“I Feel The Divine Feminine Rising”- Spanx Founder Sara Blakely On How Intuition Led To Her $1.2 Billion Blackstone Exit

As Sara Blakely prepared to sign over a majority stake in her shapewear company Spanx to private equity shop Blackstone in October, she didn’t quite know how she’d feel. 

But as she put pen to paper, Blakely said, the tears began. 

“I cried, and I was crying for so many different reasons,” she told Moira Forbes, Forbes’ Executive Vice President and President of ForbesWomen, at the 2021 Forbes Power Women’s Summit on Thursday. “I felt every emotion at the exact same time. I was incredibly proud, incredibly grateful, sad, nervous, excited, all of it.”

Blakely, 50, had reason to experience a torrent of emotions. In the 21 years since she founded her pioneering shapewear brand, Blakely says she had never before accepted any outside funding, famously launching Spanx with $5,000 saved through her job as a door-to-door fax machine salesperson and bootstrapping her way to success. The Blackstone deal in October valued Spanx at $1.2 billion, enough to vault Blakely back to billionaire status after a rocky pandemic retail landscape and heightened competition hindered Spanx’s growth—and dragged Blakely’s fortune down to an estimated $750 million in June.Forbes now pegs her net worth at $1.2 billion , composed primarily of her remaining (minority) share of Spanx, a small stake in the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and nearly $40 million worth of real estate.

The Atlanta-based entrepreneur first graced the cover of Forbes magazine in 2012, when she became the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world. At the time, her hosiery company was making 20% profit margins on nearly $250 million in annual sales, and Wall Street analysts valued Spanx at $1 billion. “It was a life defining moment,” Blakely declared at the summit. 

Nearly a decade later, Blakely credits her strong sense of intuition for the timing of the sale to Blackstone. “I have run this business, I’ve run my life, very, very connected to intuition, which we all have. It’s an inner knowing,” she told Moira Forbes. “I just always said, ‘I’ll just know, I’ll know when it’s the right time for the business. I’ll know when it’s the right time for me.’” 

Blakely’s inner voice compelled her to hold her company tightly over the years, she said, turning down any external funding. “I had this intuition from the very beginning that if I allowed other outside investors in, that I would possibly lose my voice on that,” Blakely said. “I never was looking for growth just for the sake of growth. I always wanted to honor the consumer in what we were making and doing.” 

This laserfocus on the consumer helped propel Spanx. The company didn’t spend money on advertising for 16 years, the founder said, instead counting on word of mouth from the likes of Oprah Winfrey. In November 2000, Winfrey named Spanx her favorite product of the year. Blakely, who is also a mother of four, said she has tried to “shine a light on other women” over the years by investing in female founders, hiring women for leadership positions and featuring female-founded companies in Spanx’s catalog, which  went out to millions of readers starting in 2004. 

At the summit, the entrepreneur also recalled a moment when, at age 29, she spoke with several men at a cocktail party who had read about her then-nascent business in a local Atlanta newspaper. “They said, ‘Business is war, Sara. I hope you’re ready,’” she recounted. But Blakely wasn’t convinced: “I went back home to my apartment that night … and I just thought, I’m not going to war, and I’m going to do this very different. I’m going to honor a lot of the feminine principles of intuition, empathy, kindness, [and] just allowing myself to be vulnerable through this process.”

Though Blakely has avoided all-out war, she has steered Spanx through turbulent waters. In addition to the pandemic’s drag on the shapewear industry, Spanx faces new rivals including Shapermint, Honeylove and Kim Kardashian West’s shapewear brand Skims. Blackstone is betting on a Spanx that has broadened its focus; it now sells products ranging from sports bras to leather leggings, which may help it grow further in the face of increased competition. 

Blakely’s deal with Blackstone also aligned with her commitment to boosting other women in the business world. As part of the deal, Blackstone and Spanx promised an all-female board, and Oprah, Reese Witherspoon and Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd joined as investors. The Blackstone deal team Blakely worked with was entirely women-led. Indeed, her lucrative Spanx sale may represent an inflection point for female founders more broadly. 

“I feel the divine feminine rising, I can feel it in all of us,” Blakely reflected. “It’s giving this permission in the workplace and in corporate America that maybe that’s not a weakness, maybe the feminine is actually a strength that needs to be harnessed, and needs to have a voice at the table.”