Bethenny Frankel was ready to hang things up before her career was unexpectedly reinvented.
“Skinnygirl was amazing, but I didn’t know anything when I started it,” the businesswoman, 55, exclusively told Us on Wednesday, August 12, while promoting her latest venture, the Supermodel Café, in East Quogue, New York. “I didn’t have this kind of experience in business and media and content and influence and brands and venture capital, you know, and people and marketing.”
Frankel continued, “Like, this is just a vortex. I was retiring. I was on my way out.”
Frankel made a name for herself as an entrepreneur after coming in second place on the NBC competition series The Apprentice: Martha Stewart in 2005. Three years later, she joined the original cast of the Real Housewives of New York City. With her newfound fame, Frankel founded her lifestyle brand, Skinnygirl, which started off with a low-calorie pre-mixed margarita before expanding into more diet-friendly food and beverages.
While Frankel was the CEO of a well-established brand, she confessed she never considered herself one until now.
“I’ve never worked harder, and I literally have never considered myself a CEO until this summer,” she explained. “I finally, for the first time. I’m like, ‘OK, I’m a CEO. I’m working every day,’ Really working, not just hard. My brain is fried at the end of the day.”
Frankel is putting her time and energy into her Supermodel Café. The pop-up eatery is located in the Hamptons and combines Frankel’s passion for healthy eating and content creation. Frankel joked to Us that the Supermodel Café is like “Skinnygirl 10.0.”
“People were obsessed with the bagels, millions and millions of views. People were obsessed with the supermodel snacks. So I was going to do that,” the Bravolebrity told Us. “The cheesecake was a new idea I had, and I was going to do that with multiple partners because I had a distribution channel in the fall for direct-to-consumer.”
What started off as a small idea ended up turning into a full on business venture.
“I don’t do anything half-assed, so it then became, like, now it was nutritional information and decor and merch and marketing and the Jitney came to us,” she said. “But now, in addition, major, major companies have come to me, like multi-billion-dollar companies, have come to me that they want to distribute these products.”
Frankel teased to Us that the café was only just the beginning as she aims to establish “a new entertainment media content and creator model.”
“That is going to change the entire industry. The way that it’s going to be in the marriage of content, venture capital, brand incubation, brand building, and production,” she mused. “So this is probably going to be a cafe in New York with a studio next to it. And in that studio, brands will be built and paired with creators.”
