Sara Blakely and Spanx

Scissors and a problem

In the late 1990s Sara Blakely was selling fax machines door to door in Florida, a job full of rejection. Getting ready for a party, she wanted a smooth look under a pair of cream pants but disliked the visible lines from regular underwear. She cut the feet off a pair of control-top pantyhose, wore them under the pants, and realized she had a product nobody was selling.

She had no fashion background and no investors. What she did have was $5,000 in savings and a salesperson's thick skin.

Doing it the cheap way

Rather than paying a lawyer thousands of dollars, Blakely researched patents herself and wrote much of her own application. She cold-called hosiery mills in North Carolina, and most turned her down until one mill owner agreed to make a prototype after his daughters liked the idea. She chose the name Spanx, launched in 2000 from Atlanta and talked her way into a meeting with a buyer at Neiman Marcus, where she famously demonstrated the product herself.

Later that year Oprah Winfrey named Spanx one of her favorite things, and demand exploded. Blakely kept doing her own marketing for years, standing in department stores and talking to shoppers directly.

Her pitch worked because she understood the problem personally. Buyers and mill owners were mostly men who had never worn pantyhose, so she showed them the before and after instead of describing it, a simple sales move that still works for any new product category.

Ownership pays

Because she never sold equity in the early years, Blakely kept full ownership as the business grew. In 2012 Forbes named her the youngest self-made woman billionaire at the time. In 2021 the investment firm Blackstone bought a majority stake in a deal that valued Spanx at about $1.2 billion, and Blakely celebrated by giving each employee two first-class plane tickets and $10,000.

The boss lesson

Bootstrapping is slow and personal, but it lets a founder keep control and the upside. Blakely also turned a tiny budget into an advantage: doing her own patent work, sales calls and in-store demos taught her the product and the customer better than any consultant could.

She has also spoken often about how her father asked his kids at dinner what they had failed at that week, which taught her to treat failure as a sign of trying. For a first-time founder, that mindset may matter as much as the starting money.

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