Sara Blakely

Sara Blakely grew up in Clearwater, Florida, the daughter of a trial attorney who made a ritual of asking his children at dinner what they had failed at that week, and looked disappointed when the answer was nothing. She scored too low on the LSAT for the law school plan her ambitions were built around, and instead sold fax machines door to door, becoming her company's national sales trainer by twenty-five. Frustrated that no undergarment let her wear open-toed shoes with white pants without visible lines, she cut the feet off a pair of control-top pantyhose herself. She spent two years and 5,000 dollars developing the idea, wrote her own patent application from a textbook, and pitched Neiman Marcus buyers by demonstrating it in a fitting room.

Blakely founded Spanx in 2000, and the company made 4 million dollars in its first year and 10 million in its second, helped by Oprah Winfrey naming it one of her "Favorite Things" that November. She kept full ownership for years, expanded into shapewear, activewear and swimwear, and turned the Spanx name into shorthand for the category it created. In 2012, Forbes named her, at forty-one, the youngest self-made female billionaire in the country. In October 2021, Blackstone bought a majority stake valuing the company at 1.2 billion dollars, and Blakely gave each of Spanx's roughly 750 employees 10,000 dollars and two first-class plane tickets. She founded the Sara Blakely Foundation in 2006 for women's education and entrepreneurship, and in 2013 became the first female billionaire to join the Giving Pledge.

The company that made her rich for decades ran on a habit she has described as a discipline as much as a personality trait: reframing every setback, publicly and repeatedly, as evidence she was doing something right, an inheritance from her father's dinner-table question. It made for excellent marketing and, by her own account, real resilience through years of retailers turning her away. It also meant a business built almost entirely around one woman's narrative of her own failures becoming an asset, a story compelling enough that when she finally ceded majority control to Blackstone in 2021, after twenty-one years of full ownership, coverage treated the sale itself as newsworthy mainly because it meant Sara Blakely no longer owned Sara Blakely's company outright.

Whether Blakely's continued influence over Spanx and her broader standing as a model female founder holds up is still being written -- the Blackstone deal left her without majority ownership but she remains executive chairwoman, and the shapewear category she effectively created now faces competition from brands that did not exist when she started. Her giving, through the Sara Blakely Foundation and the Giving Pledge, has been substantial and is well documented -- how her business legacy will be weighed against later entrants, and whether "Spanx" stays a generic term the way "Kleenex" or "Xerox" did, are not questions with settled answers yet.

Sara Blakely's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Spanx company
  Footless-pantyhose shapewear company she founded with 5,000 dollars 2000
• Footless pantyhose patent patent
  Filed herself using a patent-law textbook 2000
• Sara Blakely Foundation other
  Supports women's education and entrepreneurship 2006
• Blackstone majority investment in Spanx other
  Valued the company at 1.2 billion dollars 2021

• 1998 aged ~27 Cuts the feet off a pair of pantyhose, the idea that becomes Spanx
• 2000 aged ~29 Founds Spanx with 5,000 dollars in personal savings
• November 2000 aged 29 Oprah Winfrey names Spanx one of her "Favorite Things"
• 2006 aged ~35 Founds the Sara Blakely Foundation
• 2012 aged ~41 Forbes names her the youngest self-made female billionaire in the U.S.
• 2013 aged ~42 Becomes the first female billionaire to join the Giving Pledge
• October 2021 aged 50 Blackstone acquires a majority stake in Spanx at a 1.2 billion dollar valuation

• Oprah Winfrey b. 1954
  Media executive and talk show host who built a multimedia empire and became one of the most influential women in the world. promoted by
• Daymond John b. 1969
  Founder of FUBU and Shark Tank investor who built a streetwear empire from a Queens home. fellow Shark Tank-era entrepreneur
• Estée Lauder 1908–2004
  Cosmetics pioneer who built one of the world's largest beauty companies from her kitchen. earlier self-made products entrepreneur
• Martha Stewart b. 1941
  Lifestyle entrepreneur who built a media and merchandising empire around domestic arts. contemporary lifestyle-brand entrepreneur