Sara Blakely

Sara Blakely founded Spanx in Atlanta in February 2000 with $5,000 of her own savings and an idea that began with a pair of control-top pantyhose with the feet cut off. She was born in Clearwater, Florida, on 27 February 1971, and the company she built did more than any other to turn shapewear into an everyday category of women's underwear.

Fax machines and Florida State

Blakely had no background in fashion or manufacturing. She graduated from Florida State University with a degree in communication, scored poorly on the law school admission test, and spent three months working at Walt Disney World. She then sold fax machines door to door for the office supply company Danka, and by 25 she had been promoted to national sales trainer. The sales training mattered more than any design course would have: most of the early years of Spanx were spent selling.

Footless pantyhose

The product came from a problem with her own clothes. Blakely wanted a smooth line under trousers without visible seams or the foot of a pair of pantyhose. Cutting the feet off control-top hosiery gave her the shaping without the toe seam, and she spent the next two years, while keeping her day job, trying to get it made. At 27 she moved to Atlanta to work on it.

The Asheboro mill

North Carolina's hosiery mills turned her down one after another. The exception was a mill operator in Asheboro who agreed to back the idea after his three daughters encouraged him to. Blakely bought the Spanx trademark for $150.

Neiman Marcus and Oprah's list, 2000

Her first big retail account came from a demonstration. In a meeting with a Neiman Marcus buyer, she modeled her white trousers with and without Spanx to show the difference. In November 2000 Oprah Winfrey named Spanx one of her Favorite Things, and sales took off.

Sara Blakely and the shapewear category

By 2014 Spanx was reported to bring in more than $250 million a year. It opened its first shop in 2012 and expanded into activewear, denim and loungewear, though its core remained the control brief and body-shaping hosiery. In 2012 Forbes put Blakely on its cover as the youngest self-made female billionaire. In 2013 she became the first female billionaire to sign the Giving Pledge.

The category she opened later drew well-funded competitors. The most prominent, Skims, co-founded by Kim Kardashian in 2019, sold shapewear as underwear meant to be seen, a different pitch from the hidden fix that made Spanx.

Blackstone, 2021

In 2021 the private equity firm Blackstone bought a majority stake in Spanx in a deal that valued the company at $1.2 billion. Blakely marked the sale by giving every employee two first-class plane tickets and $10,000. In 2024 she launched Sneex, a footwear brand.

Earlier versions of this entry said she wrote her own patent, that Spanx made $4 million in its first year, and that the Blackstone deal valued the company at $1.65 billion. The first two could not be confirmed, and the valuation reported in the sources consulted is $1.2 billion.

Last updated October 7, 2026