Sara Blakely spent seven years selling fax machines door-to-door for an office-supply company — being turned away and having her business card ripped up at least once a week — before starting Spanx with $5,000 of her own savings in 2000, writing her own patent, keeping the company entirely self-funded for 21 years, and eventually selling a majority stake to Blackstone in 2021 at a valuation of about $1.2 billion

Sara Blakely built a billion-dollar company on $5,000 of her own money and never took a cent from outside investors. In 2000 she used that $5,000 to launch Spanx. Twenty-one years later, in October 2021, the investment firm Blackstone bought a majority stake in Spanx in a deal that valued the company at about $1.2 billion.

How does a founder get from one number to the other on her own savings? Well, the answer might have less to do with the product than with the seven years that came before it.

The fax-machine years

Before Spanx, Blakely sold fax machines door-to-door for the office-supply company Danka. She did it for seven years and rose to national sales trainer. The work, it seems, was mostly rejection, delivered face to face and often rudely. In a 2019 talk she described what that looked like day to day: “I got kicked out of buildings. People would rip up my business card in front of my face.” 

Anyone who has made a cold call and felt their stomach drop before dialling knows that particular fear. Blakely probably spent seven years walking into it. She has since framed the experience as something she valued, telling the same audience that “I believe cold calling is one of life’s greatest lessons.”

She wrote her own patent

The Spanx origin story is usually told as a product story. Blakely cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose to wear under white trousers and realized she had something. The harder part was protecting the idea on a tight budget. According to a newsroom account, patent lawyers quoted her between $3,000 and $5,000 to file for her. That was most of her starting money. So she bought a book on patents, wrote the application herself, and paid a lawyer roughly $700 only for the one legal section she could not write on her own. She registered the trademark online for about $150.

The same resourcefulness the sales years had drilled into her, now pointed at a new problem. When money is scarce, a founder does the work personally rather than pay it away. Writing the patent was not grit for its own sake. It was arithmetic. Every dollar spent on lawyers was a dollar she could not spend on stock to sell.

21 years without investors 

The detail that most sets Spanx apart is the money, or the absence of it. Blakely took no outside investment for two decades. “I never had a single investor in Spanx other than me,” she said, and put it plainly elsewhere: “I started it with five grand from selling fax machines and self-funded the entire 21 years.” No investment rounds, no board answering to shareholders, no giving away pieces of the company.

Spanx grew fast enough to make that possible. A spot on Oprah Winfrey’s Favorite Things list in late 2000 gave the product a national audience almost overnight, and Spanx reached $4 million in sales in its first year and $10 million in its second. A business that turns a profit from the start does not need outside cash to survive and staying self-funded let Blakely keep the whole company, and the whole payoff.

Most founders trade a share of the company for faster growth. Hers grew without the trade.

The Blackstone deal 

By 2020, Blakely’s estimated net worth had dropped below $1 billion during the pandemic, and by mid-2021 Forbes put it at around $750 million. The Blackstone deal made her a billionaire again. She announced the sale not in a corporate statement but on Instagram, as reported by Fortune: “People have asked me for 20 years, ‘When will you sell Spanx?’ And for 20 years I would say…’I’ll just know.’ Well that day is today.”

She kept a large stake in the company and became executive chairwoman of a newly appointed all-female board. In the press release tied to the announcement, she framed the deal in bigger terms: “This is a really important moment in time for female entrepreneurs.” What changed was who owned the company, and the arrival, for the first time, of an outside partner. What had not changed was that for 21 years there had been no such partner at all.

Strip the numbers back and the sequence sits oddly against the usual founder myth. We tend to say everything turned on the idea, the cut-off pantyhose, the flash of insight. But maybe in Blakely’s case, the more important part came earlier, in the seven years of ripped-up business cards that taught her rejection was survivable long before there was anything to reject.