It was celebratory atmosphere at Spanx when CEO and founder Sara Blakely surprised all the employees with two first class plane tickets for each employee and $10,000 to spend. Blakely did this to celebrate the sale of majority stake in Spanx to Blackstone, a leading global investment firm.
Blackstone agreed to buy an undisclosed majority stake in the company at a valuation of $1.2 billion – with Blakely maintaining a significant equity stake in the business.
Sara Blakely started Spanx 21 years with $5,000. In a story that’s now been told and retold, Spanx came to life as a way for Blakely to deal with an irritating problem. Unable to find suitable undergarments to wear under cream-colored pants for a party, Blakely cut the feet off her control top pantyhouse and wore them underneath…but they rolled up on her all night long. “I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to figure out how to make this.’ I’d never worked in fashion or retail. I just needed an undergarment that didn’t exist,” Blakely once told Forbes.
Twelve years later, her hosiery company was netting 20% profit margins on nearly $250 million in annual sales, and Wall Street analysts valued Spanx at $1 billion. At age 41, Blakely became the youngest self-made woman to join Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list in 2012, earning her a spot on the cover.
“Why am I spinning a globe?” she asked her assembled employees in the middle of her speech.
Then, to roomful of stunned employees, she announced: “I’m spinning a globe because to celebrate this moment, I have bought each one of your two first-class tickets to anywhere in the world.”
And that wasn’t all.
“You know, if you have a trip, you might want to go out to a really nice dinner, you might want to go out to a really nice hotel,” Ms Blakely continued. “So with everybody’s two first-class tickets to anywhere in the world, you are each getting $10,000.”
Hmmm….Wouldn’t you want to be a Spanx right now?
