The Spanx Story: What's Underneath the Incredible Success of Sara Blakely's Billion Dollar Empire

What can you learn from one of the most successful companies in the world? The Spanx Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled entrepreneur Sara Blakely to dominate the shapewear industry and become a billionaire.

Sara Blakely had a problem. She had a beautiful pair of white designer pants hanging in her closet just calling out to her to wear them, even though they accented her least favorite feature: cellulite. After searching high and low for a solution and coming up empty, an idea was born: Spanx.

The Spanx Story chronicles Sara's journey from long nights researching patent and trademark law, to years of cold shoulders she received from the titans of the pantyhose industry, to the cold call that led to the shelves of Nieman Marcus. It was a long road of incredible hard work and determination that led Spanx to become the iconic brand it is today.

Through Sara's story, you will learn:

• How to develop an idea and turn it into a business.
• How to start a company with very little capital by thinking outside of the box and dedicating every spare moment to your goal.
• How to recognize when it's better to hire a CEO than to be the CEO.
• How to stay the course and continue to believe in your idea, despite naysayers and going against an industry resistant to innovation.

The Spanx Story educates and inspires entrepreneurs and innovators to find the problem for their solutions and persevere through the hard work that goes into building a billion-dollar company.

ISBN-13: 9781400232758

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership

Publication Date: 09-06-2022

Pages: 144

Product Dimensions: 5.45(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.65(d)

Series: The Business Storybook Series

Charlie Wetzel is a writer, teacher, and cook. He wrote The Marvel Studios Story, the screenplay for the award-winning short film “The Candy Shop,” and more than a hundred books with New York Times bestselling author John C. Maxwell. When Charlie isn’t writing, he’s creating cooking videos for his YouTube channel “Becoming a Cook” with Stephanie, his wife of twenty-eight years, or they’re spending time with their three adult children. Stephanie Wetzel has been her husband Charlie’s primary editor for as long as they’ve been married, including for every book Charlie has written with author John C. Maxwell. A writer in her own right, she blogged for a decade—back when blogging was still cool. She now partners in writing with Charlie and works with other authors. Stephanie loves being wife to Charlie and mom to three young adults. She forces herself to run with Charlie, but she actually enjoys reading, learning, traveling, and eating former chef Charlie’s cooking. Stephanie grew up obsessed with horses and competed as a teenager at extremely low levels in local shows. No longer a regular rider, she still occasionally gets a tear in her eye at the sight of a horse.

Table of Contents

Spanx Timeline iv

1 A Billion-Dollar Idea 1

2 An Unlikely Entrepreneur 9

3 A Less Likely Product 31

4 Reshaping a Category 51

5 Making Spanx a Household Name 73

6 Making Spanx a Company 93

7 Growing Pains 117

8 Elevating Women 143

Endnotes 151

Index 163

Chapter One from The Target Story 169