Natural Born Challenger

Bethenny Frankel On How She Built Her Skinnygirl Empire By Trusting Her Instincts And Staying ‘in The Grit.’

- T.L. Stanley

In fact, she’s actively sought out the opportunity, going back to one of her first gigs as an erstwhile club promoter: She’d throw house parties as a teenager, work at a bakery to help foot the bill and make an extra buck by charging admission.

And years later, she continued that DIY-style hustle on The Real Housewives of New York. Counter to the primped and pampered mold of her ladies-who-lunch castmates, Frankel percolated a business in her one-bedroom apartment and shilled her low-calorie Skinnygirl Cocktails at every turn during early seasons of the Bravo series. She even drove a car shrink-wrapped in her budding company’s logo while her haughty co-stars shook their heads and clutched their Gucci.

These days, presiding over an empire that counts 120-plus consumer products across booze, candy, hair care, coffee, clothing and more, Frankel is still rolling up her sleeves. She calls it being “in the grit.”

The grit involves efforts both sweeping and small. (The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, and so is Frankel, who weighs in on everything from the consistency of her snack bars to the grommets on her knit tops.) Her to-do list of late included hawking her Skinnygirl jeans line on HSN (she’ll be on the channel once a month, starting in March, after her first appearance in October moved every piece of product), helping to rework the packaging on her protein shakes (“It needed to pop,” she says) and leading disaster-relief efforts via her B Strong initiative in places like Puerto Rico, Texas and Guatemala.