Students were abuzz last Friday following a guest lecture from Kim Kardashian at Harvard Business School.
Kardashian, an entrepreneur and media personality who rose to fame after starring in the reality television show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” delivered a lecture to students in an HBS short intensive course “Moving Beyond Direct to Consumer.” Kardashian spoke about her clothing brand SKIMS for the course, which examines companies that sell directly to customers without a traditional retail middleman.
After an investor told HBS Professor Leonard A. Schlesinger — who teaches the class — that SKIMS would be “an amazing case” for students to study, he set up a meeting with SKIMS’s co-founder Jens Grede. Schlesinger said the meeting “reaffirmed, quite honestly, my own excitement about the learning opportunities for students.”
Part of what interested Schlesinger about SKIMS was its growth and revenue numbers, which he…
