Sara Blakely

Sara Blakely was born in 1971 in Clearwater, Florida, the daughter of a lawyer and an artist. She wanted to be a lawyer too, and failed the entrance exam twice. She worked briefly at Walt Disney World and then took a job selling fax machines door to door for an office supplies company, a job she kept for seven years. Her father, she has said, used to ask at dinner what she had failed at that week, and was disappointed if the answer was nothing.

In 1998, wanting a smooth line under white trousers, she cut the feet off a pair of control tights. She had 5,000 dollars saved. She went to the library and wrote the patent application herself to avoid paying a lawyer, and spent evenings driving to the hosiery mills of North Carolina, where the owners, all men, turned her down one after another. One rang back two weeks later; his daughters had told him the idea was good.

She made the packaging with friends, sat the product on the desk of a Neiman Marcus buyer and took her to the ladies' room to show the difference, and in 2000 sent a basket to Oprah Winfrey, who named Spanx a favourite product on television. Blakely was still selling fax machines at the time.

She never took outside investment and never advertised in the first decade. In 2012 she appeared on the cover of Forbes as the youngest self-made female billionaire, and signed the Giving Pledge. In 2021 she sold a majority stake, valuing the company at 1.2 billion dollars.