When Kim Kardashian launched SKIMS in 2019, she built it on a principle she already understood better than anyone — influence — and turned it into a repeatable system of creator-led storytelling. (She is the original influencer, after all.)
Instead of using traditional fashion advertising, SKIMS grew through a coordinated network of creators, celebrities, and loyal customers who told the brand’s story directly on Instagram.
As of Sept 2025, Instagram reports ~3B monthly active users, with 90% following at least one business. In 2019, that ecosystem of creators and integrated shopping tools made Instagram the perfect environment for SKIMS to scale influence into revenue.”
In 2019, the platform’s visual storytelling, creator ecosystem, and integrated shopping tools made it the ideal environment for SKIMS to scale influence into revenue. SKIMS used Instagram as a showroom, feedback loop, and launchpad for every drop, turning influencer posts, Reels, carousels, and Stories into a repeatable cycle of attention, demand, and sell-through. By 2023, this system helped the SKIMS brand reach a $4 billion valuation following a $270 million raise.
From Paris Hilton’s velour throwback to Sabrina Carpenter’s viral campaign, every collaboration began on Instagram, spread through influencers, and evolved into global media coverage.
In this case study, we break down how SKIMS built its billion-dollar presence through Instagram, and what marketers can learn from the brand’s influencer ecosystem, visual strategy, and community-driven approach.
To see how brands can replicate this model through creator-led storytelling, explore our Instagram Influencer Marketing Services.
Before unpacking its Instagram strategy, it helps to understand what SKIMS represents as a brand — and why its message connects so powerfully online.
What is Skims? Skims Brand Overview
Launched in 2019 by Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede, SKIMS began as a shapewear label and evolved into a full lifestyle brand spanning underwear, loungewear, and activewear.
The company describes itself as a “solutions-oriented brand creating the next generation of underwear, loungewear, and shapewear for every body.”
Kardashian explained in an interview with Forbes, “SKIMS was built to make people feel comfortable and confident in their own skin.” This mission shaped both the product design and the visual storytelling that defines the brand’s presence on Instagram.
Who the SKIMS Brand Speaks To
SKIMS targets a diverse, global audience that spans Gen Z to millennial consumers, primarily women but increasingly men, through its new SKIMS Mens division.
As Kim Kardashian told Vogue UK: “My goal for Skims is to continue to expand our product offering and keep finding new ways to create solutions that work for all women, all the time.”
Core audience traits include:
- A preference for body-positive representation and real-fit imagery.
- High engagement with creator-led content that shows authenticity over polish.
- Interest in fashion that merges comfort, luxury, and accessibility.
This demographic is most active on Instagram, where fashion discovery and social proof drive purchasing intent. The brand’s consistent engagement across creator posts, Reels, and UGC reflects a customer base that values inclusion and identity-driven storytelling.
Inside the SKIMS Marketing Playbook
From the start, SKIMS built its brand through Instagram. Not around it. Every launch, product reveal, and celebrity partnership was planned, produced, and amplified on the platform. Over time, this became a full-scale marketing system grounded in three principles: influence, culture, and community.
Posts average 5,279 likes and 156 comments, equating to an engagement rate of 0.08% — consistent
with top-tier fashion brands operating at scale.
commerce and awareness platform, where the objective is reach, consistency, and conversion
rather than high percentage engagement.
product-tag interactions, suggesting followers engage most actively at the moment of discovery
or purchase intent.
1. Three Levels of Influence as Advertising Infrastructure
SKIMS treats influencer marketing as a full-scale distribution system. Every campaign follows a planned chain of visibility that starts with cultural impact and ends with measurable sales.
Kim Kardashian set the tone early by placing herself at the center of the initial campaign, ensuring authenticity and brand clarity. Later on, strategic collaborators like Kate Moss (2021 Cotton Collection), Sabrina Carpenter (2024 campaign), and Neymar Jr. (2023 Men’s line) extend reach into distinct audience groups. Each collaboration introduces SKIMS to a new customer segment while keeping creative direction consistent.
Beneath this top tier, SKIMS activates mid-sized creators across lifestyle, beauty, and fashion niches. They receive products in advance, share try-ons and styling content, and build familiarity ahead of official launches. These posts generate early demand and provide social proof that supports paid activity once campaigns go live.
The third layer comes from real customers. UGC functions as an always-on discovery channel. SKIMS reposts tagged customer photos and videos across its grid and Stories. These reposts drive continuous engagement and supply authentic content for the brand’s feed without additional production costs.
Kardashian told Business of Fashion,
“Skims solved a problem for me that I felt was missing in the marketplace. Our success comes from three core ingredients: inclusivity, innovation, and relentless product perfection. We prioritised a fit-first approach, designing for all body types and skin tones to make every customer feel seen.”
This philosophy underpins the entire SKIMS marketing strategy — a system that scales influence through authenticity, not celebrity alone.
This structure produces momentum: celebrity storytelling sparks interest, mid-tier creators sustain visibility, and everyday users reinforce trust. The result is a self-sustaining pipeline of influence that operates year-round without heavy reliance on traditional advertising.
2. Using Culture To Create Momentum For Conversation
Every major SKIMS campaign is tied to a cultural or seasonal moment already alive on Instagram. Instead of building attention from scratch, the brand launches collections when audience interest is already high.
In 2020, the Velour Tracksuit drop brought back early-2000s nostalgia with Paris Hilton appearing alongside Kardashian in paparazzi-style shots. The creative direction mirrored the social aesthetic dominating feeds that year — flash photography, Y2K styling, and unfiltered motion.
View this post on Instagram
In 2021, Kate Moss fronted the Cotton Collection, shot in neutral tones and minimal sets. The visuals aligned with the quiet-luxury trend taking over Instagram, helping the campaign achieve multi-million-view reach through reposts and influencer commentary.
View this post on Instagram
In 2023, the NBA and WNBA partnership introduced SKIMS Mens and expanded the brand into performance apparel. Athletes like Candace Parker appeared while highlighting the product’s comfort focus, making SKIMS part of sports-style conversations that already dominate social feeds.
Recently, Holiday Campaign (2025) featured Nara and Lucky Blue Smith with their family, tapping into seasonal content trends around comfort, gifting, and togetherness.
View this post on Instagram
All campaigns use short-form motion, clean composition, and clear product focus. The content is designed for Reels, carousels, and Stories, where looping visuals and repeat exposure drive recognition.
This cultural alignment keeps SKIMS consistently visible in the feeds where its target customers are already spending time. It ensures relevance without chasing fleeting trends and lets the brand convert existing cultural energy into measurable engagement and sales.
3. Letting Community Take the Lead in Creative Direction
SKIMS uses Instagram as an ongoing feedback and optimisation tool. Audience input shapes both product decisions and marketing direction, turning community interaction into measurable brand intelligence.
Comments, poll results, and tagged posts inform product decisions — from expanding shade ranges to improving fit in newer releases. The Adaptive Collection in 2022, designed for customers with disabilities, was a direct response to feedback from its online community.
SKIMS’ UGC-first campaigns have become a model for modern fashion marketing, showing how reposted creator content and customer stories can drive long-term growth on Instagram.
When a creator’s post drives significant engagement, SKIMS boosts it through Meta’s whitelisting feature, maintaining the creator’s handle while scaling paid reach. This keeps content authentic while extending its exposure through paid support.
We also help brands with paid media boosting. Learn more here.
The result is a content loop that feels organic but is engineered for performance. The brand listens, responds, and reinvests in what audiences already enjoy — a process that keeps engagement high and ensures customers see themselves reflected in every stage of the product lifecycle.
By integrating creators and customers into its content process, SKIMS keeps campaigns responsive and cost-efficient. The feedback loop allows the brand to adapt faster than seasonal fashion cycles, maintaining continuous engagement and trust across its audience base.
The Instagram Playbook: SKIMS Campaigns and Collaborations That Defined Its Brand
Each SKIMS campaign follows the same formula — clear visuals, short-form motion, and creator participation. The brand’s Instagram marketing strategy focuses on building awareness through storytelling, timing, and repetition.
Below are the SKIMS campaigns and collaborations that show how the brand turned social media engagement into measurable growth.
Velour Collection (2020)
The Velour Collection was SKIMS’ first major cultural hit. Released in October 2020, it featured Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton photographed in paparazzi-style imagery, wearing matching tracksuits and carrying monogrammed handbags.
View this post on Instagram
The campaign tapped into the Y2K trend that was already circulating on Instagram. The familiar imagery encouraged organic reposts and conversation, driving visibility without heavy ad spend.
It marked the start of SKIMS’ content approach; designing campaigns that move naturally through social feeds instead of traditional media.
Cotton & Fits Everybody Collection (2021)
In mid-2021, SKIMS introduced Kate Moss as the face of its Cotton and Fits Everybody lines. The campaign used neutral lighting, close framing, and minimal styling to highlight texture and fit. Posts were released as carousels and Reels showing movement in fabric.
The simplicity of the creative allowed users to focus on comfort and tone. Engagement came through saves and re-shares on fashion pages that value quiet composition and subtle styling.
View this post on Instagram
Fendi x SKIMS (2021)
Later that year, SKIMS partnered with Fendi to produce a limited capsule. The campaign was coordinated across Reels, Stories, and in-feed posts that emphasized real-time try-ons and texture details.
Instagram Shopping tags were activated at launch, letting viewers move from post to product without leaving the app. The collaboration sold through rapidly, generating measurable sales within minutes and demonstrating how social-commerce tools can support immediate conversion.
View this post on Instagram
Swarovski x SKIMS (2023)
In 2023, SKIMS worked with Swarovski on a crystal-embellished capsule. The campaign focused on macro visuals and motion transitions that highlighted reflective surfaces. Creators filmed close-ups and styling clips that integrated naturally into Reels trends around light play and visual texture.
The result was a steady stream of UGC built around sparkle and detail, showing how material-focused storytelling performs within short-form video formats.
View this post on Instagram
NBA and WNBA Partnership (2023)
The official partnership with the NBA, WNBA, and USA Basketball established SKIMS as the underwear supplier across men’s and women’s leagues.
Campaign assets featured Nick Bosa, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Candace Parker , and others, captured in motion against neutral backdrops. Clips highlighted stretch, comfort, and daily wear. The videos circulated widely through athlete reposts, giving SKIMS visibility in sports and lifestyle feeds simultaneously.
View this post on Instagram
Sabrina Carpenter x SKIMS (2024)
The 2024 Sabrina Carpenter x SKIMS campaign extended the brand’s reach among younger consumers. The creative reflected Carpenter’s own content style — soft lighting, natural posing, and music-led visuals.
The rollout was timed for high visibility across Reels and Stories, supported by coordinated posts from Carpenter’s account and SKIMS’ main feed. Within days, analytics firm Launchmetrics reported $5.5 million in earned media value, illustrating the measurable effect of creator-led amplification.
View this post on Instagram
Team USA and Paralympians (2024)
Ahead of the Paris Olympics, SKIMS launched a campaign featuring Suni Lee, Gabby Thomas, and Jessica Long.
View this post on Instagram
The creative used red-white-blue palettes and slow-motion sequences to emphasize strength and inclusivity. Posts ran in a carousel sequence that paired still portraits with movement clips. Engagement came from both sports and lifestyle audiences, reinforcing the brand’s global visibility.
Every campaign followed a repeatable framework designed to sustain visibility and brand coherence. Each launch used short-form motion to create immediacy, consistent visual tone to reinforce recognition, and pre-coordinated creator releases to extend reach through trusted networks.
This approach turned Instagram into a controlled distribution system where awareness, engagement, and conversion occurred in sequence. By maintaining uniform creative principles across diverse campaigns, SKIMS built an instantly recognizable visual identity that scales with every new product cycle — a strategy that ensures each drop strengthens the brand’s overall equity rather than competing with it.
House of Markerter’s Insights: What SKIMS Teaches About Instagram Influence
SKIMS built influence and influencer culture into its foundation. The brand uses Instagram as a living marketing engine where they launch products, test ideas, and shape culture in real time.
At House of Marketers, we have seen this pattern repeat across industries — from Liquid Death’s TikTok-led entertainment model to Starface’s creator-powered skincare community and NIVEA’s UGC-based brand repositioning. In each case, the outcome is the same: when influence is built as a system, not a stunt, social platforms become predictable growth channels, not unpredictable trend machines.
At its core, the SKIMS marketing strategy runs on a closed-loop system:
- Creators generate visibility.
- Culture sustains relevance.
- Community reinforces trust and feedback.
This alignment of storytelling, data, and commerce has allowed SKIMS to build a multi-billion-dollar brand presence that scales without traditional advertising. Here’s how you can replicate this.
1. Platform-Native Rhythm
SKIMS structures every campaign around Instagram’s natural lifecycle: pre-launch seeding, launch-day saturation, and post-launch amplification.
Early creator posts build anticipation; the main feed drives short-term attention; paid amplification sustains momentum after peak engagement.
Brands aiming to replicate this model should plan content around how audiences actually consume media on the platform, not fixed calendar dates. Real-time engagement data — such as peak story interactions or Reels saves — can reveal when attention spikes and how long it lasts after each drop.
2. Narrative Consistency
Each campaign reinforces SKIMS’ three recurring storylines: comfort as confidence, representation as design, and simplicity as luxury.
These pillars define creative tone, ambassador selection, and visual composition. The result is a brand voice that remains cohesive across hundreds of campaigns and audience segments.
Marketers can use the same approach by codifying brand narratives early and building content guidelines around them. Consistency creates familiarity, and familiarity drives recall, which directly impacts conversion.
3. Data-Driven Adaptation
SKIMS treats Instagram as an ongoing feedback loop. The brand tracks engagement depth, comment sentiment, and shopping behaviour to refine future content and product decisions.
This data-led approach keeps campaigns responsive to audience behaviour rather than internal assumptions.
For marketers, the lesson is clear: turn performance data into creative direction. Analyse what people save, share, and say — then evolve in sync with that feedback.
4. Creator-Powered Distribution
When influencer content performs organically, SKIMS transitions it into paid distribution through whitelisting. This preserves the creator’s voice while leveraging the brand’s ad budget for wider reach.
The system merges organic credibility with paid performance. Marketers can adopt the same process by identifying high-performing creator assets and boosting them through the creator’s own account. It bridges authenticity with scalability — a key to long-term ROI in influencer marketing.
At House of Marketers, we apply this same principle through our Instagram Influencer Marketing Services, combining organic creator storytelling with strategic paid boosting to maximise ROI.
5. Cultural Timing as a Growth Lever
SKIMS aligns its launches with moments when audiences are already paying attention — sports events, fashion weeks, and entertainment milestones. This timing transforms visibility into relevance without requiring large awareness budgets.
For example, the Sabrina Carpenter SKIMS campaign launched during her world tour, amplifying both reach and relatability as her concert visuals trended across social platforms. Similarly, the SKIMS x NBA partnership coincided with the start of the basketball season, positioning the brand inside active conversations rather than competing for attention.
Marketers can adopt the same principle through cultural mapping — tracking upcoming events, seasons, or pop culture moments that naturally align with their brand values and using them as launch windows for maximum impact.
6. Inclusivity as Retention
Representation is a built-in part of the SKIMS marketing strategy, not a seasonal theme. The brand consistently features Paralympians, athletes, and creators of diverse body types across campaigns, reinforcing authenticity and trust within its community.
This approach widens engagement beyond traditional fashion audiences — every viewer can see themselves reflected in the content. Over time, this representation has become a driver of loyalty and repeat purchase, proving that inclusivity is more than messaging; it is a retention strategy.
For marketers, the takeaway is to make diversity part of creative direction from the start — through casting, partnerships, and product imagery — ensuring that inclusion strengthens long-term connection rather than serving as a temporary campaign asset.
7. Commerce Integration
Instagram’s native commerce tools close the gap between discovery and purchase. SKIMS uses product tags, Reels overlays, and Story links to convert engagement into measurable sales.
Embedding commerce directly into creative strategy reduces friction and improves attribution. Marketers should map the buyer journey across touchpoints — ensuring every post, Story, and collaboration has a defined path to conversion.
The Takeaway
SKIMS proves that influence is not about celebrity — it is about structure. The brand built a marketing system where creators, culture, and community work together to keep attention moving. That is what turns social activity into measurable growth.
For brands, the lesson is simple: you do not need global fame to build influence. You need strategy — a repeatable system that blends creator storytelling, UGC-driven credibility, and cultural timing to keep your brand relevant and visible.
At House of Marketers, we build those systems. From d’Alba’s global skincare growth to Invoice Fly’s 70K+ downloads and NN Insurance’s 6.9M video views, our campaigns prove how structured influencer systems deliver consistent ROI and lasting brand equity.
👉 Explore our Instagram Influencer Marketing Services to learn how to design campaigns that move with culture, scale through creators, and turn authentic content into lasting brand equity.
House of Marketers (HOM) is a leading TikTok Marketing Agency. Our global agency was built by early TikTok Employees & TikTok Partners, which gives us the insider knowledge to help leading brands, like Redbull, Playtika, Badoo, and HelloFresh win on TikTok. Want us to convert more of Gen Z and Millennials with TikTok? Get in touch with our friendly team, here.