Sara Blakely

inspiration really does come from so many different places and for me the inspiration came from my own but I did not like the way that my pants looked I mean excuse me my butt looked in white pants and like so many women and probably every woman here in this room I had clothing that hung in my closet unworn because I couldn't figure out what to wear under it it looks great in the magazines it looks great on the runway but at the end of the day you get home and you go now what so let's face it our options we're not that great either at you know what are we supposed to wear underneath these beautiful clothes there were the shapers that were out there and those were dreadful they were very binding and they all had these leg bands on the thigh that left a line or a bulge that you could see through our clothes and then came the underwear right so that's another option but that left a panty line and then along came the thong which still confuses me because all that did was butt underwear exactly what we've been trying to get it out of so I took matters into my own hands and I actually cut the feet out of my own control top pantyhose I threw them on under the white pants I felt better I looked more toned slimmer it smoothed out cellulite it got rid of my panty lines but they rolled up my legs all night and I remember thinking you know I have got to figure out a way to comfortably keep this down on the leg if I can find a way to keep this just below the knee there won't be any line or mark on the woman's thigh it'll look invisible under clothes but it'll be lightweight enough that we'll want to wear it under everything even beautiful slacks so that was the exact moment and what you know caused me to cut the feet out but on my journey of getting this made it dawned on me very quickly I was talking to almost only men and I kept thinking to myself where are the women and then it dawned on me okay so maybe this why are pantyhose and our shapers have been so uncomfortable for so long right because the people making them were not spending all day in them and if they were they certainly weren't admitting it so I started the process and at the time I'll paint the picture a little bit about where I was in my life I'd only really had two jobs since college I basically bombed that entered the LSAT I wanted to be a lawyer and I didn't do well on that test twice so I tried out I went to Disney Rome and I had tried out to be goofy but you have to be 5-8 in order to be goofy and I'm only five six so they made me a chipmunk and I was a real high point so I did that for about three months worked at Disney World and then I ended up selling fax machines door-to-door for seven years until I cut the feet out of my pantyhose I had never taken a business class I'd never worked in fashion or retail and I had $5,000 in savings I just moved out of my mother's house I was 27 years old and I was probably dating a loser at the time so there you have it there I was and I you know wanted to wear these pants I didn't know where to go so I decided I've got to get this made I went on the internet and I started looking up hosiery mills and I went to a web site called Thomas registry comm which lists all manufacturers in the United States now it's called Thomas net but they listed it for me and lucky for me most of the hosiery manufacturers are in North Carolina well I was in Atlanta Georgia at the time so I started picking up the phone and calling all these manufacturers and introducing myself over the phone and I I just I couldn't get the right person on the phone people kept transferring me around I mean I imagine on the other end of the line them saying you know here there's a girl online so she's gonna transform her own but like which department am I supposed to send her to everyone kept either hanging up on me saying no thanks it's not a good idea so I believed in my own idea enough though that I realized okay I want to patent this I may be having some difficulty right now getting someone to help me make the idea but I want to protect it so I went and looked up on the internet martindale-hubbell which is a website that lists attorneys and they will tell you the ranking and you know sort of the rating next to them I started looking for a female patent attorney in the state of Georgia and I couldn't find one so I called the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and I introduced myself said I'm looking for a female patent attorney and they told me that there actually was not a female patent attorney in the state of Georgia at the time so I said okay I got it I'm gonna go describe this to a man and we'll see what happens and I went on the website I picked three different law firms I cold call to each law firm I put on my nicest suit from selling fax machines that I had I had my lucky red backpack that was with me the entire journey of Spanx and I went and met with them well they all quoted me between three and five thousand dollars to patent it and I had $5,000 set aside and my savings to do this so I decided to patent it myself well the attorney that ended up helping me at the very end of this process he admitted to me that when I came to him with the idea that he thought my idea was so bad when I met with him that he actually thought I had been sent by candid camera which completely makes perfect sense because I was as I was sitting in the room explaining it to him he kept looking around the room and he later said to me he said Sarah I really have to tell you I either thought you were sent by candid camera or that I was being pranked by some of my guy friends because you know you whipped out the pantyhose you're showing me the the crotch and where you cut these and how you're gonna change the world and it's like I wasn't used to that so I ended up going and buying a book called patents and trademarks at Barnes & Noble on Peachtree Road in Atlanta and I started writing my own path and I wrote the background my mom did the sketch of the drawing that's still in the patent right now and it was me standing in our living room in the prototype and so I was in the process of getting this made and when I got to the end of it there's the claims portion well I have no idea how to write the real legal part of it so I knew I was gonna need the attorneys help at some point for that portion of it at the same time I decided I'm gonna try to make this prototype myself so I started driving around and going to fabric stores I started going to Michael's and Hancock fabric I was duct taping pieces of lace at the bottom of the the pantyhose I was paper clipping little stretchy things to it to try to create my own version and just from my cold calling days I realized I've got to go in person to these mills they need to meet me they keep hanging up on me but I have to go there in person so I took a week off of work from selling fax machines at zdenka and I drove around North Carolina and I went door-to-door to all the manufacturers that I'd been calling on the phone well I would go in and they would always ask me the same three questions which was and you are and I'd say Sara Blakely and they'd say and you're with I look around I go Sara Blakely and they'd say and you're financially backed by and I'd say Sara Blakely so you know so nice to meet you Sara Blakely but we're not interested they all escorted me out and I didn't have any luck on that road trip but what happened was two weeks after I drove around North Carolina in person I actually got a phone call from one of the manufacturers in North Carolina Sam Kaplan in Charlotte and he said I quote Sara I've decided to help make your crazy idea and when I asked him why he had the change of heart he simply said I have two daughters so he had run the idea by his daughters they said it's brilliant dad helped this girl make it and he we set out to make it so the process of me cutting the feet out of my pantyhose while trying to get the prototype made before I launched it was 2 years so there was a year solid of me driving in North Carolina on the weekends and at night or taking time off from work to go and work on the prototype get it made I learned so many things that I didn't know as a consumer it had never dawned on me you know that men were making all of our undergarments so I learned very quickly that the industry had been taking an average waistband size between a small and an extra-large and putting the same waistband on every pair exactly that's why said I said you know that's not working we're really uncomfortable and they were doing it to cut cost in production so I immediately changed that in a Spanx waistband a size small gets a small/medium gets a medium and so on makes perfect sense right I also realized that they had been putting a tiny rubber cord inside the waist bands that had been there forever well we had made so many advancements in yarns that they no longer needed the rubber cord but no one had stopped to say do we still need to put this so I immediately took the rubber cord out of it and another thing I learned was the way that they were doing sizing was just so blew me away they would figure out his size by putting them on plastic forms and they would all put it on a plastic form they had different sized forms and they would stand back with their clipboards