Even other Boston investors with a focus on backing consumer brands say they haven’t interacted with Skky or met Sammons. Skky’s website offers few hints the firm is headquartered here. But Sammons and the firm’s chief operating officer, Kaitlin May, granted the Globe an interview after a month of cajoling.
Why has Skky been so quiet? Partly, it’s the result of Securities and Exchange Commission rules that govern anything that could be perceived as advertising during the fund-raising process — and Skky is still raising its first pool of capital. And partly, it’s because the firm’s fund-raising may be encountering more headwinds than it expected. Sammons and May say the reported goal of raising $1 billion to $2 billion — numbers frequently mentioned in press coverage — was never accurate. Those figures were “speculation from other people, but no target that we’d ever communicated,” Sammons says. (Kardashian is an investor in Skky, as is Sammons.)
Skky’s name has two K’s in it as a reference to Kardashian, who lives in the Los Angeles area. So how did the firm end up in Back Bay? Sammons says he met his husband while the two were earning degrees at Harvard Business School, and while his career took him to New York after that, they returned to Massachusetts during the pandemic — first to a vacation home on Cape Cod, and then to Cambridge.
At Carlyle, he’d helped lead investments in brands like the apparel company Supreme, headphone maker Beats by Dre, and Philosophy Skin Care. But Sammons left Carlyle in 2022, driven by a desire to do a startup of his own. He saw “a market opportunity that wasn’t being addressed by the traditional players”: cutting $100 million to $200 million checks — smaller deals than most private equity firms were doing — to support “younger brands” that had achieved some degree of success and profitability but wanted to grow. (Carlyle wound up shutting down its consumer investing group in 2023, after Sammons departed.)
Sammons says he was introduced to Kardashian by a mutual friend several years before they launched Skky. “We built a lot of respect for one another. We built a lot of trust in one another,” he says. When he thought about how his new firm might be able to differentiate itself from other check-writers, and get access to interesting deals, “Kim was the first person I called.”
Sammons has assembled a team of 10 other investors so far, as well as a “senior operating advisor”: Angela Ahrendts, the former head of Apple’s retail business and, before that, chief executive of Burberry Group. And what is Kardashian’s role?
Sammons says the plan is not for her to serve as a pitchwoman for the companies that Skky backs. That wouldn’t be authentic, he says. But Kardashian’s celebrity — and her personal network — may help Skky get a foot in the door with companies that may not be willing to take a call from other potential investors. And, Sammons says, she’ll serve as “a resource and an adviser to our portfolio companies, helping them navigate a world that she’s demonstrated a tremendous amount of success in” — especially with Skims, a company that was valued at $4 billion just five years after it was founded.
When the firm has Kardashian participate in its internal meetings, says May, “everyone on our team has a wish list of companies that they want to get to.” When they review those companies with Kardashian, her knowledge of those companies “allows us to very quickly narrow the funnel and say: ‘OK, that’s a mess. We can’t step into that right now. We should wait on this one. We should think about this.’ It’s just been very, very helpful for the team.” (Kardashian also appeared on-stage with Sammons to promote Skky at SuperReturn, a conference for private equity and venture capital investors, in June of last year.)
So far, Skky has made just one investment, in Truff, a California-based maker of hot sauces that include black truffles as an ingredient. Sammons says they are “very busy working on numerous investments,” with a goal of investing in seven to 10 companies over the next five years. The firm’s focus will be on US-based companies, he says.
In late December, after our interview, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing changed Kardashian’s title from “managing partner” to “senior operating advisor.” The firm, in a statement, said that her “involvement hasn’t changed, but the new title clarifies that she is not managing the firm day-to-day.”
Incidentally, Kardashian isn’t the only celebrity with a tie to an investment firm on Newbury Street. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is a “special advisor” to the venture capital firm Data Point Capital. All of the people who advise the firm, says founder Scott Savitz, suggest investment opportunities, “open up their networks, make introductions, help us think about trends,” and may take seats on boards on the firm’s behalf — as well as put money into the firm.
Though it’s still early, one question is whether Kardashian will help make Skky successful.
“It seems to be a little slow in getting started,” says Jill Kravetz, a startup adviser and founder of the nail salon chain MiniLuxe. “I’m a little surprised that they’ve only made one investment.” But, she says, “this is a serious team.”
John Burns, who was the chief executive of Tom Brady’s health and wellness company, TB12, has questions as well. Burns has been trying to raise capital for a new consumer investment fund since 2022. But he has put that on pause. “The fund-raising environment for venture and private equity, generally speaking, is not great,” he says. “And the consumer space has been hit particularly hard.” While lots of money went into consumer businesses from 2018 to 2021, Burns says, not much has been returned in the form of acquisitions or initial public offerings.
And Burns questions whether the founders of fast-growing businesses might actually prefer Kardashian as a spokesperson — something Sammons says is not part of the plan.
“She strikes me as a super-savvy businessperson,” Burns says. “But if you were the CEO of a growing consumer business, are you interested in taking business advice from Kim, or do you want her to be involved as the face of the brand from an awareness and marketing standpoint? My guess is it would be the latter.”
Scott Kirsner can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @ScottKirsner.
