How Kylie actually made $1 billion

Kylie Jenner turned her biggest insecurity into a billion-dollar empire.

At only 21, Jenner is the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner family. Now she’s also the richest out of the bunch.

As if that wasn’t enough, Jenner has just been crowned by Forbes as the youngest ever billionaire, beating Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who was given the honour when he was just 23.

While she makes a pretty penny on her family’s reality show,Keeping Up With The Kardashians (available to stream on Foxtel), through various modelling projects and the lucrative world of paid posts on Instagram, Jenner’s vast fortune stems from her business, Kylie Cosmetics.

The money making machine that is business is obvious when you compare her net worth to her half sister Kim Kardashian, the queen of the Kardashian clan, who is worth an estimated $350 million.

Considering Kardashian has been working a lot longer, and also has her own cosmetics line KKW Beauty, it’s pretty mind-blowing the success Jenner has had in such a short amount of time.

So how in the world does someone make a billion dollars with a company they only launched three years prior?

There’s a few smart and savvy reasons why.

The mother-of-one founded the make-up company on November 30, 2015, and is its sole owner, meaning there are no shareholders to please or investors waiting for their cut.

This is no doubt where the whole debate about her being a “self made” billionaire comes from. Most people starting from the bottom with a business idea have to pitch it to investors, float it on an exchange or sell shares of it to others to fund.

Jenner thankfully already had money up her sleeve to get it off the ground.

Sales of her products come directly from her personal social media, thanks to Jenner’s 129 million growing Instagram followers.

This factor cuts a big cost in advertising dollars for the business.

Remarkably, she only employs seven full time staff, with the products largely outsourced by Seed Beauty, a company which produces and manufactures makeup products for other brands. They have 500 staff working on Jenner’s brand.

Kylie Cosmetics orders are outsourced by Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, which is another affordable way to handle sales.

Jenner helps with the styling, colours and overall inspiration, but leaves the finances up to her mum and manager, Kris Jenner, who sorts out her famous children’s financial operations for 10 per cent of their profits.

Given her wild social media following, Jenner’s initial stock launch back in 2015 sold out in less than a minute and crashed the website.

Last year alone, the company made $360 million in sales.

A business owner’s dream.

As you can see there are many reasons why her company is so lucrative, with Jenner making smart choices when it comes to how her business operates.

She also had the confidence to turn her biggest insecurity — the size of her lips — into a money maker.

Jenner, who has been on TV on K UWTK since she was just 10, was ridiculed for getting lip injections when she was a teen. It was something she denied over and over again.

In 2017, after her company had launched, she finally confessed she’d had the work done.

“I have really small lips. And it was like one of my first kisses and a guy was like, ‘I didn’t think you would be a good kisser because you have such small lips,’” she said on her reality show Life of Kylie.

“But I took that really hard. Just when a guy you like says that, I don’t know, it just really affected me. I just didn’t feel desirable or pretty.

“I really wanted bigger lips. I would overline my lips with lip liner just to create the illusion of bigger lips. And then finally I was like this lip liner isn’t doing it. (I) ended up getting my lips done.”

And so, Kylie Cosmetics was born.

“It came from an insecurity and I turned it into something. I was insecure about my lips, and lipstick is what helped me feel confident,” she told Vogue last year.

“I feel like people could see that it’s authentic to me, and it was organic, and it just worked.”

— Season 16 of Keeping Up With The Kardashians airs on Foxtel channel E! on April 1.