For seven years, Sara Blakely sold fax machines door to door in Florida. It was a job built on rejection — and, she has said, the best training she could have had for starting a company.
In 1998, getting ready for a party, she cut the feet off a pair of control-top pantyhose to wear under white trousers. The result worked better than anything on the market. With $5,000 in savings, she set out to turn it into a product.
Doing it herself
Lawyers were expensive, so Blakely researched and wrote much of her own patent application. Hosiery mills turned her down until one mill owner — after his daughters told him the idea was good — agreed to make the product. She named it Spanx, designed the packaging herself and cold-called her way to a meeting with a Neiman Marcus buyer, whom she famously took into the ladies' room to demonstrate the product in person.
The break came in 2000 when Oprah Winfrey named Spanx one of her "Favorite Things." Sales took off.
Blakely has credited her father, who asked his kids at dinner what they had failed at that week, for teaching her that failure meant not trying — not a bad outcome.
No venture capital
Spanx was profitable early and Blakely kept full ownership for more than two decades. In 2012, Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire. In 2021, Blackstone acquired a majority stake in a deal valuing Spanx at about $1.2 billion — and Blakely celebrated by giving every employee $10,000 and two first-class plane tickets.
Lessons
- Venture capital is a tool, not a requirement. Profitable growth gave Blakely total control.
- Sell in person. Demonstrating the product closed deals that a pitch deck couldn't.
- Keep the idea quiet until it's real. Blakely has said she told almost no one for the first year.
