# Emma Grede's Latest Business Advice: Why Founders Need an Off-Season Too > The Skims and Good American co-founder, long known for an all-in approach to work, is now making the case that even the most driven entrepreneurs need a deliberate period of downtime. - Source: Life Channel - Canonical URL: https://lifechannel.one/article/emma-grede-s-latest-business-advice-why-founders-need-an-off-season-too - Author: Sienna Blackwood - Section: Money & Life - Published: 2026-10-14T16:02:48.750Z - Updated: 2026-10-14T16:02:48.750Z - Tags: Emma Grede, Skims, Good American, Business Advice, Entrepreneurship --- Emma Grede has built her name on an unapologetically intense approach to business. As a co-founder of Skims and the CEO of Good American, she has spent years publicly pushing back against the idea that ambition and rest can coexist easily, favoring a philosophy closer to constant motion than balance. Her latest comments add a wrinkle to that reputation: even her version of relentless, she says, needs a built-in off-season. The idea borrows directly from sports. Athletes train hard, compete hard, and then step back for a stretch that is not laziness but maintenance, the period where the body and the strategy both get rebuilt for whatever comes next. Grede has been framing founders and executives the same way, arguing that a business built to sprint indefinitely eventually breaks the people running it, and that the break needs to be scheduled rather than forced by burnout. ## Rest as a business decision, not a personal one What separates this from a standard wellness message is the framing. Grede isn't describing downtime as something owed to employees for their own sake, she's describing it as a competitive advantage, the same way a well-timed rest period keeps an athlete performing at a higher level over a full season instead of peaking early and fading. An executive who never steps back loses the sharper judgment and creative distance that only come from time away from the day-to-day grind. That framing matters for how the advice lands. Coming from someone who has spent years associated with grind culture rather than work-life balance, the shift reads less like a reversal and more like a refinement: the goal was never rest for its own sake, it was sustained output, and an off-season turns out to be part of how that gets protected rather than something that works against it. ## A harder sell at the top The advice is easier to give than to take, especially for founders running companies at the scale Grede operates at, where stepping back can feel like handing competitors an opening. Her point is that the opening is smaller than the one created by a leader running on empty, making bad calls because there was never a point built into the calendar to stop and recalibrate. Whether other founders take the advice as seriously as the fitness world takes a training calendar remains to be seen. But coming from one of the more visible names in direct-to-consumer fashion and shapewear, the comparison between a season of business and a season of sport is likely to stick around in how founders talk about burnout going forward. --- Originally published by Life Channel. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://lifechannel.one/article/emma-grede-s-latest-business-advice-why-founders-need-an-off-season-too.