Israelis Prove Immune To Charm Of Kim Kardashian

Kim Kardashian’s sunglasses sold poorly in Israel Image by Getty Images

By Jenny Singer June 21, 2019

Israeli consumers have thrown shade at sunglasses that Kim Kardashian made in partnership with the Israeli brand Carolina Lemke.

Americans, Haaretz reports, purchased the Kardashian-designed shades but rejected other products from Carolina Lemke, an arm of the major Israeli fast-fashion company Castro.

But Israelis have continued to buy Carolina Lemke shades, but rejected the glasses sold under Kardashian’s name.

The American model-turned-mogul was reportedly paid $6 million to design a line for the brand. 10,000 pairs of unsold Kardashian glasses, Haaretz reports, have been shipped from Israel to the United States in the hopes of wooing Kardashian fans closer to home.

Kardashian isn’t the first American mogul to fail to land in Israel. Starbucks famously failed to franchise in Israel, despite success virtually everywhere else on the globe. “It’s a difficult place to do business,” then-Starbucks CFO Michael Casey said when the Seattle-based coffee company packed up its Israeli shop in 2003. Israeli culture looks, on the surface, quite a bit like American culture. But religiously, politically and even fashion-wise the two are wildly different. For one, Israel doesn’t share America’s fascination with reality television.

Or, maybe, this isn’t a cross-cultural schism. Maybe it’s just that the glasses were really, really ugly.

Jenny Singer is the deputy life/features editor for the Forward. You can reach her at singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a student in the MFA Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, a former staff writer at Glamour, and a former writer and editor at the Forward.

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO