Emma Grede Explains Why She Didn’t Invest In Ami Colé But Hired Its Founder At SKIMS

Emma Grede opens up about why she chose not to invest in Ami Colé and instead hired founder Diarrha N’Diaye at SKIMS.

Emma Grede is addressing criticism of her decision to hire Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye, founder of Ami Colé, at SKIMS instead of investing in her now-defunct clean beauty company.

The serial entrepreneur and SKIMS cofounder recently appeared on Les Alfred’s “She’s So Lucky” podcast to promote her new book, “Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life,” where she explained why she passed on investing in Ami Colé early on because she typically avoids backing first-time founders unless she sees something “extraordinary about that founder and about that proposition.”

“To me, I didn’t see that. I was like, ‘It’s okay.’ But I was like, ‘It’s gonna come and go.’ That’s how I felt. So that wasn’t an opportunity that I wanted to invest in at the time, but I kept my eye on it,” Grede said.

Instead of investing financially, Grede said she supported N’Diaye-Mbaye through mentorship and direct access as she worked to grow her Black-owned beauty brand.

“We would talk time to time. And so there was a relationship,” Grede shared around the 50:05 mark. “And to her credit, she always called me. She didn’t say, ‘You didn’t invest in my company. That’s the end of our relationship.’ She was like, ‘What do you see that I don’t see? What is it that I can learn?’ And I’m having this situation, and do you know these people?’ And when she took investments, she would call me. So there was lots to speak about.”

Grede’s foresight about the brand’s longevity proved prescient when, in July 2025, just four years after launch, N’Diaye-Mbaye announced on Instagram that Ami Colé would shut down. In a candid op-ed, the young beauty founder cited business challenges and the shift in investor priorities away from the inclusivity focus that fueled many Black businesses in the wake of racial unrest in 2020.

“Instead of focusing on the healthy, sustainable future of the company and meeting the needs of our loyal fan base,” N’Diaye-Mbaye. “I rode a temperamental wave of appraising investors — some of whom seemed to have an attitude toward equity and ‘betting big on inclusivity’ that changed its tune a lot, to my ears, from what it sounded like in 2020.”

Meanwhile, her relationship with Grede continued to grow, leading to N’Diaye-Mbaye’s hiring at SKIMS just months after announcing Ami Colé’s closure. Grede called it the “perfect opportunity” for the “incredibly talented” executive to refine her ideas and gain experience before launching another brand.

“What she will say herself is that she perhaps lacked the business acumen to start a business,” Grede explained. “Now, if you have an opportunity to go inside a company where you have infrastructure and investment and executives and a bunch of people that can show you how it’s done and make something successful, and you can extrapolate all of the value from that for three years and go, ‘Thank you guys,’ and go off and try it again. Why would you not?”

“I hope the community understands it. If they don’t, then, sorry. Not even, sorry … The point of being in business is to make money. It isn’t to service the community,” she added.