What Sara Blakely’s billion-dollar Spanx story teaches us about carving your own path

Some of the best business stories begin with a great idea. Sara Blakely’s began with a pair of scissors.

In the late 1990s, Blakely was selling fax machines door-to-door when she cut the feet off a pair of control-top pantyhose because she wanted a smoother look under white pants without hosiery showing through her open-toed shoes.

It wasn’t perfect. The pantyhose rolled up her legs. But instead of simply accepting that the product she wanted didn’t exist, she asked a better question:

Why couldn’t it?

That question eventually became Spanx.

Truth be told, I’ve always been a little obsessed with Sara Blakely’s story. Maybe it’s because I’m an entrepreneur too, and I know firsthand that building your own business rarely comes with a roadmap. But what has always inspired me most isn’t simply that she built Spanx into a billion-dollar brand. It’s that she did it her way.

She didn’t come from fashion. She didn’t have an MBA. She didn’t have investors waiting to fund her idea. She had $5,000 in savings, years of experience hearing “no” while selling fax machines, and enough confidence in her idea to keep going when people who supposedly knew the industry told her it wouldn’t work.

She researched patents herself. She called manufacturers. She showed up at hosiery mills. And she continued working her day job while building her idea at night.

Then came the Neiman Marcus meeting.

Blakely finally got herself in front of a buyer in Dallas, but during the presentation she could tell she was losing her.

Most people would have continued through their carefully prepared pitch and hoped for the best.

Blakely didn’t.

She asked the buyer to come with her into the bathroom, where she demonstrated Spanx under her own white pants so the buyer could actually see the difference.

Neiman Marcus agreed to test the product in seven stores.

She didn’t wait for the traditional process to work. She created her own opportunity.

I love that part of the story because sometimes that’s exactly what being an entrepreneur requires. We’re told to wait our turn. Follow the process. Get more experience. Find investors. Hire the experts. Make the perfect presentation. Do things the way they’ve always been done.

But building something new sometimes requires doing things differently.

Blakely trusted her instincts, invested her own money, learned what she didn’t know and wasn’t afraid to take an unconventional route when the conventional one wasn’t working. By 2012, Spanx was valued at approximately $1 billion. In 2021, Blackstone acquired a majority interest in the company at a $1.2 billion valuation, with Blakely retaining a significant equity stake.

For me, though, the most inspiring part isn’t the billion-dollar valuation. It’s that she started without the credentials, connections or capital we so often assume we need before we can begin.

And as a woman founder, I think that’s part of why her story has resonated with me and with so many other women building businesses of their own. She didn’t wait for someone to invite her into the room. She found a way into the room, trusted what she had built and proved why she belonged there.

There’s something incredibly powerful about that.

Know the rules. Respect the rules when they matter. But don’t be afraid to carve your own path when there’s a better way forward.

Sometimes leadership means waiting your turn.

And sometimes it means having the courage to skip the line.