In the early days of Spanx, inventor Sara Blakely didn't have the money to hire a patent lawyer, let alone a full team to support her new business. Her office was her Atlanta apartment. Her fulfillment center was her bathroom, filled with Jiffy envelopes of her product, the now-ubiquitous shapewear that has since made her a billionaire.
So when Oprah Winfrey came calling, wanting to add Spanx to her famous Favorite Things episode back in 2000, Blakely had a problem. The Harpo production team wanted to film Blakely, then 27, at a staff meeting in her workplace.
"I called Connie from the Mailboxes down the street," Blakely told an audience of 1,000 young entrepreneurs and achievers at Forbes' 30 Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia on Tuesday. She corralled some local friends and faked a workforce for the camera.
That anecdote is typical of Blakely's early years, when she spent nights in the Georgia Tech library researching patent law (she couldn't afford a lawyer so she wrote her own patent, with a text book from Barnes and Noble). She spent weekends driving the five and a half hours to North Carolina, knocking on the doors of hosiery mills, begging them to manufacture her product.
"They'd ask who my financial backers were," she told the crowd. "I'd say, 'Sara Blakely.'"
The Florida native's hustle paid off when she finagled a meeting at Neiman Marcus' corporate HQ in Dallas. She flew there with a pair of Spanx in her lucky red backpack, a throwback from college, rather than a chic Prada bag (her friends begged her to just buy an expensive purse and return it the next day -- anything to avoid looking amateurish -- but she refused).
Two minutes into her meeting, she could tell she was losing the attention of Neiman Marcus' buyer. She whisked her into the bathroom for a little show and tell, trying on her own product -- slimming, shaping footless pantyhose -- under a pair of white pants.
Her gumption and willingness to literally put her own ass on the line worked. Neiman Marcus agreed to stock Spanx in seven regional stores. And, still a hustler at heart, Blakely dispatched friends in each of those seven cities to buy pairs of Spanx (she'd mail them checks for their trouble).
Today, Blakely remains 100% owner of Spanx, the company that made her the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world and landed her on the cover of Forbes in 2012. She has never formally advertised, nor has she taken outside investment. The popularity and success of the product has been almost entirely the result of word of mouth and buzz.
"I did not have the most experience in the industry or the most money," Blakely recalled on stage of those first tough years. "But I cared the most."
