Erica Connelly on

At age 41, Sara Blakely is the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. She is the founder of the underwear and shaping garment company, . She is a wife, a mother, an community advocate for women, and a billionaire, and yet despite her hard work she has stayed true to who she is at the core.

Biographical Sketch & Accomplishments

Sara Blakely was born in Clearwater, Florida in 1971. The daughter of an artist and a lawyer, Blakely always had an entrepreneurial side. At the age of 7, she launched her first business, “charm socks”, which she made herself and sold to friends at school. In her 20s, she ran an under-the-radar kids club at the Clearwater Hilton, until the manager caught her and escorted her out. She attended , and intended to go to law school. However, after two failed attempts at the LSAT, she gave up on becoming a lawyer.

She spent the next seven years selling fax machines door-to-door, a job that was not glamorous, but that helped her develop sales skills that would drive her future success. As a saleswoman in the Florida heat, she battled with one particular part of her wardrobe…uncomfortable pantyhose. Out of this need came her idea for Spanx, footless shaping pantyhose.

At age 27, she moved to and invested her $5,000 in savings to launch her business. For two years, Blakely worked full days at Danka and spent nights at the Georgia Tech library working on her idea. In 2000, she launched Spanx, a one product company that she ran out of her apartment. At first, she was turned away by manufacturers and then retail buyers, but she believed in her product and did not give up. Since then, she has grown her business to generate $250M in revenue. She now sells more than 200 body shaping garments in 40 countries. She alone owns 100% of the equity and has never taken on outside investment or spent money on traditional advertising. In 2008, she married , a fellow entrepreneur and former rapper. In 2009, she gave birth to her first child, Lazer. Blakely sees her core values as a contributor to her success. Her most value is resilience. At the age of 16, she watched her best friend get run over and killed. This was the same year that her parents separated. Following these incidents, her dad handed her Wayne Dyer’s self-help tapes. She says her father encouraged her to fail and bounce back as a child, teaching her at an early age that “failure is not the outcome,” but rather, “failure is not trying.” These values were essential to her, as doors were closed in her face frequently in the beginning of her career.

Connecting the Domains

Work: It helps that Blakely built Spanx to fulfill her own needs. As a result, she has been able to incorporate herself into every aspect of the business. In her own words, she is “in the DNA” of Spanx. The company mascot Sunny is her alter ego. She uses the same language on her packaging that she would use when talking to her girlfriends. Prior to launching her company, she did stand-up comedy, and she embeds her sense of humor into each of her products. For example, on a pair of bridal underwear, she states, for “when you think everyone’s looking at your train but they’re really looking at your caboose.”

Community: In 2003, Blakely was the runner up on ’s television show, Rebel Billionaire. He would have chosen her as the winner if she was not already so successful. Instead, he wrote her a personal check for $750,000 to start a foundation. As of today, Blakely has donated over $17.5M dollars to support women in education and entrepreneurship. Her work in the community aligns with her passions and her career pursuits.

Self: Blakley invests in herself, recognizing the importance of personal time to her greater success. She states that her favorite pastime is “recreational thinking.” Before launching Spanx, she would spend hours asking herself questions and assessing what she was good at. From the description of her office (“a jar of gum balls here, a loud houndstooth print there”), it seems like she designed it to match her personality and needs. And how do Blakley and her husband Itzler stay in shape with their crazy schedules? The rich have it easy…they hired a Navy Seal to move in with them and train them.

Home: Blakely and her husband have six homes, and are constantly toting their two-year-old son between them. I imagine the home domain likely suffers the most for Blakely and Itzler, given that they are both successful business people. However, the fact that Blakely and her husband share a passion for entrepreneurialism makes it easy for her to involve him in her work world. They bounce ideas off of each other, and more importantly, understand each other’s needs when work keeps them apart. The rule in their family is that they must be home for dinner, and they rarely talk work outside of work hours to keep family life more sacred. To make it all work, they hire a team of personal assistants, chefs, drivers, and house managers to maximize the time they can spend with their friends and family.

A Side Note on Building a Network

Blakely relied solely on Word of Mouth to get her business off the ground. At 27, she could not afford to spend on traditional advertising. She found that friends telling friends about the product was much more effective. Through her network, she managed to work her products into the hands of famous women that were concerned about body image. Once Oprah named Spanx as her one of the favorite products of the year, the floodgates opened and every Hollywood star was endorsing her products, free of charge.

Applying Lessons from Sara Blakely

I first started researching Sara Blakely because she is a successful business woman in the Atlanta area, and someone who is connected to me through my network.

Lesson 1: Visualize your own success. My dad is an avid believer in visualization and meditation and is constantly sending me books on tape. This is something I want to work on, but I just can’t seem to motivate myself to do it. Sara states that when she was 20, she “saw [herself] talking to Oprah.” About what, she did not know, but it was a “mental snapshot that [she] spent 15 years filling in.”

Lesson 2: Permission to fail, encouraged to rise again. As I have mentioned many times before, I have perfectionistic tendencies and an aversion to risk. When I express my fears of trying something new, my dad asks me, what’s the worst thing that can happen? Sara’s resilience is something that I really admire. Despite being told no on many occasions, she believed in herself and her idea. One bit of advice she gives young entrepreneurs is to “never underestimate the power of persistence.”

Lesson 3: Do what you love and the money will follow. For Blakely, these words definitely ring true. There are stories of her sneaking into Niemen Marcus with a shelf from Target and repositioning her products, of sending baskets of Spanx to Oprah’s stylist until she agreed to try them, and of standing on the boardroom table in her underwear. Yes, perhaps she is a little excentric, but she is passionate about what she does. When work is play, it’s easy to put in the hours required for success.

Living these three lessons could be a great source of happiness for me. I want to spend more time reflecting on what makes me happy, on what I am good at, and on where I want to be in the future. With a vision in mind, I want to be willing to take more calculated risks towards achieving my goals. I truly believe that if I am doing something I love, I will be both successful and personally fulfilled.

Sources: O’Connor, Clare. “Undercover Billionaire: Sara Blakely Joins The Rich List Thanks To Spanx”, Forbes Magazine, 7 March 2012.http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/03/07/undercover-billionaire- sara-blakely-joins-the-rich-list-thanks-to-spanx/4/ O’Connor, Clare. “How Spanx Became a Billion-Dollar Business Without Advertising.” Forbes Magazine, 12 March 2012.http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2012/03/12/how-spanx-became-a- billion-dollar-business-without-advertising/ Fenn, Donna. “Sara Blakely Shares Secrets to Spanx Success,” Inc.com.http://www.inc.com/sara-blakely- shares-secrets-to-spanx-success-donna-fenn.html. Goldman, Lea. "The New American Couple." Marie Claire. 20 March 2011.http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/new-american-couple