Sara Blakely (proven right here in 2013) is the founding father of Spanx. The womenswear firm was valued at $1.2 billion in a latest sale.
Paul Morigi/Getty Photos North America
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Paul Morigi/Getty Photos North America
Sara Blakely (proven right here in 2013) is the founding father of Spanx. The womenswear firm was valued at $1.2 billion in a latest sale.
Paul Morigi/Getty Photos North America
Earlier than Spanx founder Sara Blakely grew to become the youngest self-made female billionaire, she offered fax machines door to door as a result of she wanted the cash and medical insurance.
Now, 20 years after Blakely launched the pioneering womenswear firm, world funding agency Blackstone is shopping for a majority stake in Spanx, which is valued at an estimated $1.2 billion within the deal.
In a video posted on Instagram final week, Blakely celebrated the sale together with her workers. A globe sat on a close-by desk, and finally she requested: “Why am I spinning a globe?”
Then, earlier than the quiet crowd, she introduced the rationale: as a result of she has purchased two first-class tickets — to anyplace on the planet — for every worker.
However that wasn’t all.
“You already know, when you have a visit, you may wish to exit to a very nice dinner, you may wish to exit to a very nice resort,” Blakely mentioned. “So with all people’s two first-class tickets to anyplace on the planet, you’re every getting $10,000.”
Cheers erupted and tears flowed — and a dance get together crammed the room.
When workers had been requested how they’d use their items, their solutions ran the gamut: from a honeymoon in Bora Bora and an elopement in Sweden to a South African safari.
Within the video, Blakely hung out reminiscing on how far she had come for the reason that lengthy nights and weekends she had spent engaged on her thought for ladies’s shapewear and cold-calling manufacturing crops.
“I mentioned this firm will at some point be price $20 million, and all people laughed at me,” Blakely mentioned as she started to tear up.
Blakely took a second to make a toast to all the ladies who got here earlier than her and “all the ladies on the planet who haven’t had this chance.”
Whereas 50% of entrepreneurs are girls, she mentioned, they obtain solely 2.3% of enterprise capital.
“In a second like this, I consider my mother and my grandmothers and their lack of choices and all the ladies that got here earlier than them,” Blakely mentioned. “This might have solely been a really distant dream.”
Tien Le is an intern on NPR’s Information Desk.
