Kylie Jenner is on track to become the world’s youngest ever billionaire thanks to her lips and Instagram.



Jenner, 20, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner American reality TV family, is the founder and sole owner of Kylie Cosmetics, the makeup company she runs largely from her black iPhone X, with the help of her mother Kris.

Employing just seven full-time staff, Kylie Cosmetics has sold more than $630m (£480m) of lipstick, lip liner and lip gloss and makeup since Jenner founded the business on Valentine’s Day in 2016.

Forbes magazine, which this week featured Jenner on its cover as the face of “the era of extreme fame leverage”, estimated her “net worth” at $900m. The magazine said Kylie Cosmetics is growing at such a rate that she is likely to become a billionaire at 22 – a year younger than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was when he joined the ‘nine zeros’ club in 2008.

Billionaires are getting younger. Legendary investor Warren Buffett, who is now the world’s third-richest person with an $83bn fortune, did not make his first billion until 1986, when he was 56. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and the world’s richest person with $145bn, became a billionaire at 35 in 1999. Google co-founder Larry Page made his first billion at 30 in 2004 when the search engine floated. Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat, became a billionaire in 2015 at 25.

Nearly all of Kylie Cosmetic’s sales come directly from Jenner’s social media accounts. She has 111m followers on Instagram (77% of whom are aged 18-24, the BBC reports), is one of the most viewed accounts on Snapchat, and is followed by 25m on Twitter. Such is the weight of her influence that when she tweeted that she was “sooo over” Snapchat earlier this year, more than $1bn was wiped off the company’s stock market value.

Sales are driven higher by Jenner sparking FOMO (fear of missing out) among her fans with warnings that collections are in very limited quantities. Her initial stock of $29 “lip kits” - matching lipstick and lip liner - sold out in less than a minute, crashing the website.

Jenner, who has been in the public eye since she made her debut on Keeping Up With The Kardashians a decade ago when she was 10, said: “Social media is an amazing platform. I have such easy access to my fans and my customers.”

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The business is almost totally outsourced. Jenner comes up with ideas for styles, but the products are made by Seed Beauty, a private-label producer which also produces makeup for KKW Beauty, run by Jenner’s half-sister Kim Kardashian West. More than 500 people at Seed Beauty, which owns makeup production company Spatz Laboratories, work on the Jenner-Kardashian brands.

Spatz, which is run by siblings John and Laura Nelson, was sued by L’Oréal in 2016 over allegations that L’Oréal patents were used in the creation of Kylie Cosmetic lip products.

Jenner does not directly make her products, nor does she sell them. Kylie Cosmetics’ orders and sales are outsourced to Shopify, a Canadian online company that also runs shops for Drake and Justin Bieber. Shopify promotes its success with Jenner to encourage other entrepreneurs to skip the boring things like fulfilling orders and logistics by using their services.

“The reigning Queen of Snapchat. Reality TV darling. Makeup mogul. She’s more than just a famous face—the youngest of the Kardashian clan, Kylie Jenner, has hustled beyond her 19 years, monetising her name and exploding it into a massive cosmetics brand,” Shopify says on its site. “Kylie Cosmetics entered the IRL (in real life) space for the first time ever, driving lip envy to a fever pitch.”



Jenner also does not have to worry much about the business’s finances or the day-to-day management of her 12 staff (seven full-time, five part-time). Those matters are outsourced to her mom or “momager” Kris Jenner, who manages all her children’s financial operations – in return for a 10% cut.

Jenner, who used her reality TV exposure to secure modelling work with brands like Topshop, said she had struggled to decide what to do with her life. Then her thoughts turned to her most talked about feature: her lips.

Until she finally admitted using fillers, fans tried desperately to ape her full-lipped look by sucking on bottles. The “Kylie Jenner lip challenge” increases blood flow to the lips, with often unpleasant-looking results. This week, however, Jenner said she has had all filler removed, after learning to live with the natural look while pregnant with her daughter Stormi, who is now five months old.

Jenner trademarked the phrase “Kylie Lip Kits ... for the perfect pout” two years before setting up her company with $250,000 of money she had made through modelling and reality TV work.

“Ever since I was probably 15 I’ve been obsessed with lipstick. I could never find a lip liner and a lipstick that were the perfect match. So that’s where I thought of the idea that I wanted to create my own product,” Jenner said in an interview with Shopify.

While she had a huge fan base, Jenner said she was scared that sales might not take off when the website first launched. “I kept calling my mom, saying: ‘Mom, I’m so scared. Do you think it’s going to sell?’ Because I put all my money upfront. You know, it’s all my money. I put everything into this.”

Now the business is soaring, Jenner - who drives a Bentley Bentayga which is priced from £162,700 - is considering turning it into a family firm. “Maybe one day [I’ll] pass this on to Stormi, if she’s into it,” Jenner told Forbes. Though her mother said selling up is “always something that we’re willing to explore”.