 issue of Forbes, which broke down her then $900 million valuation. At the time, Kylie had sold more than $630 million worth of makeup since launching Kylie Cosmetics. Combining her lip kit empire, her reality show, and her various other endorsements, Forbes listed her total net worth at around $900 million, which, at 20-years-old, made her the youngest person on Forbes‘ fourth annual ranking of “America’s Richest Self-Made Women.”
FYI, Kylie’s the richest Kardashian/Jenner sister. It seemed almost quaint when Kylie told the mag: “I struggled for a minute with finding something to do on my own.”
At age 17, right around the time she was overlining her lips, Kylie trademarked the phrase “Kylie Lip Kits…for the perfect pout.” Mind you, she did this two years before debuting her first lip kit. Now that is some business acumen.
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Kylie Cosmetics are manufactured by Seed Beauty and distributed via a third-party source, Shopify. Loren Padelford, who runs the high-volume Shopify Plus, told Forbes that “no other influencer has ever gotten to the volume or had the rabid fans and consistency that Kylie has had for the last two and a half years.” For comparison, the other “influencers” that Shopify manage include Drake, Justin Bieber, and Kylie’s own sister Kim Kardashian West.
Are people still doubting that Kylie and the rest of her family are badass businesswomen?
