How They Started (3 page)

Her tagline proclaimed the brand’s attitude: “Don’t worry, we’ve got your butt covered.” To gauge whether her sassy approach was offensive, she tested the packaging out on her mother and her boyfriend’s mother.

“They laughed hysterically,” she reports.

She knew she wanted her packaging to have a completely different look, so that if she could land shelf space with a big retailer, SPANX would immediately stand out.

She sent
The Oprah Winfrey Show
a gift basket with a few prototypes of SPANX in it. A long shot, but a girl can dream.

In October 2000, with a product prototype and package ready to go, Sara thought big. Her first sales call was to her local Neiman Marcus store. Once they finished laughing, they instructed her to call the buying office in Dallas. She did.

Sara told the buyer, “I invented a product that’s going to change the way women wear clothes, and if you will meet with me, I will fly there.”

Incredibly, the buyer agreed. Sara took a Ziploc® sandwich bag from her kitchen, put a prototype inside it, and loaded it into her lucky red backpack. As she prepped for the trip, friends begged her to take a designer handbag. Surely, they thought, she wouldn’t take her ratty old backpack to a meeting at temple-of-luxury Neiman Marcus … her friends even prompted her to buy a Prada bag and return it later. But Sara was firm: the lucky red backpack was going. She also wore her cream-colored pants.

Sara modeling SPANX under cream-colored pants.

At Neiman Marcus, Sara found herself standing before the most impeccably dressed and groomed woman she’d ever seen. Even her pen was fabulous. Sara had brought a sample and a color copy of her packaging prototype. After about five minutes of pitching, Sara felt a growing panic. This is my shot, she thought. How could she make this woman understand how unique SPANX was? Suddenly, she knew.

“You need to come to the bathroom with me,” Sara told the buyer. “I’m going to show you what my product can do.”

She quickly did a before-and-after for the buyer, modeling the cream-coloured pants with and without SPANX on.

“She instantly got it,” Sara says. “She said, ‘Sara, this is brilliant, and I’m going to try it in seven of our stores.’”

Floating on a cloud, Sara returned home to Atlanta and quit her fax-sales job. She called her manufacturer and exultantly shared the news of her first big order. Neimans wanted SPANX in stores in three weeks, granting the product a single display “pocket” in seven stores. The manufacturer was less excited than she expected: he had only two machines for making the crotch of the pantyhose, known in the trade as the gusset. And both of his machines were already in full use by another client.

The manufacturer confessed that he hadn’t reserved any plant capacity for her; he assumed she planned to give away her initial run of SPANX as Christmas gifts for a few years, and that would be the end of it. If she was going to produce a large order quickly, Sara would have to get her gussets made somewhere else.

“I was like, ‘Let me get this straight. I just landed Neiman Marcus, and I have no crotches?’” Sara recalls.

A frantic search began for another company that could fill her gusset order. The savior for her crotch emergency appeared in the form of seasoned apparel-maker Gene Bobo, who was then 80 years old. His factory, just down the road from Atlanta in Norcross, Georgia, would make her gussets from then on.

When you have a brand-new product nobody knows about and limited funds, how do you create buzz around it? This was the question Sara now pondered. For the first year, she toured stores for sales trainings and public appearances, happily pulling up her pants legs to show customers her SPANX. She also called on dozens of media outlets, garnering media coverage for
Spanx
in fashion magazines and on talk shows.

With SPANX in stores in seven different cities, it was hard to be everywhere at once. Sara got out her rolodex and started calling anyone she knew in a town where SPANX were stocked. She developed a pitch that went like this: “Hi! Remember me, your friend from fourth grade? Can you go to the Neiman Marcus store and tell them you’re looking for SPANX, and I’ll send you a check? Great.”

The gambit worked:
Spanx
was profitable from the first month, and topped $1 million in sales the first year. Sara celebrated the milestone by buying a flat-screen TV.

“Hi! Remember me, your friend from fourth grade? Can you go to the Neiman Marcus store and tell them you’re looking for SPANX, and I’ll send you a check? Great.”

Just as she was running out of both friends and money, Sara got the life-changing phone call that is every inventor’s dream. In the vast ocean of products Oprah’s show is sent each year,
Spanx
got noticed. Oprah had tried SPANX and loved them. It turned out Oprah had been cutting the bottoms off support pantyhose to wear them with pants and open-toed shoes for years.

Oprah planned to do a show naming SPANX one of her favorite products of 2000, and wanted to specifically highlight both Sara and her company.

The first orders shipped from Sara’s apartment.

The Oprah team asked where the company was headquarted, and Sara answered, “my apartment.”

She explained it was a two-person show with her boyfriend at the time. “When someone called and asked for the shipping department,” Sara says, “my boyfriend would say, ‘One moment please,’ and then hand me the phone.” She was spending nights packaging and shipping the product from two card tables. The Oprah team loved the story, and soon a 10-person film crew descended upon Sara’s tiny Atlanta apartment to shoot a video of her operation. To create the Oprah video, Sara called friends over to sit with her on the living-room floor for a “staff meeting.”

After the show aired, interest in
Spanx
exploded. Other major department stores including Nordstrom wanted to stock the product. Movie stars wanted to wear it under their Oscar-night gowns.
Spanx
lasted 18 months operating out of the apartment before growing into an office in Decatur, Georgia, in 2001 and growing its staff up.

In hiring, Sara looked for people who were enthusiastic about the brand, then trained them for their roles. A friend of a friend heard she needed an assistant and came over to help. Two weeks later, Sara asked her to be the head of product development, a job she still holds today. Likewise, Sara once walked to a bagel shop with a woman who recognized her and raved about
Spanx
. Sara hired her to be head of public relations. A key hire in 2002 was former Coca-Cola executive Laurie Ann Goldman, who became
Spanx
’s CEO. The staff numbered 11 by year end.

One rule Sara made was that everyone who works at
Spanx
wears the products. Even the men. Most of the company’s new product ideas over the years would come from feedback from customers and staffers. This period saw the company add Control-Top Fishnets (the package proclaimed “No more grid butt!”), Power Panties and Mama SPANX Maternity Pantyhose. In 2003,
Spanx
outgrew that first headquarters and moved to more spacious quarters in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood.

As word of
Spanx
spread, Sara planned a trip to pitch London department stores, including Harrods and Selfridges. As part of her trip, Sara managed to secure an interview with the BBC, but it didn’t go quite as planned.

A staid male news anchor asked Sara, “Tell us what SPANX can do for women in the UK.”

Sara began to explain, “It smoothes and separates your fanny … ” only to see all color drain from the anchorman’s face. “Fanny” is actually slang for vagina in Britain. The trip wasn’t off to a great start, but
Spanx
did manage to enter the UK market in 2003.

The company continued adding products, expanding beyond hosiery into intimates and apparel. All of its product names have the same cheeky attitude, from Bod-a-Bing! dresses to Skinny Britches lightweight shapers.

Not many entrepreneurs spend 11 years planning
their business’s start. But from his first foray into business at age 17, Trip Hawkins knew he wanted to start one. He just didn’t know what it would do. Then, in 1971, he got a glimpse of an early prototype microcomputer at a friend’s house, and an idea began to take shape. In the future, he realized, home computers would be commonplace.

From that initial flash of insight, the biggest company in digital gaming would arise. Trip knew it would take time for home computers to catch on, but he began laying a course that would position him to profit from the coming electronic age.

He chose a date for his business launch: 1982. Just as planned, Trip did start a home-based, one-man business that year. That company became Electronic Arts, which now employs 7,600 and raked in a $677 million profit in 2010. How did it happen? Trip puts it down to a couple of personality traits: persistence and fearlessness.