The Real Story Of How Sara Blakely Become A Billionaire : Sara Blakely always has a big smile on her face in pictures. If I had a billion bucks, I’d probably go around with a wide grin, too.
Blakely traveled from Clearwater, Florida to Orlando to work at Disney World after failing the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) on both occasions. She was two inches too small to fit into the Goofy costume, so she spent the day at Epcot ensuring sure guests were safely fastened into a ride.
Three months of that was enough for anybody, so she changed jobs. Danka is a firm that sells fax machines door to door.
Wearing any professional clothes in Florida is plain awful, and Blakely admitted that she couldn’t take the way she felt when wearing pantyhose.
To shorten a long tale short, she chopped the feet off her pantyhose and thought she was onto something. She spent hours in a college library researching hosiery and ultimately designed a foundation undergarment for women. She created her own patent using a Barnes & Noble textbook to save $3,000 in legal expenses.
She named her new product “Spanx” because she felt it was humorous and memorable, plus she had heard that things ending in the letter “X” sold well.
She located an abandoned textile factory in North Carolina and handed them her whole $5000 life savings to create her first batch of merchandise. She took the final products and sold them to Nieman Marcus.
Spanx today has manufacturing facilities in 15 countries. It sells quite well.
Sara Blakely, 41, became the world’s youngest female self-made millionaire in 2012.
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