Will Stormi Webster help run Kylie Cosmetics one day?
Kris Jenner is reassuring fans that Kylie Jenner will continue building the company despite selling off most of it week, adding that the 22-year-old reality star wants to remain in the beauty business for the rest of her life and may pass down her empire to her own daughter.
On Monday, beauty company Coty Inc. announced it will pay $600 million for a 51% majority stake in Kylie Cosmetics. The deal values her group at about $1.2 billion, and is set to close in the third quarter of the 2020 fiscal year. Under the terms of the agreement, Kylie and her team will "continue to lead all creative efforts in terms of product and communications initiatives."
"She feels like this is where she belongs, this is where her passion is, since she really wants to use her creative side to develop her brand," Kris said on CNBC on Tuesday. "And this is what she wants to do for rest of her life. She talks about it all the time. Twenty years from now, she sees herself doing this and maybe passing it down to her daughter."
"She's so excited about the partnership, but at the same time, this is her dream to build this beauty empire and just go into many categories that she hasn't even scratched the surface," Kris said. "You know, she launched [Kylie] Skin this year and she's really excited about that and that's been a huge success for her, and looks forward to working with Coty to develop more categories and going into other areas of the beauty business and that's very exciting."
Kris said the goal is "to just keep building Kylie's existing beauty business into a global powerhouse brand."
"That's the vision," she said. "And we decided to partner with Coty because they share the same vision that we do in building this into a huge thing and it's, you know, we dream big and this is something we're so excited about."
Kris also did not rule out the possibility of another Kardashian-Jenner family member selling off part of their own business.
"I think there's always that possibility, you know, as the businesses grow," Kris said, adding, "I think that the focus for the kids isn't always about growing it just to sell it. I think that they really are so passionate about what they're doing."
"I mean, I can't think of a better match than Kim [Kardashian] and her SKIMS [shapewear] business," she said. "Because she's just dreamed about this for a decade, thought about developing something like this, thought about creating a business like this, and she's done it and she lives it and breathes it and I watch her every single day try to create something even better, and it's really exciting. So I think that it's the whole process of what they're going through and learning."
She added, "I think that if they do grow the business and they're able to sell something and keep having a hand in it, that that's kind of the ideal situation."
Kylie officially launched Kylie Cosmetics in 2016, months after she released her signature product, her Lip Kits, as a test line. Coty said on Monday that Kylie Cosmetics had an estimated $177 million in net revenues over the past year.
In 2018, thanks partially to a a distribution deal with beauty retailer Ulta, the reality star's company brought in an estimated $360 million in retail sales, Forbes reported in March. At the time, the magazine estimated that Kylie was worth at least $900 million, and dubbed the then-21-year-old the "youngest self-made billionaire ever."
"I think she's self-made," Kris said on CBS Sunday Morning in May. "Listen, my girls, you can say that certain things have been handed to them. But it takes a lot of work to do what they're all doing."
"The money she's made is her own," she continued. "It began with her own savings. She put her own blood, sweat and tears into it. It was her idea. It was amazing what she did, and what she showed the rest of us how to do it."