Sara Blakely Turned $5,000 and a Pair of Scissors Into a Billion-Dollar Company

Before Spanx, before the Forbes cover, Sara Blakely was selling fax machines door to door in the Florida heat, required to wear pantyhose she couldn't stand.

She liked what the control top did and hated everything else about it — the feet, the lines under white pants, the seam that showed in open-toed shoes. So one night she cut the feet off a pair and realized she'd made something other women would want. She had no fashion background, no business degree, and about $5,000 in savings. To save on legal fees, she drafted the initial patent herself.

Spanx launched in 2000. The turning point arrived when Oprah Winfrey named it one of her 'Favorite Things' that same year, and demand exploded. Blakely modeled the product herself in buyer meetings and built the brand on grit more than capital, keeping ownership unusually tight as it grew into a company selling in dozens of countries.

In 2012 Forbes named her the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, and TIME put her on its 100 Most Influential list. In late 2021 Blackstone took a majority stake in a deal valuing Spanx at $1.2 billion — brokered, fittingly, by an all-female team. She has since kept inventing, launching the cushioned high-heel line Sneex in 2024.

Blakely credits a childhood ritual: a father who asked at dinner what she had failed at that week, teaching her to treat failure as evidence she was trying. She was also the first self-made female billionaire to sign the Giving Pledge, writing that investing in women offers one of the greatest returns there is.

The lesson she keeps handing other founders is almost too simple: the idea was cheap, the persistence wasn't.