The genius of Spanx, a billion dollar idea

HAVE you ever had one of those ideas for a product you just know could help people?

While most of us get them from time to time, not all of us do something about it. Billionaire Sara Blakely is not one of those women.

The self-made Spanx cre ator is a lesson in many things; not just how a great idea can turn into a billion dol lar business, but how re silience, grit, and a bit of selfbelief can change the course of our lives.

The Florida-born mother of four’s incredible success story really does lend credence to the American Dream, that anyone with initiative, hard work and the guts to take a few risks can achieve their goals.

Sarah’s path to success began in the 1990s when she chanced her $5,000 life savings on looking into the viability of her idea on how to give women a streamlined look under their clothes and turning it into something she could actually sell.

The idea was simple enough: getting the firmer look you have from tights, but without covering the whole leg and foot.

Blakely cut the ends off a pair of tights, tried them out under trousers, and the seeds were sown for her business empire.

As with all good success stories though, she had her struggles and rejections along the way. Hosiery company after hosiery company turned down her concept until one stepped up to come up with a product prototype.

Blakely’s first big break in getting someone interested in actually selling is also now the stuff of business legend: having managed to beg a Neiman Marcus Group rep to give her 10 minutes of her time she demonstrated the pros of her prototype product on herself to the rep in the ladies’ loo. chose the product as one of her favourite things of the year.

The rep saw the potential, and Blakely’s product was soon on sale in their stores, followed shortly by others.

Blakely was pretty much a one-woman business show to begin with, doing everything she could to put her product on the fashion map, and still selling fax machines door-to-door for a living.

Sales started to go up, and by its second year Spanx had achieved $10 million. Today the company produces a whole range of underwear, leggings and body shapers, for men and women and annual revenues are in the hundreds of millions.

Blakely has demonstrated she has a strong philanthropic side to her character as well as entrepreneurial, establishing a foundation to help women through education and entrepreneurial training in 2006.

In the same year she donated $1 million to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, and in 2013 she became the first female billionaire to join the ‘Giving Pledge,’ whereby the world’s richest people donate at least half of their wealth to charity.

But then came a really big break in 2000, when after sending a gift basket of prototypes to the Oprah Winfrey TV show, the globally influential lady herself

In 2012, Blakely was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, and was named the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes. Two years later Forbes ranked her as the 93rd most powerful woman in the world.