Sara Blakely grew up in Clearwater, Florida, and wanted to be a lawyer like her father. She did well in school but was a terrible test-taker and scored poorly on the LSAT multiple times.
Undeterred, she took a different path — auditioning to be Goofy at Disney World. She was told she was "too short to wear the costume." They made her a chipmunk instead, which she didn't end up doing. She ended up greeting visitors at an Epcot ride in a brown polyester spacesuit.
Eventually she went back home and took the only job that seemed available: selling fax machines door to door.
"I kept feeling like I was in the wrong movie. I was determined to create a better life for myself."
She spent seven years knocking on doors, cold-pitching, getting rejected, and saving every dollar she could. By the end of it, she had $5,000 to her name.
In 1998, Blakely was getting dressed for a party and wanted to wear her white pants that had hung in her closet for eight months — she couldn't get the "smooth look" she wanted. She cut the feet off a pair of control-top pantyhose and wore them instead.
"The moment I saw how good my butt looked, I was like, 'Thank you, God, this is my opportunity!'"
Blakely had never taken a business class in her life, nor had she worked in fashion or retail — and she had only $5,000 to invest in the business. She kept the idea completely secret for a full year. "Ideas are the most vulnerable in the moment you have them," she later explained.
When she finally did tell people, the reaction was exactly what she had feared. Her family's response was: "Sara, if it's such a good idea, why hasn't anybody already done it?"
In the beginning, Spanx was a one-woman operation. Blakely wrote her own patent to save on legal fees, handled every department herself — packing, shipping, and sales. "I was everything," she said.
She heard "no" for two years from manufacturers before getting her first Spanx product made. Hosiery mill after hosiery mill turned her away. The men running the factories couldn't understand why anyone would want the product.
She secured the Spanx trademark for just $150 and eventually found a hosiery mill willing to produce her prototype after multiple rejections. Then came the pitch that would change everything.
Blakely was about five minutes into her pitch to a buying representative at Neiman Marcus when she realised her idea wasn't resonating. So she made a snap decision — she guided the buying rep to the bathroom and modelled her white pants with and without Spanx.
"She immediately said, 'Oh I get it. It's brilliant — and I'm gonna put it in seven stores.'"
Spanx had its first retail partner. But Blakely wasn't done hustling. After noticing her products had been placed in a quiet corner of the store's expansive hosiery department, she bought display bins at Office Depot and placed them at every cash register throughout the store — "which is so, so not okay," she admitted. She also paid friends who lived near the seven stores to go in and buy the product so it wouldn't tank.
"Right when I was running out of friends and money, Oprah called," Blakely said. Winfrey had received Blakely's handwritten note and prototype in the mail and added Spanx to her annual "Favourite Things" list in November 2000.
Spanx achieved $4 million in sales in its first year, and $10 million in its second. All of it self-funded. Not a single outside investor.
"I started it with five grand from selling fax machines and self-funded the entire 21 years. I sat down with myself and I was like: do you wanna spend your five grand on a vacation? Or do you wanna try to bet on yourself?"
In 2012, Blakely was named the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world by Forbes. In 2021, she sold a majority stake in Spanx to private equity firm Blackstone at a $1.2 billion valuation. She remains executive chairwoman and one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs of her generation.
She also became the first woman to join "The Giving Pledge" — the movement founded by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett — pledging at least half her fortune to charity.
"Start small, think big, scale fast." — Sara Blakely