Posts Tagged ‘Billionaires’

Thanks To Spanx, Sara Blakely Is a Billionaire At 41!

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March 9th, 2012

Customers say, We were smitten from the beginning.

If you have an idea, don’t push it to the back of your mind and mutter that you will do something about it some other time. Act immediately! Great ideas don’t come around that often. You may never have another great idea. If you have one, use it now!

The idea

This week Sara Blakely, 41, was honored. The 25th annual Forbes Magazine ‘rich list’ credited her with “re-inventing the girdle”. Her simple idea of developing underwear to banish bulges by shaping and controlling the figure was embraced by women worldwide. Blakely, married with a son, came up with the idea at age 27 after getting fed up at the way her tights stuck to her skin in the heat and humidity of her native Florida. She cut the feet off and wore them under cream trousers. Sounds simple, huh? It is simple. Really simple. Anyone could think of that, you say. Agreed. Thousands of women could easily have the same idea, but only Sara was genius enough to grab the idea and go to work on it.

Spanx

Today her company “Spanx” is valued on Wall Street at $1 billion. Because Sara owns 100 percent of the stock and has no debt, she made the roll of global billionaires, coming in at 1,153^rd on the list of 1,226. She started out with her life savings of just $5,000 and promoted Spanx herself.

Billionaires

The inventor of Spanx body shaping underwear has been named the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire and she has a long list of highly satisfied customers which include celebrity customers like Gwyneth Paltrow, Sienna Miller, Dannii Minogue and Emily Blunt, who admit they have worn Spanx on the red carpet. “I’d never worked in fashion or retail,” Sara says. “I just needed a different type of undergarment that didn’t exist at the time.” Blakely carried on with her day job in an office supply firm and at nights worked as a stand-up comic to make extra money.

The name

When she went to copyright her idea, the patent attorney was so astonished by the name she suggested that he asked her if they were on Candid Camera. Sara then cut costs by patenting the name herself using a legal textbook. Her major break came when TV presenter Oprah Winfrey said Spanx was one of her favorite new products.

Today

Over the last couple of years Spanx has depended less on Blakely’s face and other body parts, to shift its shapers and stay ahead of a handful of copycats. The company is now run by a team of 125, only 16 of them men. It sells 200 products in 11,500 department stores, boutiques and online shops in 40 countries. Distributors worldwide clamor to get on the stockist list. “With international, we’re just warming up,” says her CEO Laurie Ann Goldman. Karen Katz, formerly of store Nieman Marcus, said: ‘Sara’s effort was to solve an age-old problem for women in a modern way. We were smitten from the beginning.’

Tags: Billionaires, Forbes list, Sara Blakely, Spanx
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