Good morning and welcome back to Inc.‘s 1 Smart Business Story, where we’re always swaddled in a beige-on-beige outfit when we share the remarkable entrepreneurial stories of our times.  
 
Today: Jenni Kayne, whose eponymous fashion brand has come to define “California luxury,” as she calls it, while also speaking to consumers well beyond the Golden State.  
 
Amy Odell, author of the great newsletter Back Row as well as seminal biographies of Anna Wintour and Gwyneth Paltrow, spent time with Kayne to learn:  

Let me know what you think of Kayne and her burgeoning lifestyle empire at [email protected].

The designer’s eponymous company built a massive following with 50 shades of beige. As her palette grows, will her ambitions?

BY AMY ODELL

Few clothing brands are synonymous with a pair of sleeves alone. Such was Jenni Kayne’s claim to fame this year after Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, draped her beige-striped cashmere sweater over her shoulders in her hit Netflix show, With Love, Meghan. As the sleeves dangled over frittata, the show’s guest star, Mindy Kaling, asked Meghan about her outfit. Her white linen pants were Zara and her top was Loro Piana, she said, before opening the sweater sleeves around her shoulders and revealing “Jenni Kayne.”

Most brands would kill for this kind of viral moment. But for designer Jenni Kayne, the exposure was not necessarily a difference maker. A disciplined builder who prides herself on eschewing fleeting fashion trends, Kayne stopped chasing this kind of celebrity clout long ago. Instead, she has built a business of high-end, evergreen staples that make it easier to manage inventory and improve profit margins.

Had she known Meghan was about to give her a shout-out, Kayne deadpans in an interview with Inc., she likely would have had much more in stock.

Founded in 2002 in Los Angeles, the company says it did $140 million in
revenue this past year. It has 109 employees and has expanded from a clothing line to include accessories, furniture, home items, and a skin care line called Oak Essentials. Kayne says she’s had interest from both minority and majority investors, but “none felt like the right fit,” and she’s remained independent. (It helps that her billionaire father is her clothing line’s sole investor.)

The luxe, minimalist aesthetic that attracted Meghan is, in Kayne’s words, “California luxury.” Others call it quiet luxury or stealth wealth. “When you think of California, there’s an ease. Everything’s rooted in nature. Everything’s a little bit slower. There’s this idea of this indoor-outdoor flow. Nothing’s too serious or buttoned up,” says Kayne, sitting on a beige linen couch in her Tribeca store in New York City. “It is a quintessential California brand, but it translates everywhere.”

Having scaled the U.S. business to 31 retail stores, Jenni Kayne opened a pop-up shop in London’s Selfridges in August as it eyes international expansion, and plans to start shipping to Canada in 2026. With each of these moves, Kayne is betting that plenty more people will respond to her taste and point of view. Could she be the next Ralph Lauren, a brand as recognized for homewares and fragrances as it is for polo shirts and red carpet gowns?

“She’s her consumer,” observes fashion and retail consultant Robert Burke. “I think that one of the real keys to her success is knowing their lifestyle and their ambitions, should I say, and desires.”

Raised in Beverly Hills, Jenni fell in love with fashion around the age of 8, after her mom, Suzanne, took her to a Chanel charity fashion show featuring Linda Evangelista. At 18, she left design school and got a job working in the Pearl boutique, owned by Jennifer Nicholson (Jack’s daughter). Pearl sent her to Europe to place orders from brands like Jean Paul Gautier and John Galliano, and on these trips, she made connections who would eventually help her start her own business.

Naive and ambitious, Kayne envisioned building a full-fledged lifestyle brand. Her dad, Richard Kayne, an investor estimated to be worth over $1 billion, agreed to fund her first three collections “on a shoestring,” she says (she does not remember how much he gave her). And so in 2002, Kayne launched her label. She was all of 19.

To say the initial look was antithetical to the Jenni Kayne of today is an understatement. She showed lamé, velvet, and sequins. Her first runway show included pearl nipple pasties paired with cutout drawstring lounge pants. An L.A. showroom decided to carry the line, which reportedly did $250,000 in sales. Neiman Marcus and Barneys Co-Op soon followed.

By September 2006, her business had grown to $1 million annually. She showed at New York Fashion Week. Anna Wintour called her in and she was featured in Vogue. And Mandy Moore got attention for an orange Jenni Kayne dress she wore to the American Music Awards in 2004. With the dominance of tabloid media back then, those kinds of events “would make or break your business,” Kayne says.

Fashion Week, Vogue, celebrities: Kayne was checking off all the right boxes. She even opened a store on Almont Drive in Los Angeles in 2007. But then she had her first child, Tanner (she went on to have two more children, Ripley and Trooper), and her life changed. “Once I had a baby, it was like, what do I feel good in?” she recalls. She adopted a new uniform built around a trouser, a knit, an “elevated flat,” and sometimes a collared shirt. She could play with her kids, and then go out to dinner—and “once you figure that out, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” she says.

As Kayne embraced this new aesthetic, she decided to stop showing at New York Fashion Week, which was expensive and time-consuming to the point of distraction. Meanwhile, direct-to-consumer selling was in its infancy and offered a different (and more profitable) model. Kayne redirected her focus, developed new products, and started selling directly to shoppers.

She thought about what her customer wanted. That meant “core pieces, not so much seasonality all the time,” Kayne says. “And that changed my business.”

It was one of those core items—a pair of d’Orsay flats—that, in 2013, went viral after a Chinese blogger covered them, flooding the brand with orders. Flush with revenue, Kayne tried a new growth strategy. Believing she needed to expand beyond clothing, she started with a beige-ified home accessory line, including pillows, throws, and candles. She outfitted a vintage Airstream trailer with product and sent it to cities such as Miami and Austin. “We were able to test out markets,” Kayne says. Her line soon expanded to furniture, and now includes a $4,400 linen-upholstered bed and a $14,000 sectional.

The brand says that from 2018 to 2020, revenue quadrupled, from $25 million to $100 million. As online sales boomed during the pandemic, Kayne looked next to beauty. She launched Oak Essentials skin care and bath products in 2021, with investment from Silas Capital and Unilever Ventures following in 2024, as a distinct line from her namesake brand. While she may want to hold onto Jenni Kayne as a private company, she “didn’t want the skin care to be forced to do the same thing.”

In 2022, Jenni Kayne was profitable for the first time, as growth slowed to 5 or 6 percent through 2024. Jenni Kayne president Kate Watters expects revenue to stay flat in 2025 owing to “a period of deliberate stabilization for our business.” Tariffs have complicated things for all clothing brands this year. Jenni Kayne was manufacturing in countries including China, and says that as soon as talks of tariffs cropped up, the company ramped up efforts to diversify its supply chain. Not being trend-driven has helped the retail math here too: Jenni Kayne’s collections could be delayed or carried into the next season.

By channel, Jenni Kayne’s revenue is split roughly in half between e-commerce and retail, with outposts from Brentwood to Southampton. The stores have allowed Kayne a complete aesthetic realization of the lifestyle she sells. “I think it’s very wise for her to control her retail environment, because there are few wholesale accounts that could show the breadth of the line—the home, the furniture, the ready-to-wear all together,” says Burke, the consultant.

The retail business also serves as a crucial source of feedback. When customers of the interiors-focused store in SoHo in New York City complained about being unable to buy sweaters there, it added clothing. Salespeople also reported that customers kept requesting something Kayne had long avoided: color. Watters, who joined Jenni Kayne in 2017 and became the brand’s president last year, says, “I don’t know that that’s something Jenni would have done if she weren’t hearing that direct feedback.”

For a brand built on the concept of California chic, its designer’s home is surprisingly rustic. On Kayne’s property, she keeps a menagerie of mini donkeys, mini horses, chickens, a pig, and two goats. “You would never know you’re in the middle of Los Angeles,” she says.

Most weekdays, Kayne takes her kids to school, and then rides her horse Messy (pronounced “mezzy”) for an hour before clocking in around 10. Around 4:30, she stops to spend time with her family, then makes dinner, and finishes work after her kids go to sleep. Her bedtime is a civilized 10 p.m. and she rarely works weekends. “I’ve done that. It’s not healthy,” she says.

Though Kayne, who considers herself an introvert, casually mentions her friendship with Lauren Bush Lauren, “I’m not in a scene at all,” she insists. “My husband always says we have fear of being invited.”

Bush Lauren praises Kayne for her authenticity. “Consistency can be hard to come by these days when there are so many folks chasing trends,” she says of Kayne’s “comfortable, cozy, elegant world.” About whether her friend can be the next Ralph (Bush Lauren’s father-in-law), she reflects, “Ralph is obviously in a class of his own. I think Jenni is really true to herself, which is something Ralph is as well.”

Of course, Ralph Lauren has never been one to avoid the spotlight. If Kayne has the ambition of taking her $140 million business to the next level, she may have to re-engage with her industry on its own terms. After over a decade of skipping Fashion Week, she hosted a big party this year, serving tomato martinis and seaweed shrimp tartlets topped with red caviar. The menu matched the bright red and green pieces from the spring 2026 collection on display downstairs. Kayne’s palette is expanding, along with the company.

Though it was admittedly a scene, Kayne circulated happily, greeting guests such as Martha Stewart, Will Arnett, and Rachel Zoe. She was clearly the center of attention, and yet she was dressed in a subdued pale-yellow V-neck sweater and loose pants. It looks comfortable; in its own way, it’s a power move. When I ask her about her choice, she says simply: “I don’t believe in flashy.”

This story originally appeared on Inc.com.