Spanx

With $5,000 of savings and a pair of control-top pantyhose with the feet cut off, fax-machine saleswoman Sara Blakely founded Spanx, the American shapewear company, in Atlanta, Georgia, on February 15, 2000. It made light, footless shapewear a mass-market category, and since October 2021 it has been majority-owned by the investment firm Blackstone.

Clearwater, Disney and a Fax Machine Route

Blakely was born on February 27, 1971, in Clearwater, Florida, and studied communication at Florida State University. Her early working life was a short tour of odd jobs: three months at Walt Disney World in Orlando and a spell trying stand-up comedy. Then she joined Danka, the office-equipment company, selling fax machines. She was good at it, and by 25 she was the company's national sales trainer.

The idea came out of that job. Selling in the Florida heat, she wore pantyhose for the smooth line of the control top but disliked how the seamed feet looked with open-toed shoes. Before an event she cut the feet off. The control top did what she wanted, smoothing away panty lines under her clothes, but the cut legs rolled up her calves all evening. The fix she needed was a garment that kept the top and finished the leg properly.

Two Years, $5,000 and a $750 Patent

At 27 Blakely moved to Atlanta and spent two years developing the product while still working at Danka. She put $5,000 of her savings into it. She researched and drafted much of her patent application herself and paid a patent attorney $750 to finish it. She bought the Spanx trademark for $150.

Manufacturing was the hard part. She went to the hosiery mills of North Carolina and was turned down by every representative she met. Then a mill operator in Asheboro called back. He had talked it over with his daughters, and they told him to help her.

Neiman Marcus, Oprah and QVC, 2000 to 2001

The first big account came from a meeting with a Neiman Marcus buyer. Blakely took the buyer to the restroom and demonstrated the product on herself. Neiman Marcus put Spanx into seven stores.

In November 2000, months after launch, Oprah Winfrey named Spanx one of her "Favorite Things", and sales took off. In 2001 the company arranged a deal with QVC, whose live demonstrations suited a product that was easiest to sell by showing it. An earlier version of this entry gave first- and second-year revenue figures of $4 million and $10 million; those numbers could not be confirmed from the sources reviewed and have been removed.

What Spanx Changed

Before Spanx, body-shaping underwear in the United States mostly meant the girdle and the long-line control brief, garments associated with an older customer and a stiffer era. Spanx took the knit technology of control-top hosiery and turned it into a lighter, footless garment that could be worn under trousers or a fitted dress. The vocabulary changed with it. Shapewear became a fashion category with its own department-store fixtures, and Spanx was the name customers used for it, whatever the label said.

The range has since spread far beyond the first footless body shaper. It now covers shapewear, intimates, hosiery, activewear, loungewear, denim, swimwear and wider apparel. The company opened its first bricks-and-mortar store in 2012.

Forbes, 2012

In 2012 Forbes put Blakely on its cover as the youngest self-made female billionaire. It was a striking position to reach from a $5,000 start, and it fixed the Spanx origin story in business-school case studies and magazine profiles for the next decade.

The Blackstone Sale, 2021

On October 20, 2021, Blackstone agreed to buy a majority stake in Spanx in a deal that valued the company at $1.2 billion. Blakely stayed on as executive chairwoman. To mark the sale she gave every employee $10,000 in cash and two first-class plane tickets, a gesture that was reported far beyond the business press.

By 2024 the chief executive was Caroline "Cricket" Whitton. Blakely, meanwhile, launched a separate company in 2024, Sneex, selling high-heeled sneakers. The shapewear market Spanx opened has also filled with challengers, from engineered compression brands such as Honeylove to celebrity-led labels such as Skims. Spanx remains the reference point they are all measured against, a quarter of a century after a pair of scissors went through a pair of pantyhose.

Last updated October 7, 2026