Sara Blakely

Sara Blakely is the inventor and founder of the SPANX shapewear empire. Blakely came up with the idea in 1998 and in 2000 SPANX became a worldwide success after Oprah Winfrey announced on her show, Oprah, that she preferred wearing SPANX to underwear. Today, the SPANX range contains over 200 items and turns over an estimated US$400m in global sales a year. Blakely still owns 100% of the company.

Sara’s Aha! Moment

Sara’s Aha! moment came when she decided to cut the feet off a pair of tights to eliminate the visible panty line from under a pair of cream trousers.

Journey

Sara’s first retail customer was Neiman Marcus. After feeling like she was bombing in the pitch, see decided the best thing to do was to model the product herself.

Fears

• Flying
• Speaking in public

Sara faces her fears through gratitude and connection to a higher purpose. She realises that the majority of women in the world will never have the opportunities that she has; there are women in the world who will never receive an education so she can get her backside on the plane and get on with things. She’s still scared, she just doesn’t let fear get the better of her.

Sara’s Routine

• Sara carves out a piece of her day for thinking time by doing a “fake commute” to work each day. Even though she lives five minutes from the SPANX office, Sara will spend up to an hour driving around, taking different routes to work as she finds it gives her space for her brain to relax and her ideas start to flow.

Sara’s Success Principles

• Think productive thoughts and process life in a way that allows you to be your best self. Sara learned this as a teenager after listening to her father’s set of motivational tapes by Dr Wayne Dyer called “How to Be a No-Limit Person”.
• Visualization. Do the prework and imagine where you want to be and what you want your life to look like.
• Take the time to make an inventory of your strengths and weaknesses. Align your goals with your strengths as this will get you a lot further than just trying to improve your weaknesses. You’ll also enjoy what you do a lot more which will make the journey easier.
• Have a bias for action; don’t just sit around thinking about it, get it done.
• Listen to your gut. Sara had had many ideas over the years but she knew this one was different. She didn’t tell anyone about the idea for a year as she worked nights and weekends, skipping parties and other social events to focus on her developing her idea. By not her idea with anyone that wasn’t directly involved with moving forward (e.g. hosiery manufacturers), Sara was able to keep the external noise to a minimum and not get distracted in the early stages when the idea is most fragile.