Sara Blakely wrote her own patent because no one else would
With $5,000, a scissors, and a Barnes & Noble textbook, she invented a billion-dollar category nobody saw coming.
In 1998, a 27-year-old fax machine saleswoman cut the feet off a pair of control-top pantyhose, put them under white pants, and thought: this should already exist. Sara Blakely had $5,000 in savings, no fashion contacts, and no idea how to make anything she was imagining.
She called every hosiery mill in North Carolina. They hung up. She drove there in person, mill by mill, and got turned away in every lobby. Patent lawyers charged $3,000 to $5,000 — essentially her entire budget — so she bought a textbook at Barnes & Noble and wrote her own patent application. She later found an attorney to handle the claims; she already had the concept locked down.
A mill owner named Sam Kaplan finally agreed to make the prototype, not because of anything Blakely said in his office, but because he went home and described the meeting to his two daughters, who told him he was being an idiot. Two weeks later he called her back.
In November 2000, Oprah Winfrey named Spanx one of her Favorite Things. Blakely had never taken out advertising. She had never hired a PR firm. She had also never given up equity — when Blackstone bought a majority stake in 2021, the deal valued Spanx at $1.2 billion. It started with a scissors and a textbook.