Coty Gave Kim Kardashian $200 Million. They Got Almost Nothing Back.

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]In 2020, one of the largest beauty conglomerates on the planet paid $200 million for a piece of Kim Kardashian.

[00:00:08]Five years later, they sold that piece back. The price was never disclosed.

[00:00:15]But here is what almost nobody noticed.

[00:00:18]By the time Coty walked away, their own accountants had already marked that investment down to about $4.5 million.

[00:00:26]Read that again. $200 million written down on the company's own books to roughly $4.6 million. That is not a bad investment. That is a near total wipeout hidden inside a quarterly filing that the celebrity press never opened.

[00:00:43]So how does a corporation operating in over 150 countries hand a reality star $200 million and end up with almost nothing?

[00:00:54]And why, while this was happening, was Kim quietly building a separate company that just hit a $5 billion valuation, one that Coty was never allowed to touch?

[00:01:05]Stick with us because we are going to take this apart like an autopsy in three parts.

[00:01:13]First, the desperate reason this deal even happened, which has almost nothing to do with makeup. Second, the slow collapse and the accounting trick that buried it.

[00:01:23]And third, the brand Coty never owned, the one that made the entire bet look like a distraction.

[00:01:32]Let us start with why Coty was at the table in the first place because the real story begins years before Kim ever signed anything.

[00:01:41]You might assume a giant like Coty bought into Kim Kardashian because they loved her brand.

[00:01:47]>> [music] >> The truth is closer to panic.

[00:01:50]Back in 2016, Coty [clears throat] had made an enormous bet paying $12.5 billion dollars to buy a pile of beauty brands from Procter & Gamble.

[00:02:01]It went badly.

[00:02:03]By 2019, they were forced to write down around 3 billion dollars in value, and the company was drowning in roughly 8 billion dollars of debt.

[00:02:13]In 2020, Coty's stock had collapsed by nearly 2/3.

[00:02:18]And here is the part the gossip channels skip entirely.

[00:02:22]Coty is not really run by beauty executives.

[00:02:25]It is controlled by a private investment group called JAB Holding, the vehicle of the German billionaire Reimann family.

[00:02:33]The man steering these celebrity deals, chairman Peter Harf, was a founding partner of JAB.

[00:02:40]So, this was never a love letter to cosmetics.

[00:02:43]It was a debt rescue mission run by financiers who needed young, viral brands to convince Wall Street the company still had a future.

[00:02:53]They moved fast.

[00:02:55]In late 2019, Coty bought 51% of Kylie Jenner's cosmetics line for 600 million dollars.

[00:03:04]Then, in June 2020, they came for Kim.

[00:03:09]200 million dollars for 20% of KKW Beauty, valuing her 3-year-old makeup brand at 1 billion dollars.

[00:03:17]And there was a clause almost no one reported.

[00:03:21]Coty secured an option to buy a majority stake later, exactly like they had with Kylie.

[00:03:27]They fully intended to own her one day.

[00:03:30]But even as the ink dried, the cracks were already there.

[00:03:34]At the very same time, the company that actually manufactured both Kim's and Kylie's products, a quiet incubator called Seed Beauty, sued.

[00:03:44]Seed claimed the Coty deals threatened to leak its trade secrets, the digital-first playbook that built these brands. A judge granted a temporary injunction.

[00:03:54]The whole machine behind the Kardashian beauty empire was tangled in a legal fight before Coty ever made a cent.

[00:04:02]So, that is part one.

[00:04:04]A debt-loaded conglomerate steered by private equity buying celebrity relevance to save itself while the factory behind the brand was already in court.

[00:04:16]Now, let us get to the collapse and the number Coty really did not want you to do the math on.

[00:04:21]If you are finding this useful, take 1 second to subscribe because this next part is where $200 quietly turns [music] to dust.

[00:04:32]The first real warning sign came almost immediately.

[00:04:35]Within months of the deal, Kim shut down the KKW Beauty website entirely.

[00:04:41]The official reason was a rebrand into something more modern and sustainable.

[00:04:45]The unofficial reason was personal. The two K's stood for Kardashian West and Kim was in the middle of her very public divorce from Kanye.

[00:04:54]The W had to go.

[00:04:56]In 2022, the replacement arrived. SKKN by Kim. And this is where the business logic falls apart.

[00:05:06]SKKN launched as a nine-step skin care system with a full routine costing around $600.

[00:05:13]>> [music] >> A single serum ran $95.

[00:05:16]The cleanser alone was $43.

[00:05:19]Now, remember why Coty bought in.

[00:05:22]They wanted young, social, everyday shoppers.

[00:05:25]But you cannot sell a $600 ritual to a teenager scrolling on her phone.

[00:05:31]Even Kim's own circle pushed back.

[00:05:33]Bethenny Frankel went on TikTok and called it a rich person's game.

[00:05:38]And the sales told the same story.

[00:05:41]Coty never reports brand level revenue.

[00:05:44]So, we lean on the analysts who track this.

[00:05:47]At the time of the acquisition, the business was estimated to do somewhere between 100 million and 150 million dollars a year.

[00:05:56]By the end, analysts at Jefferies estimated SKKN had collapsed to roughly 30 million dollars in sales.

[00:06:04]Some industry reports put it even lower, closer to 20 million.

[00:06:08]Whichever figure you trust, the brand had lost the majority of its revenue.

[00:06:14]We are now at the halfway mark. So, let us take stock.

[00:06:18]Coty paid 200 million dollars. The brand got shut down, renamed, priced for the rich, and bled most of its sales.

[00:06:28]Now, watch how they made the loss disappear on paper.

[00:06:33]Here is the mechanism almost no video explains. When you own a minority slice of a struggling company, you do not just sit on the original price.

[00:06:42]Every year that the business loses money, you write down the value of your stake.

[00:06:47]So quietly, quarter after quarter, Coty's 200 million dollar investment shrank on their books.

[00:06:54]By late 2024, their own filing valued the entire KKW holding at just 4.6 [music] million dollars.

[00:07:03]The 200 million was already gone, erased in slow motion long before any headline.

[00:07:11]Then, in early 2025, came the exit.

[00:07:15]When Coty finally offloaded its stake, it booked a loss of 71.01 million dollars tied to that beauty business.

[00:07:25]And because of how this kind of investment is taxed, it was treated as a capital loss the company could not even use to lower its tax bill, with no silver lining at all.

[00:07:36]That single beauty exit helped drag Coty to an operating loss of over 280 million dollars for the quarter in a period where the year before they had made a profit.

[00:07:48]By June of 2025, SKKN by Kim was officially dead.

[00:07:54]Three years, closed for good, and the mainstream press barely blinked because half the celebrity beauty industry was collapsing that same year.

[00:08:04]But Coty did not stop at SKKN.

[00:08:07]The same company was busy selling off its Well Air empire to the private equity firm KKR. It was about to lose its crown jewel Gucci fragrance license.

[00:08:17]Its long-time chief executive, Sue Nabi, was on her way out, and its stock fell more than 50% across 2025.

[00:08:27]The Kim deal was not an isolated mistake.

[00:08:30]It was one symptom of a company in full retreat. So, who actually won here?

[00:08:36]Because someone did.

[00:08:37]And that brings us to part three, the brand Coty never owned.

[00:08:43]Here is the move that makes Kim look less like a celebrity and more like a strategist.

[00:08:49]While KKW and then SKKN were quietly dying under Coty's part ownership, Kim was building a [music] completely separate company on her own.

[00:08:59]Skims.

[00:09:00]The shapewear and clothing brand she launched in 2019.

[00:09:05]Coty had no stake in it.

[00:09:07]None.

[00:09:08]It was never part of any of these deals.

[00:09:10]And Skims did exactly what [music] the beauty brand was supposed to do.

[00:09:15]It exploded.

[00:09:17]In November [music] 2025, a funding round led by Goldman Sachs valued Skims at $5 billion with the brand closing in on a billion dollars in annual sales. It pushed into loungewear, swimwear, menswear, and physical stores around the world.

[00:09:36]The loyal [music] spending audience that Coty thought it was buying through Kim's makeup, that audience actually showed up.

[00:09:43]Just for the company Coty had no piece of.

[00:09:47]Then came the final twist.

[00:09:49]In March 2025, Skims stepped in and bought out Coty's 20% of the beauty business and also absorbed Kim's own majority share.

[00:10:00]In one move, everything Kim had built, the clothing, the skin care, the cosmetics, the fragrance, landed under a single roof that she controlled.

[00:10:12]The conglomerate that once dreamed of owning a majority of her empire ended up selling its piece back, while Kim consolidated all of it.

[00:10:21]And the next chapter is already loading.

[00:10:25]In late 2025, Skims hired a respected beauty founder to build out Skims beauty, aiming for a relaunch under the one brand that actually worked. This time, with no outside partner holding any strings. So, step back and look at the whole board.

[00:10:44]A global beauty giant run by financiers trying to dig out of debt, paid $200 million chasing the Kardashian audience.

[00:10:53]It watched that stake quietly erode to almost nothing on its own books, took a loss it could not even write off, and shut the brand down.

[00:11:04]And the entire time, the real prize, the audience it actually wanted, was sitting inside Skims, the one company it was structurally locked out of.

[00:11:16]That is the part Wall Street will never put in a press release.

[00:11:20]The headline deal was almost never the real deal.

[00:11:24]The $200 million was the show.

[00:11:27]The $5 billion was the business.

[00:11:31]If this changed how you the Kardashian money machine, hit subscribe because every week we open up the filings behind a famous name and show you what the headlines leave out.

[00:11:43]And tell us in the comments, did Cody get outplayed from day one or did they simply back the wrong sister?

[00:11:50]We read every single reply.