Around March 2019, Forbes magazine came out with their annual “World’s Billionaires” issue. It included Kylie Jenner, a well-known celebrity, but recognized more for her family’s reality show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” News broke out that Kylie Jenner had officially become the world’s youngest, self-made billionaire at 21 years old, which she was made by her company Kylie Cosmetics. But now in 2024, people are asking if the title “billionaire” will last.
Everything started a few years back.
In 2014, at the age of 17, Kylie Jenner started her business Kylie Cosmetics, accompanied by her mother Kris Jenner. She started by selling Kylie Lip Kits, which sold for $29. Instantly customers and fans bought them, and this was just the start of her makeup line but also a start to success.
Kylie then started a swimline brand in 2021, which began receiving a lot of criticism because customers said they were getting scammed, and the material was cheap and didn’t seem normal for a well-known celebrity who has the money, but yet couldn’t make good quality swimwear.
Take it to the beginning of 2024 when Jenner launched three new businesses out of nowhere: Khy, a leather and clothing brand, a fragrance called Cosmic, and recently a drink called Sprinter, and the products haven’t been performing very well. It was just very random and it seemed like Jenner was trying to find her new product since Kylie Cosmetics wasn’t doing very well.
A podcast called “Share Your Screen” made an episode covering Kylie’s business, and the alleged worth of it ($1.2 billion) since 2017, they compare it to the revenue (net sale) of it as years passed and every year it has decreased. Seeing Kylie’s testing in products isn’t strange though.
Celebrities regularly do this, where their products will be trendy for a while but consumers want something more. For example, Kylie’s lip kit in 2015 blew up and everyone wanted it since Jenner was iconic for her big lips. But as years went by, the popularity died down. So Kylie might be trying to find a new thing to gain that money back again.
This past March is where people started speculating the rumors. Jenner got into cake drama with a small business called “Yip Studio”. Yip got reached out to by Jenners team, asking if they could commission her to make a cake for Kylie, so owner Amy Yip gave them a price and made a lot of accommodations for them. Yip then got an email saying Kylie’s team didn’t have the budget for the accommodations. Later on, Jenner then posted a picture on Instagram with a knockoff of the cake the owner made, as people heard of this, they started asking how come Kylie’s team or Kylie couldn’t afford the cake, since she is known for having money and wearing super expensive brands.
One of the biggest things that is leading to the speculations, is Jenner trying to sell her eight-figure Beverly Hills mansion, which she and her ex-husband Travis Scott bought in 2018 for $13.45 million. They first listed for $21.9 million, but didn’t get any buyers, so they cut the price to $20 million, proving she most likely is struggling to make money and selling her house all of a sudden.
How many people are diving into Jenner and the company, trying to understand why the sudden making of these new products, or why couldn’t she pay for a cake? But the main question is, is Kylie Jenner going broke?
