How did Sara Blakely make her first million?
Sara Blakely turned a simple idea into a multi-million-dollar business. She came up with the idea for Spanx when she was frustrated by the way her white pants looked with regular underwear. Sara was working as a fax machine salesperson at the time. She invested $5,000 of her savings to develop her product. Without any experience in fashion or manufacturing, she created a prototype, got a patent, and did everything from market research to packaging herself. After landing a deal with Neiman Marcus, Spanx became an immediate success, making her a millionaire within a year.
Blakely was named in Time magazine’s “Time 100” annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2014, she was listed as the 93rd most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.
Early Career
In her early career, she wanted to become an attorney but changed her mind after scoring low on her LSAT. She took a job at Walt Disney and also did stand up on side. She later took a job as a fax machine salesperson, where she became quite successful. For her sales job, she had to wear pantyhose in the hot Florida weather. She didn’t like the way her seamed foot looked, but she thought that the control-top model eliminated panty lines and made her body appear better. She tried cutting the feet off her pantyhose while wearing them under a new pair of pants. The pantyhose kept rolling up her legs, but it still gave her the result she wanted. That’s how the idea of Spanx was born. Spanx achieved $4 million in sales in its first year and $10 million in sales in its second year
Sara Blakely is now entering the shoe market through the launch of her new company, Sneex. The new shoe design features a high heel and a sneaker to create a hybrid heel, or what the company calls “hy-heels.”
Image Attribute: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
