Emma Grede, cofounder and chief product officer of $5 billion shapewear company Skims, attributed her ability to keep brands relevant to complete confidence in her own intuition—an instinct forged through years of successes and failures alike.

“I don’t second-guess myself,” Grede said at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, Fortune’s annual gathering of women leaders, in Santa Barbara on Tuesday. “I think a lot of us have that skill, but we talk ourselves out of it, and we second-guess ourselves a lot. One of the most expensive habits that we have as women is waiting until we’re ready.”

In a conversation with Most Powerful Women editorial director Ellie Austin, Grede said she has fine-tuned her ability to test new ideas and has failed so many times that failure “stopped mattering” and no longer holds her back.

The 44-year-old entrepreneur, who was raised by a single mother in East London and never attended college, is an investor and fashion designer as well as a Skims cofounder. She launched Skims with Kim Kardashian in 2019 and previously cofounded Good American, the denim brand she started with Khloé Kardashian in 2016. Her most recent venture is Off Season, a luxury sports-fashion brand she founded alongside designer Kristin Juszczyk.

Grede credited her intuition for a series of unexpected Skims releases, among them a push-up bra with a raised nipple detail. Initially perceived as provocative, the product was in fact intended to affirm women who have undergone breast reconstruction surgery after a mastectomy, she said.

She described the company’s product strategy as operating on two tracks. Items such as black thongs are designed to meet existing demand from the many women who do not own one, while products like the face sculpt wrap aim to create, occupy, and own an entirely new market.

“One of my special sauces is to go in and say, ‘Well, how do you take a problem that exists within this and make it make sense for a new generation of customers?’” Grede said.

“So much of what I do is not brain surgery,” she added. “It’s about making things 1% better. It’s about taking existing markets, but really paying attention and really being focused on the excellence of products.”

Grede has also sought to pass her insights on to other women, including through her book Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life, in which she cautions that much of the advice aimed at women is feel-good rather than practical and effective. The book puts into print the same results-first philosophy she shared on stage.

“What I’m not doing is trying to make people feel comfortable,” she said. “I’m talking about the reality of what I do, and so I actually think that so much of what’s out there, specifically in women’s media, is to make women feel better.

“And I’m interested in that because I’m a results-oriented person. I’m an operator, and so I talk about the truth and the quality it is to operate in my life. I’ve never been shy about saying this is what I had to do. These are the sacrifices that I had to make. These are the tradeoffs in my life. These are the things that I don’t do.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.